Forbidden Love: Thunderclap’s Melville & Hawthorne at the MATCH

They met at a picnic in Massachusetts’ Berkshire mountains in August 1850 – the grand American literary lion, Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter, Twice-Told Tales) and the young impulsive whaler, adventurer, mutineer, Herman Melville.

For Melville (Tyler Galindo), known at the time as the author of the scandalous but well-received Typee and Omoo, novels based on his experiences in the Marquesas, the attraction was instantaneous. “When the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning.”

The more reserved Hawthorne (Brock Hatton), 15 years older, had never met such an uninhibited, impertinent man who said whatever was on his mind. Propriety was beyond Melville. He left that behind in the South Pacific. Five years later, after a shattering separation, they meet for the last time in England, where Hawthorne was American Consul to Liverpool. Hawthorne wrote of his former intimate Melville, “He has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.”

But from August 1850 through November 1851, in the bucolic Berkshires, the two married men were practically inseparable. Melville lived six miles away with his family on a farm he worked when not writing Moby-Dick. The two would meet for dinner, or brandy and cigars, and talk the nights away: philosophy, the art of writing, transcendentalism, atheism, everyday things. Their friendship, hardly mentioned at the time, wouldn’t have merited any attention except for the extant letters from Melville that Hawthorne kept. (Melville would destroy Hawthorne’s.)

Melville’s correspondence is so deeply personal and blunt it borders on the obsessive, if not the homoerotic. He adored Hawthorne, no question, and his pungent style swirls with profound passion and utter devotion.

“Your heart beats in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s…It is a strange feeling – no hopefulness is in it, no despair. Content – that is it.”

“Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips – lo, they are yours and not mine.”

“Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.”

It’s no wonder that, for years, literary scholars have battled over whether these two greatest of American writers of the antebellum period – or any period for that matter – were lovers.

Playwright Adi Teodoru, in her world premiere Melville & Hawthorne doesn’t flinch. She believes they were and shows us. Using quotes from the letters in a masterful way for much of Melville’s dialogue, she dramatizes their burgeoning affair, from the thunderstorm-interrupted picnic, to their struggles to reconcile the feelings that move them so, their first impassioned kiss, the mutual inspiration, the fraying of Melville and Hawthorne’s marriages as their spouses’ suspicions are revealed, their rueful meeting on a bench in Liverpool as they say their final goodbye.

World premieres are tricky things. They can come full-borne like Athena out of the head of Zeus, or often can be out-of-town tryouts, needing revisions. M&H cries out for more work. The bones are here but oftentimes too obviously lurking under the thin flesh covering them.

During arguments between famous legal reformer David Dudley Field II (Curtis Barber) and Melville – over slavery and colonialism or barbarism versus civilization or black versus white – the contentious debates ring with an anachronistic peal. They sound too modern and glib for the antebellum. The scenes depict Melville’s impassioned humanism but seem like filler, not drama.

Cortney Haffner, as Sophia Hawthorne, has an impressive stage presence with a mezzo’s velvet voice and is quite effective as a woman scorned, but is she really needed in this play? Or is Sophie Powers, as neglected Lizzie Melville? She has a soft reading of her part which is in stark contrast to the others, and she just doesn’t register. I may be wrong, but these women slow down the action. Let them be offstage, talked about, argued over, unseen. The play doesn’t need them. Keep the focus on the principals, make it even more intimate. (I couldn’t stop thinking about Liz Duffy Adams’ Born With Teeth, the Alley’s 2022 world premiere. It focuses on Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe. No Virgin Queen, no Thomas Kyd, not even Anne Hathaway to swan in at a dramatic moment. Only these two share the stage. It was stunning.)

And you don’t need any others when Hatton and, especially, Galindo rule the stage. Although he’s much too young for Hawthorne in 1851, Hatton plays this with the finesse of a reserved Pilgrim, who’s ultimately seduced into the searing light of Melville. At first, he pulls away when Melville gets to close or lays a gentle hand on his shoulder or arm. Reluctant to yield, he doesn’t know what to do about these strange feelings he shouldn’t be feeling. He admires the younger man – his thoughts, his rebellion, his work, his dark side which mirrors his own deeply hidden desires. When he relents, his face lights up, he relishes the intimacy. Later, when he lies in Melville’s arms, he glows under Liz Lacy’s dappled light.

Then there’s Galindo. Talk about stage presence. He carries his own klieg light. With his wayward hair, blustery insistence, and savage demeanor, he has arrived straight from a desert island. You know he could fashion a hut out of palm fronds, paddle a war canoe, or eat you alive. He stalks Hawthorne and eventually ensorcells him. He roars his attack, then purrs in satisfaction, or cries in desperation whenever rebuffed. It’s a fierce performance, full of guts and grit. In the future, what a mad, possessed Ahab he would make.

Director Andrew Ruthven allows all the space they need to emote and then discover the tenderness within their forbidden allure. Jacob E. Sanchez’s minimal set has hints of the sea with its ship’s rigging pierced by starlight and a swag curtain that looks like a unfurled mainsail. Dru Bowman’s period costumes are appropriately swallow-tailed and wool, or gingham and swirly.

But an overhaul is in order for this drama to be truly seaworthy. Scrape away the barnacles, and let the story catch the wind. There’s a fine ship underneath, just waiting to be launched.

Melville & Hawthorne continues through August 10 at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays; and 2:30 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays at Thunderclap Productions at the MATCH, 3400 Main. For more information, call 713-521-4533 or visit thunderclapproductions.com or matchhouston.org. $15-$25.