Cancell'd Destiny

Teacher/scholar Christine Burleson's shocking suicide in Johnson City, TN, took on the trappings of a real-life literary mystery for a transplanted husband and wife who learned about it when they moved into the house where she killed herself. No one in the town where the arthritic, wheelchair-bound 68-year-old woman was a well-known and much-admired teacher of Shakespeare at East Tennessee State University seemed to understand, crippling illness aside, why she put a plastic bag over her head and shot herself in November 1967. Their detective work, which included examining the autopsy report and digging up information from a cache of letters and personal papers, led Pat Arnow and Steven Giles to collaborate with local actress Christine Murdock on the play, Cancell'd Destiny (a title borrowed from Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece), which they call a "psychological autopsy."

Told primarily through letters to and from her parents, the lover who dumped her to marry someone else, and editors who rejected her eight unpublished novels, Cancell'd Destiny is, in effect, a one-woman play. A wordless "Messenger" (Amy Fisher, who also has a miniscule speaking part as president of Johnson City Monday Club, where Burleson lectures amusingly on "How To Remain Happily Single") wanders in and out but is a needless distraction. And voices of Burleson's parents (Tad Chitwood, father; Susan Linville, mother) and her one-time lover Tom Stribling (director Gil D. Reyes) , who actually won the 1933 Pulitzer Prize for a novel called "The Store," occasionally float through scenes.

But the play belongs to the highly skilled Laurene Scalf, a veteran Necessary Theater performer whose work always compels attention. This time, her demanding role produces flashes of brilliance - those moments when she steels herself to use the gun are mesmerizing - but there's a constant nagging feeling that the playwrights have let her down with a mostly ponderous, didactic approach to the story. One wonders why they didn't put themselves in the narrative and show how they peeled back the layers of Burleson's life to get to the heart of the mystery.