Burning Bright: A Novella — John Steinbeck

Burning Bright is a 1950 novella by John Steinbeck written as an experiment with producing a play in novel format. Rather than providing only the dialogue and brief stage directions as would be expected in a play, Steinbeck fleshes out the scenes with details of both the characters and the environment. The intention was to allow the play to be read by the non-theatrical reader while still allowing the dialogue to be lifted and performed with little adaptation by acting companies. While Steinbeck could see that providing little information in the way of physical description or stage direction allowed the director and actors greater freedom and scope for imaginative interpretation, he weighed this against the benefit of making the players aware of the author's intent and making the play accessible to the general reader.

The story is a simple morality play concerning Joe Saul, an ageing man desperate for a child. His young wife, Mordeen, who loves him, suspects that he is sterile, and in order to please him by bearing him a child, she becomes pregnant by Saul's cocky young assistant, Victor. The fourth character in the story is Friend Ed, a long-time friend of Saul and Mordeen, who helps the couple through the ordeal after Joe discovers that he is indeed infertile and the child can not be his. The story is meant to be that of an everyman (early in its development Steinbeck had thought of calling the play Everyman), so the setting for each of the three acts recasts the four characters in different situations: the first act is set in a circus, Saul and Victor are trapeze artists and Friend Ed, a clown; in the second act, Saul and Friend Ed become neighbouring farmers and Victor appears as Saul's farmhand. In the final act Saul is the captain of a ship, Mr. Victor, his mate, and Friend Ed a seaman about to put out on a different ship.