BY DAWN BAUMGARTNER VAUGHAN

dvaughan@heraldsun.com; 419-6563

Considering Tennessee Williams' dark world view, Tony Lea expected the playwright's "Summer and Smoke" to end with a death, madness or castration. But the lesser known Williams work has kind of a happy ending, said Lea, who directs the upcoming production at Deep Dish Theater in Chapel Hill. "Summer and Smoke" opens the company's ninth season tonight.

The play is Deep Dish artistic director Paul Frellick's favorite of Williams' body of work, though the Southern playwright is best known for "The Glass Menagerie" and "A Streetcar Named Desire." Frellick said "Summer and Smoke" is a tricky play to produce.

"It's a very delicate and intimate piece about two people struggling to discover who they are and what they can be to each other, and it's full of idiosyncratic characters that defy simple characterizations," he said. That makes it a perfect play for Deep Dish, Frellick said, where the up close and personal nature of the drama can have its full weight.

In "Summer and Smoke," written in 1948, a wild doctor returns to his hometown and childhood love interest, Alma, a minister's daughter who never married.

Actress Katja Hill said she has wanted to play Alma Winemiller for 16 years, ever since she did a scene study as a student at North Carolina School of the Arts, playing Alma in one scene.

"The beauty of the play stayed with me throughout college, and I was thrilled to finally have my chance to play the whole part. But oh, what a part," she said. Hill had forgotten the mammoth size of the role. She has prepared by studying the text intensely and running lines every day before rehearsal.

"That sounds terribly obvious but really, really knowing your lines is totally underrated for actors. Everybody wants to go off woolgathering instead of the hard knocks drill of getting the words just right. So many things fall into place when you get the writer's language correct, but it takes constant work," Hill said. "Williams' language is rich with imagery, and that detail with the line work has helped me truly see the images that he sees as clearly as I can in my mind's eye."

Lea said he thinks Williams' writing in "Summer and Smoke" is beautiful. "I really think it's a lovely play -- the depth of character, poetry of the words is quite striking," he said.

Eric Swenson play the doctor neighbor of Alma, John Buchanan Jr., who Swenson describes as a young, somewhat undisciplined man who has recently returned to his childhood home in Mississippi to work in his father's practice.

"He spends his time drinking and carousing out of a compulsion to get the most out of life that he can, without really knowing what it is he's seeking," Swenson said. His technical preparation included learning the dialect and talking to his father, a doctor, about medicine during the time period.

Swenson hopes audiences come away from the play with sympathy for each character's approach to their circumstances. "The piece considers what we hope and expect our lives to be, the realities of what they actually are and how we cope with the difference," he said.

Hill said that "Summer and Smoke" is tender, surprising and largely unknown to many theater-goers, which makes it one of her favorite Williams plays.

WHAT: "Summer and Smoke" by Tennessee Williams

WHEN: Tonight through Sept. 19

7:30 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays ($16 adults/$14 seniors/$12 students), 8 p.m. Fridays-Sundays and 2 p.m. Sundays ($18 adults/$16 seniors/$14 students)

WHERE: Deep Dish Theater

University Mall, Chapel Hill

ON THE WEB: www.deepdishtheater.org

FOR MORE INFORMATION: 968-1515