EYE OF THE GULL
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“Domestic drama” might be a less pejorative-sounding term–but Chambers, who died in 1983 of a brain tumor, had no qualms about the soap-opera label. She was well established as a writer for TV shows like Search for Tomorrow and Somerset–until the success of her lesbian-themed play A Late Snow led the TV industry to blackball her, according to her lover and literary executor Beth Allen. That focused Chambers’s attention on the stage, for which she subsequently wrote the eerily prophetic drama Last Summer at Bluefish Cove, about a woman dying of cancer, and the goofily comic My Blue Heaven. All these plays concern a group of lesbians–friends, rivals, current and former lovers–looking for a balance of happiness, connection, and independence in the rural east-coast areas that Chambers loved so much.
To that canon can now be added Eye of the Gull, an unfinished work written around 1971 (probably right after A Late Snow). Receiving its world premiere at Footsteps Theatre, this play has been “revised” by Vita Dennis with Allen’s approval; Dennis says most of her work has been reshaping, updating, and trimming (she’s compressed the play from three acts to two), work she believes Chambers would have done if she’d been alive. Like the best of Chambers’s sometimes flawed but always affecting work, it’s funny, warm, moving, and shrewdly compassionate in its observation of the traps people lay for themselves.
