Villa Rhabani: An Unfinished Play by Thornton Wilder

Abstract

Abstract Written while Thornton Wilder spent a year in Italy after graduating from Yale (1920–21), Villa Rhabani is a Henry Jamesian American abroad story, a genre to which Wilder would return in his first novel, The Cabala (1926). In this uncompleted play (only three out of a four proposed acts exist in manuscript), the American abroad is a young wealthy widow, Helen Darrall. She lives in a villa on the isle of Capri, just off the Italian mainland. She is plagued by an unspecified medical condition that will ultimately require surgery, but her family friend and physician, Dr. Kemper, further prescribes that she engage in activities that will make her happy, as he seems to think that her temperament is crucial to curing her illness. Thus when Helen’s friend visiting from the States, Ailsa Morrow, tells Dr. Kemper that local adventurers view the wealthy widow as lucrative prey, he is all for Helen enjoying herself—that is, until he meets the adventurer with whom she has fallen in love: Dario Stiavelli. Villa Rhabani has another visitor—The Baroness von Dorrn, an art appraiser hired to catalog Helen’s collection of paintings—who it is revealed has her own relationship with Dario. Dr. Kemper and Ailsa try to persuade Helen that Dario is using her for her money, but she professes to them (and in scenes with Dario) that they have a romantic relationship that is out of the ordinary, not based on the expectation of domestic life but instead two beautiful people giving themselves to the moment. Whether Dario has actually fallen in love with Helen in the process of his con is left ambiguous. While this brief synopsis may strike readers that Villa Rhabani is a conventional even clichéd melodrama, the excellence of Wilder’s dialogue raises the characters and action to a higher level that engages the reader.