Bright Lucifer
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| Bright Lucifer | |
|---|---|
| Written by | Orson Welles |
| Characters | Bill Flynn, Jack Flynn, Eldred Brand |
| Original language | English |
| Genre | Horror |
Bright Lucifer is an unproduced 1930s era semi-autobiographical horror play, and the first written by Orson Welles as a single author. It has, to date, never been professionally staged.
Welles first began writing Bright Lucifer in 1932, while he was writing the play Marching Song at a friend's summer home in Lac du Flambeau, Wisconsin.[1]: 224 [2] He was still developing the text in September 1934 (having moved to New York to play the part of Tybalt in Katharine Cornell's transferred production of Romeo and Juliet), telling John Houseman that he was working on a script “about the devil” when they first met in December. He had intended to premiere the play at a proposed theater festival at his old school in the summer of 1935 (though this never came about; due to difficulties with the 1934 summer festival the event was not repeated), and continued to work on the script with an eye to producing it as late as 1938.[3]
An amateur presentation was given of the script by a community group in Wisconsin on September 27, 1997, 12 years after Welles's death, at the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center in Madison, Wisconsin.[2]
Characters
- Jack Flynn - a burned-out B-movie horror actor, suffering a nervous breakdown after the breakdown of his marriage - a cross between John Barrymore and Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi
- Bill Flynn - a newspaper editor, his brother - a large, Falstaffian father-figure with a heart condition
- Eldred Brand - Bill's teenage ward, an asthmatic orphan - a "bitch boy," and the Lucifer of the plays title