Suddenly, Last Summer

Content Warning: Suddenly Last Summer features brief descriptions of murder, mutilation, and cannibalism. An unseen character is also implied to be both gay and a pedophile, playing into stereotypes about gay men. The play contains extensive discussion of outdated and harmful approaches to mental health treatment. The guide also references suicide.

“There are massive tree-flowers that suggest organs of a body, torn out, still glistening with undried blood; there are harsh cries and sibilant hissings and thrashing sounds in the garden as if it were inhabited by beasts, serpents and birds, all of savage nature.”

The stage direction that opens the play describes the late Sebastian Venable’s private garden at his and his mother’s home in New Orleans. The garden’s primeval vegetation and bird cries embody the savage worldview that he embraced after his trip to the Galápagos. The bloody, organ-like flowers, glistening with “undried blood,” also evoke the tableau of his own mutilated body (like torn “roses”) at the play’s close and suggest the still-raw trauma of his death on his survivors (Violet and Catharine) and their bloody battle over his memory, which constitutes the heart of the play.

“DOCTOR. It’s like a well-groomed jungle…

MRS. VENABLE. That’s how he meant it to be, nothing was accidental, everything was planned and designed in Sebastian’s life and his […] work!”

Violet’s use of the passive tense (“everything was planned”) connotes that not all of the planning was Sebastian’s—i.e., that she herself may have wielded significant control over his life and work. This begins to establish the dichotomy of Art Versus Life; while Sebastian attempted to craft both carefully, life eventually proved wilder and more chaotic than art could capture. His gory death, evoked by the savage garden, was thus Sebastian’s final “poem” and entirely his own work—a fact that still angers his controlling mother.