William Phinizy Spalding Author

William Phinizy Spalding's On Words is not so much a play as it is an exorcism, a sprawling, incantatory work that summons four centuries of American ancestry and forces them into dialogue with myth, death, and the author himself. It is audacious, overwrought, deeply personal, and utterly unconcerned with whether you're prepared for it.

The structure is deceptively simple: thirteen acts plus prologue and epilogue, each a vignette in which historical and mythological figures converse across time. John Rolfe bargains with Osiris for Pocahontas's return. Benedict Spalding II encounters Hiram Abiff outside Independence Hall in 1776. Catherine Spalding, the Kentucky frontier nun, debates Dionysus himself. The play culminates with the author stepping into Elysium to meet his ancestors and, finally, to confront Osiris, the Egyptian lord of the dead who haunts this work like a recurring nightmare.

Spalding writes in a register that oscillates between Jacobean pastiche and stream-of-consciousness confession. The diction is deliberately archaic, yet punctured constantly by modern inflection, profanity, and an almost jazz-like improvisational rhythm. This can be exhilarating or exhausting depending on your tolerance for maximalism.

The play's central obsession is inheritance, not just of property or name, but of myth, sin, and meaning. Spalding is explicitly grappling with what it means to carry a lineage that includes slave-owners and papal knights, literary luminaries and morphine-addled inventors. Walker Percy looms as a key influence, and that debt is evident: this is a work saturated with Percy's Catholic existentialism, his concern with the "malaise" of modern life.

But where Percy's novels tend toward ironic detachment and diagnostic precision, Spalding's play is operatic, unguarded, almost embarrassingly sincere. He doesn't analyze the weight of heritage, he howls under it. The final confrontation with Osiris is essentially a theodicy delivered as a shouting match, the author refusing to be judged by death itself, demanding instead to be understood.

On Words is a flawed, fascinating, sui generis work. It demands a reader willing to surrender to its incantatory rhythms, to tolerate its excesses, to accept that it operates by dream-logic rather than dramatic convention. For those attuned to its frequency, it offers something increasingly rare: a writer willing to stake everything on the page, to treat literature as sacred act.

If On Words was Spalding excavating his bloodline, The Last Love Story is what happens when he detonates the temple and builds something new from the rubble. This is, by the author's own admission, one of the longest plays ever written, and it earns its length not through narrative sprawl but through sheer incantatory density.

The entire work unfolds within a single location: the Fisher King's Castle. But this is no medieval costume drama. Spalding has collapsed time itself, gathering Arthurian knights alongside Roman emperors, Old Testament prophets, Greek titans, and figures that seem to emerge from the author's own fever dreams. Guinevere argues with Mordred. Percival confronts Merlin about the nature of power. Galahad and Satan negotiate the terms of cosmic surrender. The Grail is present, but as question rather than object, as wound rather than cure.

The verse here is looser than in On Words, more percussive, closer to hip-hop cadence than Shakespearean meter. Characters interrupt each other, talk past each other, deliver philosophical arias that fracture mid-thought. The effect is less dialogue than polyphonic dream, voices overlapping in a space where linear time has ceased to function.

What distinguishes this from mere mythological pastiche is Spalding's willingness to make it personal. The cosmic battle between love and destruction isn't abstract, it's rendered through the specific wound of romantic betrayal, the specific terror of loving someone who might annihilate you. The refrain "You're gonna kill me" recurs like a heartbeat, sometimes threat, sometimes prayer, sometimes both simultaneously.

The climax, wherein Guinevere and the narrator achieve a kind of fusion that transcends their mutual destruction, is genuinely earned. After three hundred pages of cosmic warfare, the revelation that "our old hate is the only new love in the universe" lands not as paradox but as hard-won truth.

The Last Love Story is not for everyone. It requires patience, surrender, and a willingness to be overwhelmed. But for readers who have followed Spalding from ancestral reckoning to this apocalyptic romance, it represents a genuine apotheosis, the moment when a writer stops explaining his obsessions and simply becomes them.