Production Credits
Director.. Jack Phillips
Technical Director.. Thad Hallstein
Stage Manager.. Mary Pavia
Assistant Stage Managers
Darla Goudeau, Don Strueber
Costume Designers
Peggy Carlson, Lori D’Asta
Costume Crew
Stephanie Abramowitz, Dorothy Attermeyer, Cindy Blaszak, Nell Fisher-Agnew, Chris Gavlin, Karla Hudson, Julie Knoch, Julie Mueller, Nancy Nicholson, Mary O'Dowd, Donna Sauers, Julie Suarez
Dramaturg.. Catey Sullivan
Hospitality Chair.. Carol Clarke
Hospitality Crew
Dorothy Attermeyer, Nancy Belda, Jan Benedict, Chuck Berglund, Jack and Karol Calvert, Susan Cardamone, Ruth Cekal, Mike DeKovic, Tom Frohnapfel, Stacie Heintze, Joyce Hewitt, Bonnie Hilton, Karen Holbert, Dennis and Karla Hudson, Mike Huth, Andrea Imes, Donna, Eleanor and Rich Kanak, Tom Kokontis, Stacy McCargo, Bridgett Murray, Janel Palm, Katie Pecis, Pat Rafferty, Carolyn Redding, Adam and Margo Rickert, Joan Roeder, Debbie Sampson, Donna Sauers, Margaret Schlegel, Jackie and Randy Snyder, Charron and Dick Traut, Gini Welch, Mark and Sue Wisthuff
Lighting Designer.. Linda Bugielski
Lighting Crew
Pat Deane, Patricia Huth, Paul Roach, Betsy Stiles, Cal Turner, Cathy Van Horne
Makeup Designer.. Mary Ellen Druyan
Makeup Crew
Suzanne Anthoney, Eileen Crow, Stacy Mazzulla, Janel Palm, Mary Smith, Susan Valenta
Properties Designers
Dave Bremer, Debbie Phillips, Liz Steele
Properties Crew
Bill Fitzgerald, Dennis Hudson, Sandra Rasnak.
Set Construction Chairs
Thad Hallstein, Bill Rotz
Set Construction Crew
Brant and Grace Abrahamson, Anne Cahill, George Dempsey, Tom Frohnapfel, Harry Hultgren, Heinz Karplus, Bill Love, John Otto, Rob Pold, Paul Roach, Fred Sauers, Terri Smartz
Set Designer.. Thad Hallstein
Set Painting Chairs
Rob Nardini, Cathy Van Horne
Set Painting Crew
Grace Abrahamson, Madison and Tricia Boren, Leon Briick, Jack Calvert, Heinz Karplus, Kathy Kusper, Martha “Marty” Kirchman, Julie Knoch, Kelli Margaret Kopp, Terri Smartz
Sound Designer.. Peggy Solick
Sound Crew.. Terri Smartz, Betsy Stiles
Box Office Chair.. Mary Ellen Schutt
Box Office Crew
Ed Barrow, Kelli Kopp, Lori Proksa, Patti Roeder, Marilyn Wilson
House Manager Chair.. Bill Wilson
House Managers
Jack Calvert, Penny Choice, Rob Cramer, Mary Maureen Gentile, Roland Imes, Arlene Page, Denny Wise
Front Row Center Flyer.. Joe Petrolis
Group Sales Chair.. Betsy Stiles
Poster Distribution.. Kathleen Kusper
Production Coordinator.. Jon Mills
Program Advertising.. Peggy Carlson
Program Production.. Ed Barrow, Marion Reis
Publicity Chair.. Denise Stout
Actives Website.. Judy DiVita

Tennessee Williams is acknowledged as one of the great American playwrights. His work dominated stage and film throughout the late forties and early fifties, and many of the best known American actors started their careers by working on his characters. The plays are great fun to work on. The characters often don’t say what they really mean. They tend to use words to hide what they are thinking rather than using them to reveal their thoughts.

They are clearly driven by their feelings, but many have to decide what those feelings are and if they should follow through on them. Stanley in Streetcar Named Desire completely commits to whatever he is feeling with no thought of the consequences. In all Williams’ plays, his characters respond to how they were brought up. Southern manners, acting like a lady or a gentleman, are on everyone’s mind even when they chose not to use them. Our job as actors and directors is to decide what thoughts are going on in those characters’ minds and give you some insight into them.

In Summer And Smoke, Alma and John are each right about the other one. The question is who will convince whom and can the person be convinced in time?

Dramaturg’s Diary
By Catey Sullivan

Blanche Du Bois, Maggie the Cat and the flightless family Wingfield are, perhaps, better known than the denizens of Summer and Smoke. But like the women of Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Glass Menagerie, Alma Winemiller of Summer and Smoke bears the unmistakable stamp of a playwright whose works were intensely, if not always obviously, autobiographical.

Alma, like so many of Williams’ exquisitely drawn female characters, is a study in the genteel torrid — a Southern-bred lady whose passions must be repressed in public in the emotional equivalent of foot binding. Presenting the proper exterior is paramount, even if it means the painful, horrific mutilation of some hidden part of the body. So Alma’s raging love for her wild, sensually indulgent neighbor is not the stuff of hearts and flowers, but of tragedy. The battle between outward appearance and inward appetites, between sex and spirituality, is deadly. The heart might not actually cease beating, but it’s killed nonetheless.

The ultimate showdown between Alma and the object of her ardor, the wanton, wild yin to her prim, repressed yang, is a brutal one; an 11 o’clock emotional bloodbath of boiling oratory and desperate wishes. It is dialogue that blazes with the heat of a Southern Gothic summer in a confrontation that leaves the stage in virtual ruin, red-blooded emotion consuming itself, blazing away until all that is left is smoke.

Tennessee Williams described Southern Gothic as a style that captured "an intuition of an underlying dreadfulness in modern experience." The Southern Gothic movement in literature brings the atmosphere and sensibilities of the Gothic, a genre originating in late 18th century England, to the American South. Such literature builds on the traditions of the larger Gothic genre, including supernatural elements, mental disease, and the grotesque. Much Southern Gothic literature, however, eschews the supernatural and deals instead with damaged and delusional characters. Instead of perpetuating romanticized stereotypes of the Antebellum South, Southern Gothic literature often brings the stock characters of melodrama and Gothic novels to a Southern context in order to make a point about Southern mores.

As for Williams, himself, scholars agree that he lived in constant fear of his own emotional demolition, especially after his sister, Rose, underwent a lobotomy in order to treat her schizophrenia. And as a gay man born and bred in the Bible Belt back when homosexuality was viewed both as a disease and a sign of morally grotesque deviance, Williams had plenty of familiarity with publicly stifled passion. Also, like Alma, Williams knew his way around a medicine cabinet, and had a special fondness for the soothing power of opiates.

It’s always a bit dangerous to equate the psyche of the playwright with that of the characters they create. But in the case of Tennessee Williams, the life of the man inarguably overlaps into the lives of his creations. Williams, who once admitted, "every part of me is chronic," was a man of endless vices from sex to drug addiction. For better or worse, he was one of the greatest playwrights the world has ever known creating timeless, insatiable characters through five decades of writing over 70 plays for the theatre. Williams eviscerated his private life for the world to experience, documenting the sorrow and joys of his Southern existence through his work — primal, heart-wrenching pagan poetry never flinching from any human taboo be it impotence, alcoholism, masturbation, even cannibalism.

There have been volumes written about this flamboyant playwright, but legendary director Elia Kazan, instrumental in Tennessee Williams theatrical ticket to fame, said it all, “Everything in his plays is in his life, and everything in his life is in his plays."

Acknowledgments

Produced with special permission
from Dramatists Play Service, Inc.

Special thanks to:
The Fruit Store, Western Springs
and Hinsdale, for providing apple
cider at cost with free delivery.

Starbucks, Western Springs, for
providing decaf coffee for the
Thursday performances.

More Photos on Page 2