JoAnne Akalaitis bristles when I suggest that Jane Bowles’s In the Summer House reminds me of a Tennessee Williams play. “First of all, Tennessee Williams is a man, and this writer is writing about the central conflict between mothers and daughters from a woman’s point of view,” the director says with conviction. “Williams is also very sophisticated, and Jane Bowles is very innocent.” Akalaitis recently directed In the Summer House–the late novelist and literary cult figure’s only play–in its first Broadway production in 40 years at Lincoln Center Theater, where it opened in early August. Akalaitis has a point about the comparison to Williams: Bowles writes about mothers and daughters from a perspective Williams never had–personal experience.
Her own mother was doting and domineering, determined to give Jane, whom she called her “million-dollar baby,” every advantage. Bowles translated these emotions into her writing, a small but distinguished body of work with a unique, feminine perspective–writing which has over the years drifted towards obscurity, despite the fact that it was greatly admired by her literary peers.
In the Summer House centers on no less than three sets of mothers and daughters: the overbearing Gertrude Eastman Cuevas (Dianne Wiest) and her reclusive, odd daughter, Molly (Alina Arenal); the anxious, overindulgent Mrs. Constable (Frances Conroy) and her vivacious and high-strung daughter Vivian (Kali Rocha); and the down-to-earth, affectionate Mrs. Lopez (Alma Martinez) and her adoring daughter Frederica (Karina Arroyave).
The scene is southern California in the early 1950s (an era Ann Hould-Ward has fully capitalized on for her chic, playful costumes), and Gertrude has brought her daughter to live in a house facing the ocean, where they coexist in relative seclusion, if not harmony. The solitude is broken only by visits from Gertrude’s tenacious suitor, Mr. Solare’s (Jaime Tirelli), and the occasional boarder they are forced to take in to make ends meet. “As the years go by the boarders will increase,” Gertrude predicts gloomily in a soliloquy aimed at her daughter, who has taken refuge in her favorite spot, the summer house in the garden, “and I can barely put up with the few that come here now. Even my own flesh and blood saps my vitality–particularly you.” Abrupt shifts in Jennifer Tipton’s shimmering lighting and discordant sound engineered by designer John Gromada signal Gertrude’s shift to an internal monologue of painful personal recollections: a distant father, moments of dark isolation.
Separations and reunions
The brown, parched garden where only a single vine grows and the stucco-style wall of the house are central to George Tsypin’s evocative set. The wall becomes transparent to allow the audience to see the road leading to the house, backed by a scrim covered in brilliant sunset hues. “The set is kind of a surreal, lonely ocean, but also an arid landscape,” Akalaitis says, “in which the intimate, melodramatic–in the best sense of the word–events are played out.”
The melodrama heats up with the arrival of Mr. Solares, Mrs. Lopez (his sister) and Frederica, quickly followed by the latest boarder, young Vivian Constable, and her mother. After a ferocious argument with the reclusive Molly, who resents the lively newcomer’s intrusion into her world, Vivian falls (or jumps? or is pushed?) off a cliff. Bowles sets up the central unanswered question of the play: What actually happened that day on the beach?
The play follows Molly through a bizarre double wedding–at the same time Gertrude marries Mr. Solares, Molly marries Lionel (Liev Schreiber), a serious young man who works at the Lobster Bowl restaurant in town, in a ceremony which Akalaitis stages as a kind of slow-motion group dance–and through a wrenching separation from her mother. In the final scene, Gertrude returns after a year’s absence to reclaim Molly, forcing the young woman to choose between husband and mother. Of the three sets of mothers and daughters, only the inseparable Mrs. Lopez and Frederica make it to the final curtain with their relationship intact.
The ambiguousness of the ending–was Molly responsible for Vivian’s death? what will happen to the two mothers left alone?–is, Akalaitis says, a strength of the play. “That classic, critical criterion–that plays have to have very neat, wrapped-up endings–has impacted on American dramaturgy considerably. The ending of this play is a big question mark–and that is stimulating, so that the audience should leave the theatre with its own scenario or scenarios.”
The production mixes haunting music composed by Philip Glass with Mexican folk songs, performed by a trio of servants and a guitarist, providing both ambiance and a sense of the vitality of the Hispanic characters. When reading the play again after a number of years, Akalaitis was concerned that the Mexican characters could be construed as racist cliches. (Indeed, in a review of the 1953 production, Brooks Atkinson commented on the “exuberant, animal life” of Mrs. Lopez and company, who were played mostly by white actors, with the notable exception of Miriam Colon as Frederica.) “I cast the Mexicans as very attractive people,” Akalaitis relates. “So, while the WASP people are neurotic and pathological, the Mexicans are in touch with their emotions, food, their bodies, the landscape. They are expressive, they are funny, their presence is buoyant and airy. And they are not played by Anglo actors, they’re played by Latinos, which is very important.”
Confusion among the critics
Another casting choice is central to the play: Akalaitis cites Dianne Wiest’s “great stage presence, beauty, range of emotions, the fact that she is a raw, emotional actress” as requisites for the bravura role of Gertrude.
Although Akalaitis rejects Tennessee Williams’s work as a parallel to Bowles’s, Lincoln Center has used the late playwright’s endorsement of his friend Jane’s play prominently in its advertising. “It is not only the most original play I have ever read,” Williams said of In the Summer House, “I think it is also the oddest and funniest and one of the most touching. Its human perceptions are both profound and delicate; its dramatic poetry is both illusive and gripping.” Despite such comments by her contemporaries, the play has rarely been performed since its 1953 Broadway premiere.
Reviews from that production directed by Jose Quintero and starring Judith Anderson as Gertrude and Mildred Dunnock as Mrs. Constable ranged from the New York World Telegram’s pronouncement that “Jane Bowles…may fairly be termed the most original American dramatist of her generation,” to “curiously ineffectual” in the New York Times, and “flashes of bright buoyancy intermingled with sordid psychopathology” in the Daily Mirror.
Akalaitis describes the play as “very American but also very surrealistic,” and says that in 1953 it confused the (mostly male) reviewers, so they “talked about neurotic women.” “The play is real,” the director says, “because the feelings are real, but structurally and emotionally it is more like a meditation on a dramatic situation.”
Jane Bowles’s life greatly affected Akalaitis’s approach to the play. “All of her eccentricities, her oddness, her quirkiness, her self-destructiveness, her generosity, her obsession with food, her rhythms” are present in the play, the director believes. “It’s all about Jane Bowles. In a funny way, every non-Mexican woman on the stage is Jane Bowles.”
It remains to be seen whether Lincoln Center’s production will restore this all-but-forgotten play to the American repertory. “It is unique and dazzling American dramatic poetry,” Akalaitis says fervently. “This voice of 45 years ago is as fresh and as innovative and as moving as it was when she wrote the play. And perhaps more so.”
