Edith Wharton\u2019s 1934 autobiography, \u201cA Backward Glance,\u201d glances a bit more carefully at some things than others. She gives her close friend and fellow literary lion Henry James a chapter, but names her husband of 28 years exactly once. (And that\u2019s only because she quotes James referring to him.)<\/p>\n
One subject Wharton doesn\u2019t mention at all? \u201cThe Shadow of a Doubt,\u201d a full-length 1901 play that got close to a Broadway opening before foundering under murky circumstances. It was all but forgotten \u2014 which is perhaps what Wharton had intended \u2014 until two scholars unearthed a script in 2016.<\/p>\n
Mary Chinery, of Georgian Court University in New Jersey, and Laura Rattray, of the University of Glasgow, found the script in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. (Crucially, the play was filed not under the center\u2019s well-combed-over Wharton holdings but rather in its collection of \u201cPlayscripts and Promptbooks.\u201d)<\/p>\n
\u201cWe often don\u2019t have the complete picture, especially with women writers from that period,\u201d Chinery said. \u201cTheir work is so spread out that there\u2019s a lot we still don\u2019t know about.\u201d<\/p>\n
Audiences will finally be able to see for themselves at the Shaw Festival, in the bucolic Canadian hamlet Niagara-on-the-Lake, which presents works written by and in the spirit of George Bernard Shaw each summer. Nestled alongside works by Shaw, J.M. Synge and No\u00ebl Coward this year is the world premiere of \u201cThe Shadow of a Doubt,\u201d which opened Aug. 20 at the Royal George Theater.<\/p>\n
Tim Carroll, the festival\u2019s artistic director, said he was constantly on the lookout for new works to add to the festival\u2019s repertory. \u201cI have friends all over the world sending me links to articles about new discoveries,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd 95 times out of 100, you realize this is a forgotten play for a reason.\u201d<\/p>\n
But he said \u201cShadow,\u201d a somewhat lurid mash-up of Oscar Wilde\u2019s drollery and Henrik Ibsen\u2019s noose-tightening melodrama, \u201cticked three boxes\u201d: It was by a well-known author, it was written during Shaw\u2019s lifetime and it had never received a full staging. (There was a BBC Radio adaptation in 2018, and the Red Bull Theater staged a reading the following year.)<\/p>\n
Carroll felt Wharton\u2019s play was in that 5 percent of discoveries worth unearthing. \u201cIt\u2019s not perfect, but it\u2019s jolly interesting,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
As it happens, Wharton\u2019s interest in the theater went well beyond the occasional stage adaptations of her novels. Before she found success with \u201cThe House of Mirth\u201d in 1905, Chinery said, Wharton had forged relationships with several New York theater professionals and worked on adaptations and brief works that she called \u201cdialogues.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShadow,\u201d the story of a nurse who marries uneasily into a wealthy family after her patient\u2019s death, was poised to become Wharton\u2019s big step forward. The play entered rehearsals in February 1901 with the impresario Charles Frohman and the noted leading lady Elsie de Wolfe on the bill. It was scheduled to be performed as a one-off matinee at the Empire Theater, then a Broadway venue, which was a common prelude to a longer run, but it never got that far.<\/p>\n
Why? Accounts vary, with culprits ranging from the subject matter (assisted suicide) to a discontented Frohman to an unenthusiastic de Wolfe. Wharton reportedly planned to \u201cstrengthen some of the roles\u201d during the announced postponement. But for whatever reason, the postponement became permanent and essentially marked the end of her playwriting days.<\/p>\n
Much of the play\u2019s raw material would soon provide fodder for her 1907 novel \u201cThe Fruit of the Tree,\u201d which served as a useful resource for the cast and crew of the Shaw Festival\u2019s new production. This was especially valuable since the script raised some questions of its own. Katherine Gauthier, who stars as the upwardly mobile (and potentially sinister) Kate Derwent, said she identified several aspects that she believes would have been tweaked after the initial Empire Theater performance.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt had kind of a smorgasbord of genres,\u201d Gauthier said of the original text. \u201cOur challenge has been to put all of these people in the same world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gauthier is a playwright herself, as is the director, Peter Hinton-Davis, who described the initial script as \u201ca bit like getting a rehearsal draft\u201d \u2014 to the point where he felt almost queasy about taking it on.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe really don\u2019t know why it didn\u2019t get produced, and part of me wonders if Wharton even wanted it produced,\u201d Hinton-Davis said. \u201cWe all have stuff at the bottoms of drawers.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said the \u201cShadow\u201d actors, eager to make a good first impression on behalf of the piece, felt more beholden to the original text than they would have for a better-known work. All of the words being performed are Wharton\u2019s, but Hinton-Davis described the rehearsal process as \u201ca constant navigation between the found text and the edited text that we used.\u201d For one thing, he arrived at rehearsals with a considerably leaner version, only to reinsert certain witticisms and plot points along the way.<\/p>\n
Hinton-Davis also added some audiovisual components, including real-time close-ups courtesy of four onstage cameras, that might have sent de Wolfe to her fainting couch. \u201cSome people will be divided on this production, no question,\u201d said Carroll, who contrasted this approach to what he called the \u201carchaeologically exact sort of staging\u201d common to so many period pieces.<\/p>\n
Gauthier drew a different comparison from the perspective of Shaw Festival audiences. \u201cI think some people are coming in primed to see another \u2018Gaslight,\u2019\u201d she said, alluding to last year\u2019s reboot of another woman-in-trouble drama that played in the same atmospheric theater. \u201cBut while a lot of plays come to you, this one asks you to lean forward and listen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those who do will hear a fledgling playwright take a tentative but intriguing step toward many of the themes that would animate her novels \u2014 the persistence of class, the fluidity of our personas and how they change from relationship to relationship. \u201cGiven her mastery of multiple genres, I think she would have done well had she stuck it out as a playwright,\u201d Chinery said.<\/p>\n
That possibility remains unknowable (unless other plays also surface, including a missing title called \u201cThe Tightrope\u201d that Wharton alluded to in her letters). Still, \u201cShadow\u201d offers a titillating look at what she might have done with \u2014 and to \u2014 the prevailing theatrical styles of the time.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of people think of realism as the antithesis to artifice, as opposed to melodrama or farce,\u201d Hinton-Davis said. \u201cBut I think of realism as the antithesis to idealism, and Wharton excelled at that. I see her as a wonderful satirist.\u201d<\/p>\n