Editor’s Foreword

Abstract

Mission statements—awkward pairings of fine print and bold-faced idealism—rarely attract much attention. Electronic editions of scholarly journals often don’t publish them, even though they could do so without incurring expense, as print editions cannot. I appreciate the irony but wish to point out one section of the EOR’s statement to readers of both media: “Consideration will be given to submissions on topics relevant to but not centrally concerned with O’Neill, such as . . . work on O’Neill’s colleagues and collaborators in the Provincetown Players.” Hmmm. Granted, Bess Rowen’s performance-review section has kept pace with the Metropolitan Virtual Playhouse’s COVID-era streamings of plays by Susan Glaspell, Neith Boyce, and other pertinent dramatists. Generally, however, the Players have been underrepresented in our pages. EOR 43.2 signals a renewed commitment to their inclusion.The issue opens with eight letters from sometime-Provincetowner Kyra Markham to O’Neill’s biographer Lois Sheaffer, written from Haiti during the reign of “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Best remembered for her painting and, trivially, her youthful relationship with Theodore Dreiser, Markham proves a witty, worldly, sometimes wistful, and occasionally caustic commentator on O’Neill proprio, naturally, but also, per our mission statement, on his “colleagues and collaborators.” Among the subjects of her recollections are Djuna Barnes, Mary Blair, George Cram Cook, Dorothy Day, “Fitzi” Fitzgerald, Susan Glaspell, Mary Pyne, and Ida Rauh. Markham is a skilled epistolist, and Sheaffer’s talent for drawing out his subjects is clear from the increasing openness of her letters. Jeff Kennedy, whose Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players is due for publication this fall, expertly introduced and annotated the letters.Of course, there’s more. A strikingly original essay by Gerhart Bleifuss argues for the influence on The Hairy Ape of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s distasteful “Manifesto of Futurism” (1909). (“Such gaudy tulips grown from dung,” one might say, after Swift.) Bleifuss offers a provocative and sobering new perspective on Yank, the past’s assassin. “Substantial” seems a just descriptor of the essay, “durable” a good bet. A spirited and informative conversation between dramaturg Beth Wynstra and director Eric Fraisher Hayes—collaborators on the Eugene O’Neill Foundation’s Welded (2022)—transports us from the stokehold of Marinetti’s mind and onto (let’s say) a sun deck of creative coalescence. Welded is a tough play, and I expect more readers than I will appreciate Wynstra’s and Hayes’s elucidations of nuances and potentialities that might otherwise have remained obscure—literally, given Hayes’s fondness for the use of probing flashlights in this production.We’ve “gone long” on the Used Book feature, here expanded from its original 1,500–2,000–word format. David Palmer rises (extends?) to the occasion admirably in his reassessment of Joel Pfister’s Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse (1995). That agile, sometimes chewy study benefits equally from Palmer’s talents as exegete and as hermeneut. Shorter reviews of newer books, commissioned by Zander Brietzke, appraise Patrick Chura’s Michael Gold: The People’s Writer (David Roessel) and Bess Rowen’s The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment (Jennifer Buckley). We close with reviews of productions virtual, actual, and filmic by Marla Del Collins, Eileen Herrmann, William Davies King, Dan McGovern, Sheila Hickey Garvey, and yours truly.Sincere gratitude is due to Anabel Cole, Barbara Cole, Lisa Ruddick, and Kyra Markham’s other grandchildren for their genial correspondence and their permission to publish that fascinating woman’s letters. Thanks as well to the representatives of the International Susan Glaspell Society, whose collegiality augers well for the EOR’s future. And, as always, thanks to you, our readers.