Editor’s Foreword

More than one conversation with Eugene O’Neill Society members at conferences over the last ten years, which often occurred late in the evening after imbibing at the hotel bar, included complaints about the overprivileging of Eugene O’Neill’s late, autobiographical plays at the expense of his early plays. This issue of the Eugene O’Neill Review might just be the anodyne for these ailments. Certainly, late plays like Long Day’s Journey Into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten get their due. But the articles, interviews, and reviews here address plays such as The Hairy Ape and Lazarus Laughed, Beyond the Horizon and “Anna Christie,” Warnings and Before Breakfast. Even The Great God Brown makes an appearance! Alternately, contributors offer illuminating pieces on O’Neill’s contemporaries among the Provincetown Players.In Lost & Found, Jeffery Kennedy investigates “A New Marionette Theatre,” an essay discovered in the “James Light typescripts” folder at the Billy Rose Theatre Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts alongside “The Parade of Masks,” Light’s article about masks in O’Neill’s plays, which appeared in EOR 41, no. 1. Nevertheless, Kennedy makes a compelling case that “A New Marionette Theatre” was written not by Light but instead by Remo Bufano, Light’s friend, who had performed in productions by the Provincetown Players in 1920 and became one of the more successful puppeteers during the early twentieth century. Kennedy speculates that “A New Marionette Theatre” may have been part of his application for a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928 to study puppeteering.The articles featured in this issue come from newcomers to the Review who offer exciting new directions for O’Neill’s plays. Mohamed Nejib Hizi considers the Nietzschean philosophy of laughter in Lazarus Laughed in ways that highlight Lazarus as a life-affirming Übermensch and O’Neill’s aesthetic project of establishing a Dionysian theater during the heady days of the Provincetown Players. Zay Dale contends that the ghostliness in The Hairy Ape speaks to the play’s investment in metaphysical Blackness. Drawing upon the work of Frantz Fanon and Rizvana Bradley, Dale argues that Yank’s encounter with Mildred thrusts him into a painful existential confrontation with his own ghostliness that embodies what Fanon describes as the “Nothingness” of Blackness—a condition that haunts African American literature.Brenda Murphy’s Used Books article celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Stephen A. Black’s Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy. As Murphy shows, Black’s book has exerted remarkable influence on scholarship concerning O’Neill and has been cited in texts from other disciplines, including Genograms: Assessment and Treatment and Posterity: Letters of Great Americans to Their Children. Murphy argues that Black’s study remains readable and valuable in O’Neill studies over two decades later.Bess Rowen continues the interview series with contemporary playwrights on O’Neill’s legacy by talking with Sarah Ruhl, whose plays The Clean House (2005) and In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) (2010) were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. With commentary on The Great God Brown, Mourning Becomes Electra, and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Ruhl discusses theatrical representations of family, trauma, autobiography, character complexity, and character-driven plays to consider O’Neill’s contributions to a “poetics of American theater.”Edited with aplomb by Zander Brietzke, the book reviews address O’Neill’s life at Tao House and his contemporaries. Katie N. Johnson reviews William Davies King’s book about the importance of Tao House in O’Neill’s plays and the lives of Eugene and Carlotta O’Neill, while David Kornhaber examines Ryder Thornton’s book on philosophy in O’Neill’s early plays. Baron Kelly commends Patti Hartigan’s biography of August Wilson, whose cycle of plays about the African American experience during the twentieth century paralleled O’Neill’s imagined (but abandoned) cycle of plays, “A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed.” Jeremy Killian reviews Michael Y. Bennett’s book about the philosophy of theater, which pursues wide-ranging inquiries about what defines theater. Performance reviews from Vivian Casper, Anne Fletcher, J. K. Curry, Jeff S. Dailey, and myself address O’Neill classics such as A Moon for the Misbegotten and “Anna Christie” as well as adaptations by Nicolas Flagello, Ronán Noone, and Eric Fraisher Hayes. My thanks to Bess Rowen for curating such fine reviews!Thanks also to the readers of this journal for your continued interest in Eugene O’Neill.