The Final Straw: Producing James Purdy at the Trinity Square Rep

{ 95 } \ The Final Straw Producing James Purdy at the Trinity Square Rep —VALLERI J. HOHMAN In an address at the National Educational Theatre Conference in 1986, Oscar Brockett stated, “Few artistic directors have shown the nerve that Adrian Hall did in 1976 at the Trinity Repertory Theatre in Providence when, following an extremely controversial season, his board sought to fire him. Responding that it wits [was] him who had founded and built the company, Hall dismissed the board and replaced it with one more sympathetic to his work.”1 That same year, an article about Hall’s career featured in Time magazine also commented on his “showdown with the Trinity board, which had grown impatient with his explicitly erotic work, especially an adaptation of the James Purdy novel Eustace Chisholm and the Works.”2 The author also noted that Hall was able to replace the board with “backers of his vision.”3 The event solidified Hall’s status as a renegade theatre director and served for some theatre artists and historians as a great example of art, especially revolutionary and controversial art, in triumph over the establishment.Although the event has been mentioned sporadically, its role in strengthening Hall’s position at the Trinity Rep and solidifying the theatre as part of the Providence community has not been fully explored. While claim of triumph was true, it was a complicated success that required Hall’s own form of adaptation and collaboration with members of the so-called establishment. Through this event, Hall’s project of staging unique American voices and his devotion to this theatre company become clear, although , in the aftermath, the notion that Hall found “backers for his vision” is less clear. The event was necessary for the theatre to become a vital aspect of the community, as it enabled Hall to part with a board of directors with which he was in constant conflict, and to stabilize his company. { 96 } VALLERI J. HOHMAN It certainly was not the best time to produce Eustace Chisholm and the Works, but Hall did it anyway. The financial situation was bleak. The board of directors had grown nervous and was frustrated with the artistic director, both for his lack of financial skill and for his unconventional approaches to production and sometimes shocking choice of material. The board had already tried to remove him in 1970 after his controversial production about Charles Manson .4 Hall knew the board viewed him as uncompromising and reckless;5 nevertheless , he staged the adaptation of Purdy’s novel to end the 1975–76 season. Hall knew that controversy had always surrounded the work of James Purdy, whose earliest attempts at publication in the 1950s were met with acerbic rejection. Although his works have been praised by Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Dorothy Parker, and others, Purdy’s subjects as well as his portrayals of them have often been the targets of hostility. His surreal, allegorical novels depict fratricide, crucifixions, and the most repellent kinds of violence with vivid detail. To be sure, Purdy wants to horrify and repel people, to upset and disturb our anesthetized lives, but never for simple shock value, for the most extreme disturbances serve multiple narrative and symbolic purposes, often meant to critique the fact of violence in American life and history. The violence arises inevitably from the desperate actions of characters near the brink of total destruction in a land of bloody beginnings, fierce interracial tensions, and expansionist longings. The strong reactions to the adaptation centered on the display of male nudity and homosexuality, the graphic depiction of an abortion, and the violent acts of a sadistic army captain. As one radio reporter stated, “The ingredients that go into this . . . if just stated here . . . would probably convince many of you [that] the people at Trinity have finally flipped.”6 In spite of this introduction, the reporter concluded, “Eustace Chisholm and the Works is, in many ways, one of the best things Trinity has done.”7 Another reviewer called it Hall’s masterpiece .8 Eustace Chisholm and the Works centers on a group of transients whose lives intersect with that of the struggling poet Eustace Chisholm.9 Set in Depressionera Chicago, the novel...