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, potentially 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 The play contains extensive discussion of outdated and harmful approaches to mental health treatment.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.

The set, which does not change throughout the one-act play, simulates the interior of a “Victorian Gothic” mansion in New Orleans’s Garden District, incorporating a garden that suggests a stylized “prehistoric” tropical jungle full of “violent” colors and giant tree flowers that resemble bodily organs. The sound design features animal cries, hisses, and thrashing sounds. Shortly after the curtain rises, the sounds fade, but they occasionally swell and reverberate to punctuate the play’s action.

The season is late summer or early fall sometime in the mid-1930s. A lady enters with the help of a cane, accompanied by a doctor. Her hair is obviously dyed, while the doctor is young, blond, and handsome. The lady (Mrs. Violet Venable) is clearly attracted to the doctor’s “icy charm.” She tells him that they are standing in “Sebastian’s garden” and shows him a Venus flytrap that her son Sebastian used to feed with special fruit flies.