A collection of four plays from the master of twentieth-century American drama. Summer and Smoke is set in Glorious Hill, Mississippi, from the "turn of the century through 1916", and centers on Alma Winemiller, a highly strung, unmarried minister's daughter, and the spiritual/romance that nearly blossoms between her and John Buchanan Jr., a young doctor who grew up next door. She, ineffably refined, identifies with the Gothic cathedral, "reaching up to something beyond attainment"; her name, as Williams makes clear during the play, means "soul" in Spanish; by contrast Buchanan, a doctor and sensualist, defies her with the soulless anatomy chart. By the play's end, Buchanan and Alma have traded places philosophically. She has been transformed. She throws herself at him, saying "she doesn't exist any more, she died last summer — suffocated in smoke from something on fire inside her". But he has changed, he is engaged to marry a respectable, younger girl, and as he tries to convince Alma that what their relationship was indeed a "spiritual bond", she realizes that it is too late to rescue it. In the final scene, Alma accosts a young traveling salesman in the park and follows him to enjoy the entertainment at Moon Lake Casino. "Orpheus Descending," The play is a modern retelling of the ancient Greek Orpheus legend and deals, in the most elemental fashion, with the power of passion, art, and imagination to redeem and revitalize life, giving it new meaning. The story is set in a dry goods store in a small southern town marked, in the play, by conformity, sexual frustration, narrowness, and racism. Into this scene steps Val, a young man with a guitar, a snakeskin jacket, a questionable past, and undeniable animal-erotic energy and appeal. He gets a job in the dry goods store run by a middle-aged woman named Lady, whose elderly husband is dying. Lady has a past and passions of her own. She finds herself attracted to Val and to the possibility of new life he seems to offer. It is a tempting antidote to her loveless marriage and boring, small-town life. The play describes the awakening of passion, love, and life – as well as its tragic consequences for Val and Lady. The play deals with passion, its repression and its attempted recovery. On another level, it is also about trying to live bravely and honestly in a fallen world. The play is replete with lush, poetic dialogue and imagery. On the stage, the opening sections seem somewhat lacking in dramatic movement, but the play picks up power as the characters are developed and it moves to its climax. Val, a metaphor for Orpheus, represents the forces of energy and eros, which, buried as they are in compromise and everyday mundanity, have the tragic power to create life anew.--In a mansion in New Orleans’s Garden District in the mid-1930s, the wealthy Violet Venable tells Dr. Cukrowicz, a handsome young doctor, about her son Sebastian, who has recently died. She shows the doctor a gilt-edged volume of her son’s poems (Poem of Summer), which he hand-pressed himself and shared only with a small circle of friends. His poems were so carefully composed, she says, that he managed only one poem each summer—and only with her devoted assistance. She claims that the proof of her own importance to both his art and his life is that this past summer he went abroad without her for the first time and wrote no poem at all. Instead, he died. Violet tells the doctor of a trip she and her son made to South America’s Galápagos Islands many years before. Inspired by a passage from Herman Melville, Sebastian wanted to witness the hatching of the islands’ famous sea turtles. Sebastian also hoped to find God in the Galápagos’s remote, dramatic landscapes. However, both she and her son were horrified to see thousands of sea birds preying on the baby turtles. Afterward, Sebastian told her that he had seen “Him.”--Period of adjustmentOn December 23rd, Korean War veteran George Haverstick and nurse Isabel Crane - who George lovingly refers to as "Little Bit" - get married in a civil ceremony. They met when George was admitted to Belvedere General Hospital in St. Louis for a nervous shake, with Isabel being his night nurse. They got married immediately following his release, which occurred despite the doctors never discovering the reason for his affliction. They plan on honeymooning in Miami, and stopping in suburban High Point, Tennessee along the way to visit George's best friend, fellow Korean War vet Ralph Bates, and Ralph's wife of six years, Dorothea Bates. By the time they arrive on the Bates' doorstep on Christmas Eve, George and Isabel are hardly speaking to each other when they aren't yelling at each other as each had a preconceived notion of their role in the marriage incompatible with the other, and a romanticized view of how the other should behave. Ralph's marriage is currently in no better shape. Dottie has just left him, taking their infant son Junior with her. Although he never stated such to her, Ralph married insecure Dottie despite not loving her because her wealthy father, for who he worked, promised him the family business as an inheritance. Ralph and Dottie's current problem is primarily because Ralph could no longer stand her parent's pretentious and overbearing ways, both professionally and personally. Although Ralph, George and Isabel seem blind to the source of and solution to their own marital problems, each seems to have a clearer view of what ails the other couple and how best to fix their marriage.