Written by Orson Welles Genre Horror fiction | Playwright Orson Welles Original language English language | |
Characters Bill Flynn, Jack Flynn, Eldred Brand Similar Orson Welles plays, Other plays | ||
Bright Lucifer is an unproduced 1930's era semi-autobiographical horror play, and the first written by Orson Welles as a single author. It has, to date, never been professionally staged.
Contents
History
Welles first began writing Bright Lucifer in 1932, while he was writing the play Marching Song at a friend's summer home in Lac du Flambeau, Wisconsin. He was still developing the text in September 1934 (having moved to New York to play the part of Tybalt in Katharine Cornell's transferred production of Romeo and Juliet), telling John Houseman that he was working on a script “about the devil” when they first met in December. He had intended to premiere the play at a proposed theater festival at his old school in the summer of 1935 (though this never came about; due to difficulties with the 1934 summer festival the event was not repeated), and continued to work on the script with an eye to producing it as late as 1938.
Though the play has never been performed professionally before 2016, an amateur presentation was given of the script by a community group in Wisconsin on September 27, 1997, 12 years after Welles's death, at the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center in Madison, Wisconsin.
The professional premiere of Bright Lucifer will be in November 2016 at the White Bear Theatre in London, directed by Brice Stratford.
Characters
Plot
After the disappearance of Jack's wife (in the wake of a sexual affair and drug abuse scandal), he has abandoned his career in Hollywood (where he specialised in "creature features" - playing the monster in B-movie horror films) and is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He has arranged for a retreat to recover in the family cabin (on a north woods Indian reservation) with his brother (Bill - a tabloid newspaper editor) and his brother's young ward (Eldred - a strange, young asthmatic), his brother's wife (Martha) due to arrive a few days later. As the play opens the three males have been fishing, and tensions are already high. Outside the cabin an American Indian funeral is ongoing, and "devil drums" ceaselessly beat throughout. The twisting story unfolds to encompass whisky, murder, God, the Devil, a monster costume, insanity, and the hysterical desecration of a corpse. The entire play taking place over two nights, and is set entirely in the cabin in the woods.
Gothicism
The play is a lurid gothic horror, mixing high art with grand guignol; the Chicago Tribune referred to the play as a combination of Henrik Ibsen, Eugene O'Neill, Weird Tales and The Twilight Zone.
Father-figures
Welles was orphaned at the age of 15, and was adopted by Dr. Maurice Bernstein - a lover of his mothers'. This relationship directly reflects that of Eldred and Bill, and biographers have speculated on the autobiographical nature of the depiction.
Homoeroticism
A notable aspect of the play, considering the era in which it was written, is the homoerotic undertone which runs throughout (not to mention the implied Hebephilia of the Bill/Eldred relationship).