LIZZIE LEIGH! Or, the Murder Near the Old Mill: A Story of Three Christmas Nights – A Domestic Drama, in Three Acts by W. R. Waldron

Abstract

Richard Waldon’s play Lizzie Leigh can be interpreted as a domestic drama, a temperance play, or a sensational melodrama. In editing the script we asked ourselves which generic frame – the domestic or temperance – enables the sensation narrative to speak to an audience more powerfully today. Since the discourse of temperance is effectively culturally dead, our first editing decision was to delete the opening temperance dialogue and all subsequent references to temperance as such. We open our version of the play in the midst of an action, and all subsequent deletions to the script were made in the service of keeping the core action of the play in the foreground. We strived to capture how the action might speak to our audience within the contexts that we carry with us from our own cultural moment, our heightened awareness of forms of violence against women, and uncertainties about truth claims being the most prominent. Thus, we shortened the long paeans to lost domestic security and happiness, keeping domesticity as a thread but not a preoccupation. In other words, we kept enough of the domestic context to highlight the action with the intention to make the action as legible and as credible as we could.