Editor’s Foreword

Ireland and Irishness so thoroughly permeate this issue of the Eugene O’Neill Review that one might think the current editor has stooped to pilfering material from EOR 39.1, the special issue dedicated to the O’Neill Society’s 10th International Conference held in Galway, Ireland (2017). Edited with élan by Audrey McNamara and Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, that issue celebrated the “Constant Presence” of Ireland in O’Neill’s life and plays. Seven years later, issue 46.2 continues this celebration with Lost & Found, New Voices, articles, and performance reviews of plays at the Eugene O’Neill International Festival of Theatre in New Ross. Additionally, the current issue explores O’Neill’s reading of Poets Laureate, stage design for Desire Under the Elms, radical O’Neill contemporaries, and the history of theater-making in the twentieth century. I’m taking the Fifth on the pilfering question. Nevertheless, this issue is quite the read!More found than lost, the Lost & Found article is the transcription of President Michael D. Higgins’s speech delivered at the Irish Arts Center in New York City when he was awarded the Eugene O’Neill International Public Service Award in September 2024. Those of us who attended the Galway Conference remember President Higgins’s speech at the Society Banquet. Introduced by Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, the 2024 speech demonstrates President Higgins’s enduring appreciation for O’Neill’s plays and makes compelling observations on those plays and today’s global concerns, observations that, with any luck, will spark new scholarship.Katie N. Johnson starts off the articles in this issue by examining the production history of “Anna Christie” in Ireland. Although the play takes place in American cities like New York and Boston and reflects American concerns on immigrants, gender, prostitution, and marriage, it “resonates significantly with Ireland,” especially across the multiple drafts and versions in which O’Neill experiments with Irishness. William Davies King redirects our focus to Tao House with his article on John Masefield and O’Neill. Noticing a copy of Masefield’s Enslaved and Other Poems on the bookshelves of O’Neill’s study, King undertook an examination of the resonances between Masefield’s novels and poems (especially “The Hounds of Hell”) and O’Neill’s plays, including The Moon of the Caribbees, The First Man, and The Emperor Jones.The Practitioner’s Colloquium for this issue originated with Eric Fraisher Hayes, who suggested a project that would have stage designers design Desire Under the Elms for the one-hundredth anniversary of its debut in 1924. At our request, Anne Fletcher embraced this project and recruited three designers who agreed to do designs for a hypothetical production of Desire and take part in interviews during which they would provide samples of their work and explain their process. Although we missed the anniversary, this project is compelling both visually in the images produced and informatively for those outside the world of stage design.Elizabeth Ricketts-Jones’s dissertation, “Land Goddesses, Divine Pigs, and Royal Tricksters: Subversive Mythologies and Imperialist Land Ownership Dispossession in Twentieth-Century Irish and American Literature,” is the second installment of New Voices. Completed in 2021 at the University of South Florida, this dissertation is a comparative project that examined the consequences of British colonialism, specifically land ownership dispossession, in Irish and American plays. The texts include Brian Friel’s Translations (1980), Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats (1990), W. B. Yeats’s and Lady Augusta Gregory’s Kathleen ni Houlihan (1902), Seán O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1924), Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1956) and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1947), and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959). This comparative reading locates Long Day’s Journey and Moon in an Irish theatrical genealogy and suggests intriguing new directions for consideration of O’Neill’s plays.My thanks to Zander Brietzke and Bess Rowen for their exemplary work on book and performance reviews. Valerie Barnes Lipscomb kicks off the book reviews with her reading of Roberta Barker’s Symptoms of the Self: Tuberculosis and the Making of the Modern Stage, a compelling study of theatrical representations of tuberculosis on French, British, and American stages—including O’Neill’s The Straw and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Alexander Pettit considers Damned Agitator: A Michael Gold Reader, edited by Patrick Chura, the first anthology to include Gold’s political, journalistic, and dramatic writings. Fonzie D. Geary II reviews Mark Connelly’s The Group Theatre: An Enduring Legacy, which examines the history and legacy of this theatrical company. Performance reviews on A Moon for the Misbegotten (Kristi Good), O’Neill Reimagined (Kelly I. Aliano), Teddy (Katie N. Johnson), and Mourning Becomes Electra (J. Chris Westgate) demonstrate the vitality of O’Neill’s and others’ plays on stage today.Thanks to the readers of this journal for your continued interest in Eugene O’Neill.