Welles's "Bright Lucifer" - Welles play gets belatedly produced

[R Kadin]

The time: September 27, 1997. The place: Madison, Wisconsin. The event: the premiere of a "new" Welles work, a posthumous staging of Bright Lucifer, a play Welles wrote in the mid-1930's. According to the above source, at least, it appears to have been as ahead of its time (thematically, at least) as the rest of the Master's work and its script seems to presage Welles's soon-to-emerge cinematic obsession with visual detail.

Whether the play's failure to date to find a repertory following says anything about its dramatic merits is a matter, I suppose, for those who know the piece to debate. All the same, it might have made for an interesting evening of theatre.

[Wilson]

I've read Welles' Marching Song, his play about John Brown written in the 30s, and I'll have to dig out my notes, but I couldn't see it being performed onstage without a huge cast and budget, as there was a very large number of parts. It was a thrill reading Welles' original typed pages though, with his original conceptions for the sets included, sometimes pasted onto a page of script.

[Glenn Anders]

My understanding of Bright Lucifer is that it might be a touch dated as drama, but that it would offer excellent insights into Welles' psychology and the development of his character. Discussions of it I've read suggest a story set in the "Great North Woods." a plot involving murderous sibling rivalry. The basic situation reminds me somehow of a seminal melodramatic Midwest version of the Glass Family psychodrama which J.D. Salinger created a decade or so later.

Has anyone seen the production under discussion?

Glenn