'Bright Lucifer' - The Devil and Orson Welles (with video)

By MIKE TEAL

Eighty years ago in September 1934, Orson Welles, fresh from the triumph of his Woodstock Summer Theatre Fest, moved to New York to prepare for his Broadway debut with the Katherine Cornell Theatre, and also began work on a new play, “about the devil”, as he was to tell John Houseman at their first meeting three months later.

By October, his Summer Theatre girlfriend, Virginia Nicholson, had joined him in New York, and they were married in November. Also around this time, Welles had his first taste of employment in radio, where he worked briefly with Joseph Cotton and Ray Collins. His initial plan was to stage “Bright Lucifer”, as he soon named it, at the 1935 Woodstock Summer Theatre Fest, which he was already envisioning as a followup to the previous Summer’s event. However, Skipper Hill, feeling himself lucky to have survived the 1934 fest both financially and emotionally, nixed the idea of staging the new play, to Orson’s disappointment.

After falling in with Houseman, Welles’s meteoric rise began, both on stage and radio, and “Bright Lucifer”, although Welles continued to work on it as late as 1938, was eventually tucked away and forgotten, without ever being staged in Welles’s lifetime.

Despite being dismissed by many Welles scholars as an adolescent horror story, it has some autobiographical references that are quite extraordinary, when put into the context of Welles’s career. It figured prominently in Barbra Leaming’s 1984 biography, “Orson Welles”, which was written with much psychological and emotional input from Welles himself. “Bright Lucifer” is the tale of two men on a fishing trip in the north woods; one a burned-out horror film actor named Jack, clearly modeled on John Barrymore, and the other his brother Bill, a newspaper editor, who as Leaming points out, is an apparent amalgamation of Welles’s guardian Maurice “Dadda” Bernstein, Skipper Hill, and John Houseman.

With the two men is Bill’s adolescent ward, Eldred, who is the “Bright Lucifer” of the play’s title, and obviously a self-portrait of Welles himself. Like the author, Eldred is an orphan, smokes cigars, has hay fever, and has studied Nietsche. More disturbingly, there is the suggestion of a sexual relationship between Eldred and his guardian.

On September 27, 1997, 12 years after Welles’s death, the play was finally given it’s world-premiere performance in Madison, Wisconsin, where Welles had briefly gone to school as a 10-year-old.

As the Chicago Tribune pointed out at the time, the cast and crew were “a feisty little group” that made the most of their very limited resources.

The bootleg recording heard here is of the opening night performance, obviously reflecting a few opening night jitters, but well done nonetheless. The recording was made with a portable cassette recorder, and is of fair quality at best. It has been augmented with subtitles taken from the play’s original text.

Act I