SUMMER AND SMOKE Touchstone Theatre at the Halsted Theatre Centre
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The play revolves around two characters who have failed to achieve this tricky reconciliation. Alma, whose father is a minister and whose mother is mentally unstable, grew up contemptuous of carnal desires, giving priority to spiritual impulses. She compares the soul to a Gothic cathedral, with its arched doorways, vaulted ceilings, and mighty spires “all reaching up to something beyond attainment!” To her the Gothic cathedral symbolizes “the everlasting struggle and aspiration for more than our human limits have placed in our reach.”
He defies her to show him where the soul resides in the jumble of blood and guts on the anatomy charts. Of course she can’t, so he assumes he has won the argument. But by the end of the play “the tables have turned with a vengeance,” as Alma puts it, and each is following the path formerly trod by the other.
