Edmund Wilson: Playwrights, Farewell!

Abstract

In June 1950 Hume Cronyn, who was to play a 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 performance echoed his personal 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. Like The Little Blue Light, it has long since vanished from the stage.