About the Play:

Summer and Smoke has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues, Female/Female Scenes, and Female/Male Scenes.

Summer and Smoke is a full-length drama by Tennessee Williams. All her life, Alma Winemiller has been irresistibly drawn to the dangerous and wild Dr. John Buchanan. And now she may just have her chance at love. Summer and Smoke is a shimmering story of the conflicts and reconciliations of the heart and spirit.

Summer and Smoke is a simple love story of Alma Winemiller, a repressed minister's daughter, who nurses a longtime unrequited love for the boy next door, John Buchanan, who grows up to be an unreserved young doctor whose nature is completely at odds with hers. Each is basically attracted to the other but because of their divergent attitudes toward life, each over the course of years is driven away from the other. Not until the end does the doctor realize that the girl's high idealism is ultimately right, and while she is still in love with him, it turns out that neither time nor circumstances will allow the two to come together. A perennial favourite of summer theatres and schools, the play one of the author's most highly regarded works. Written in the mid-1940s, making it a contemporary of The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams said that Miss Alma, the central character of Summer and Smoke, "may very well be the best female portrait I have drawn in a play."

Summer and Smoke premiered in 1948 at Music Box Theatre on Broadway and has enjoyed numerous revivals and tours. A perennial favourite of summer theatres and schools, the play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops. Because of the explicit details provided by the author's production notes, the stage directions, and the diagram of the set design, nonprofessionals should have no difficulty in mounting the play effectively.

Cast: 6 female, 8 male

About the Playwright:

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), one of the 20th century's most superb writers, was also one of its most successful and prolific. He was born in Columbus, Mississippi, where his grandfather was the Episcopal clergyman. When his father, a travelling salesman, moved with his family to St. Louis some years later, both he and his sister found it impossible to settle down to city life. He entered college during the Depression and left after a couple of years to take a clerical job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years, spending the evening writing. He entered the University of Iowa in 1938 and completed his course, at the same time holding a large number of part-time jobs of great diversity. He received a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and 1955.