Edmund Wilson: Playwrights, Farewell!

Edmund Wilson: Playwrights, Farewell! NEALE REINITZ In June 1950 Hume Cronyn, who was to playa major role in Edmund Wilson 's play The Little Blue Light at the Brattle Theatre, dictated a four-page, single-spaced letter to Albert Marre, the director, with a number of explicit criticisms of the "dramatic structure." He liked the play, he said, but the symbols were obscure, the motivations were unclear, and the ending was manipulated.' When the production went forward that August, Wilson followed it closely, resisting every cut that Cronyn had suggested.' Wilson's intense interest in the perfonnance echoed his persona] involvement a generation earlier in his only other play to be staged professionally. In 1924 The Crime ill the Whistler Room was slipped into the repertory of the Provincetown Players through the efforts of Eugene O'Neill, with Wilson's wife, Mary Blair, one of O'Neill's favourite actresses, in the lead.l Like The Little Blue Light, it has long since vanished from the stage. In a literary life that lasted over forty years, Wilson published a total of nine plays, and actively sought to get them produced' Despite his continual frustration, he aspired to be a dramatist. In the introduction to Five Plays (1954) he declared: "I have always been particularly susceptible to the theater , and the stories that take shape in my imagination are likely to do so in dramatic fann. "5 Most of his plays begin with a variation on a single idea: the individual's struggle to find freedom from sterile and repressive traditions. In The Crime in ille Whistler Room these forces are Edwardian gentility and big business; in The Little Blue Light they are totalitarian thought-control and liberal despair.6 Wilson did not publish - or even finish - another play that was inspired by a similar theme, one very much closer to his own life. It was not conceived intellectually, but came directly out of experience. In this play he had planned to dramatize the weight of the ancestral past on the personal present, as he had known it at the Old Stone House in Talcottville, New York. Modem Drama, 36 (1993) 454 Edmund Wilson: Playwrights, Farewell! 455 Through the middle 1950s, soon afler he inherited the property which had belonged to his family since early in the nineteenth century, Wilson planned the staging, characters, and plot for what he called the " Stone House Play.,,' He intended to show himself and his contemporaries in confrontation with the family's heritage. After making notes for six or seven years, he abandoned this embryonic text. Much later, in the 1960s, he wrote about the Old Stone House at length in Upstate (1971), an amalgam of personal journal, history, and guidebook. His dramatic imagination had faltered when confronted with this subject; he could re-create it only in a first-person narrative. The failure of the "Stone House Play," the success of Upstate, and the peculiar qualities of Wilson's other plays collaborate to suggest the reasons for Wilson's limitations as a playwright, limitations which he was very slow to accept. In certain externals Wilson's earlier plays were consistent; he would use the same methods in the Stone House Play. In The Crime in the Whistler Room and The Little Blue Light, the people, thinly disguised, are from his own life; realism and fantasy exist side by side. Wilson acknowledged the influence of the stage realism of such turn-of-the-century American playwrights as David Belasco and Clyde Fitch.8 At the same time, he could not resist making use of the dreams and fantasies that crowded his mind and filled his journals. In the Whistler Room, the extended dreams of an ingenue based on Mary Blair and Edna Millay are reminiscent of Strindberg's A Dream Play but spring essentially from Wilson himself. The wistful young waitress wakes up to escape from the genteel family that is preparing her for Vassar by running off with her lover, a madcap author modelled on Scott Fitzgerald. In The Little Blue Light, one of the leading male characters, a liberal magazine editor, resembles Wilson. His wife, "a handsome brunette ... with an habitual tensity" (421...