O’Neill Reimagined

O’Neill Reimagined, presented as part of the 2024 Eugene O’Neill International Festival of Theatre in New Ross, County Wexford, Ireland, offered audiences a unique opportunity not only to encounter some infrequently performed short works by O’Neill but also to see them configured in an innovative format designed to allow them to speak in new ways. O’Neill Reimagined featured two one-act plays, Warnings Before Breakfast and A Wife for a Life: A Backstage Story, which were structured so as to be in thematic dialogue with one another. O’Neill’s Warnings (1913) and Before Breakfast (1916) were combined by director Eric Fraisher Hayes to create a new, longer work that moved fluidly from scenes in one play to the other. Through this dramatic structuring, the two works were able to speak to recurring themes in O’Neill’s plays, particularly those that center the realities and complexities of married life. The resulting Warnings Before Breakfast served as the evening’s first “act,” with O’Neill’s A Wife for a Life (1913), in a revised version by Hayes, subtitled A Backstage Story, serving as the performance’s latter half. Truly, these plays were “O’Neill reimagined”; in each case, the short drama was presented in a manner that went beyond what O’Neill had originally scripted. Seeing these works was a perfect culmination of the festival events and made O’Neill’s early works feel fresh and relevant for contemporary audiences.Described on the performance’s program as being presented to “examine themes of ambition, relationships, and family tension,” each of the works highlighted questions at the core of O’Neill’s larger body of work. For Warnings Before Breakfast, this was a consideration of obligations to family as well as the pressures of the economic realities of early twentieth-century American life. The presentation jumped back and forth between chunks of the two plays, almost framing the failing hearing of the wireless operator in Warnings as being the same failing called out by Mrs. Rowland to her offstage husband, Alfred, throughout Before Breakfast. The staging was minimal, and the dramatic tension was created by the expert performances of the actors organically shifting between the two dramatic worlds.In particular, I found the use of symbolic props useful in distinguishing each narrative environment, especially in terms of establishing characters in Warnings. In that piece, actors played multiple roles and small costume elements and props clarified who was who. Particularly compelling was the concept of labeling three of the roles Fear #1, Fear #2, and Fear #3, played by Isabel Siragusa, Willem Long, and Cynthia Lagodzinski, respectively. This suggested that this collection of parts for each actor was connected by the ways in which they embodied what would frighten the other two characters, Woman, played by Emily M. Keyishian, and Man, played by Ryan Hayes. The ship’s captain, part of the role of Fear #3, being signified by the use of his hat, was fascinating because the role was doubled with that of Mrs. Knapp. It clarified who was who but, when paired with her apron, also implicitly suggested who had overall control of Knapp’s life. In all, the performances were deeply compelling and brought an energy to the often open-ended dialogue that made the characters feel truly alive.Transitions were smooth as lighting, along with the use of stage space, helped distinguish what was happening in each story. Before Breakfast was performed on the right side of the stage and Warnings mostly center and stage left. This meant that there was very little bleed between the scenic worlds, and the lights being raised and lowered in each area helped keep the focus on the correct dramatic action. This distinction between narrative worlds also reminded the audience that Mr. Knapp was not the offstage Alfred, yet the staging also implicitly suggested that he could be, particularly when Knapp was visible as Mrs. Rowland called out to him. Details like this helped to heighten the narrative and thematic connections between the two plays.While the dramatic construction did clearly establish that Mrs. Knapp of Warnings was a separate individual from Mrs. Rowland from Before Breakfast, the paralleling of the narratives offered a powerful statement about the pressures and disappointments in marriages, especially in this era. Each wife’s frustrations mirrored the other’s: the necessity that she rely on a husband who has not done enough for the marriage and family, leading her to decry his shortcomings. In both plays, the reality that the marriage is not a partnership built from love but an arrangement dictated by necessity is powerfully felt by seeing each woman’s struggle in tandem. Indeed, viewing these women, portrayed by Keyishian in Before Breakfast and Lagodzinski in Warnings, as mirror images threw into relief the social strictures that prevented women from being able to take control over their own lives.This was a visionary manner in which to configure the plays for an O’Neill aficionado, allowing the plays to speak with one another in unique ways that offer insight into thematic concerns that pervade O’Neill’s dramaturgy. For the uninitiated, however, I am not entirely convinced that the distinctions between the two plays would have been perfectly clear. On the one hand, I think that this provides an interesting route for exploring the degree to which O’Neill’s dramatic concepts bleed over between his dramatic works, especially his shorter plays. On the other hand, I wonder if it might be a bit of a disservice not to see the distinctions between the two one-acts a bit more clearly, if for no other reason than to give each its due as a play worthy of presentation. Director Hayes’s note for a previous production in Danville, California, justifies his choice to blend the two works, noting that his aim was both to make the narratives’ characters more relatable and accessible, and to explore how “each of these plays was very centered on one character’s point of view, and in each case, I was left wondering about the other half of the story,” leading him to ask, “What if I could intermix the two plays to understand these stories more fully? Maybe seeing the two plays as one could shed light on the relationships in these stories and relationships in general.” In this respect, I think the combined narrative structure was quite successful. It gave the audience the chance to see a potential “other half” to the story while centering the concerns that govern modern relationships and, ultimately, can lead to their demise.In terms of offering the audience insight into the individual value of each of these plays, however, I think seeing them played one right after the other might have highlighted similar thematic overlap without any dramatic confusion as to what was happening in each. In particular, I think the conflict between the responsibilities of the male breadwinner of a family in contrast with the responsibilities of the individual to serve a greater good, the central debate at the core of Warnings, got a little lost in this version. To me, it seemed to matter more that he would disappoint his wife, paralleled by Mrs. Rowland of Before Breakfast—whose marital slights outweigh those of Mrs. Knapp, in my opinion—than that he put his entire ship’s crew in danger. I wonder if some of the independent meanings of each play was lost by seeing them in this new format or if, perhaps, that was the point: to highlight brand-new thematic concerns. Thus, as a fan of O’Neill’s plays, it was an illuminating way to consider the intersections between these works; for those unfamiliar with the plays, it may have offered meanings different from those intended by the playwright in their original versions, which may or may not be a disservice to O’Neill’s intent with the works.Even more thoroughly successful was the reimagined version of A Wife for a Life, now presented, as its subtitle A Backstage Story suggests, as a peek behind the curtain at O’Neill’s actual dramatic developmental process. Hayes added a fascinating framing to A Wife for a Life, a play originally about how both love for a woman and desire for revenge over a woman’s betrayal can motivate men’s actions. Here, that story remains but it is presented as the play that a young O’Neill, played by Willem Long, is working on and has brought backstage to his father, James, played by Donald Sage Mackay, at one of his performances, to read and offer commentary on. These performances, along with Ryan Hayes as James O’Neill Jr., really made the O’Neills feel like complex three-dimensional people and not just figures from history. Once the reading of the play began, the world of the Arizona desert occupied almost all of the stage, as if being brought to life through the words of Eugene’s play as read by James at the front of the stage. This clever staging suggested that the play was emerging from their interaction, with story elements being revealed on stage as they were described in the script. Distinctions between the contemporary dress of the two O’Neills in contrast with the Old West–style of clothing of the characters of the play-within-a-play helped establish their different identities, while the setting was still clearly referred to in the program as “A dressing room of a roadhouse theatre in a small town. 1913.” The scenic environment was meant to be this backstage area, so when we saw the campsite fully rendered on stage, we knew we were seeing inside these men’s imaginations, manifested from the dramatic text.While the action of A Wife for Life is engaging in its own right, seeing how the two O’Neill men differently interpret what constitutes meaningful dramatic action was even more compelling. The play, in this reimagined form, offered keen insight into how the theater of the older and younger O’Neills differed and how elements of both practices can have value when creating a dramatic work. Hayes’s added dialogue perfectly encapsulated the shift from the more melodramatic plays popular during the career of James O’Neill to the grittier psychological realism that Eugene O’Neill helped popularize in American drama. It allowed the short play to be an object of study, not just about its own thematic elements—which were well paired with the concerns about love, marriage, and family explored in the interposed plays of act one—but also about what O’Neill’s life and times as both a playwright and the son of a famous actor would have been like. This revised version brought new life to this dated work and offered meaningful insight into the relationship between James and Eugene, making me reconsider how their shared love of the theater might have informed who they were as artists, people, and family members.All in all, O’Neill Reimagined did exactly what its title suggests: it provided the audience with a new vision of these short O’Neill plays. It highlighted the degree to which O’Neill was a playwright grappling with similar themes across his dramaturgy, showcasing how the experiments of these earlier plays may have informed his later full-length works, such as Long Day’s Journey Into Night, with their central themes about family, obligation, betrayal, and art. For the aficionados of O’Neill in the audience, the production was a fresh take on what it means to produce the works of O’Neill, offering an opportunity to see three of his plays not commonly performed presented in a visionary way. For those less familiar with his oeuvre, the plays were presented in such a manner as to be relevant and entertaining and to serve as an excellent primer to the concerns that permeate O’Neill’s body of work. O’Neill Reimagined was a thoughtful take on producing O’Neill’s plays presented by one of the foremost directors of his work in the United States today, a perfect final performance for four days of celebrating the work of Eugene O’Neill.