Editor’s Foreword

Abstract

The iconoclastic tendency in literary studies demands much of academic journals, particularly single-author journals devoted to the white, male heterosexuals. But the challenges at issue are mostly obvious and not all that hard to meet, at least with respect to Eugene O’Neill in the third decade of the present century. We have in O’Neill both a playwright of undeniable genius and a person whose life-long crawl between earth and heaven scratched and muddied him. His wounds (e.g., illness and trauma) are pitiable; his defilements (e.g., flickering anti-Semitism and racism, spousal abuse) are not. And we find in our own “moment”—so brutal, so stupid in so many ways—a diversified intellectual population impatient with hagiography and quick to call out moral vulgarity but not necessarily insensitive to genius.Happily, the Eugene O’Neill Review has never gone in for hagiography and the various “vulgarities” it entails: O’Neill is an inapt candidate for sainthood, and the journal has never been edited by a simpleton. Furthermore, O’Neill turns out to be a hard fella to cancel, as though the inapplicability of “icon” balked “clastic.” Readers of Patrick Chura’s essay on Shirley Graham’s Federal Theatre Project’s “Negro adaptation” of The Hairy Ape will likely appreciate Graham’s fascination with the transracial resonances of that play, even as they regret O’Neill’s ugly dismissal of the FTP’s proposed production. Chura criticizes O’Neill sharply and well, but he recognizes the disservice a pummeling would do to Graham’s engagement with O’Neill’s art. Her adaptation, he concludes, “does not detract from, and may well enhance, appreciation of O’Neill’s accomplishments.”One might say the same of Adrienne Earle Pender’s Emperor Jones reconfiguration, N, a fuller adaptation than Graham’s but a similarly provocative “Blackening” of O’Neill’s work. Would O’Neill have thought as poorly of N as he did of Graham’s Hairy Ape? I suspect not, because Graham wanted to reproduce great chunks of O’Neill’s script, and Pender did not. But we don’t need to care. O’Neill is gone. We’re here, richer for the efforts of Graham and Pender and—selectively to contextualize—racially imaginative adaptors of classical drama like Luis Alfaro, Marina Carr, Yaël Farber, and Charles Mee.We do know what Ronald E. Quirk thinks of N, or at least of a recent production: a big “thumbs up.” His review leads off a fine quintet, filled out by commentary on productions of Susan Glaspell’s Bernice (Ash Marinaccio), Neith Boyce’s The Sea Lady (Christen Mandracchia), and O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet (James Armstrong) and Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Catherine Young).And we know what Pender thinks of Mourning Becomes Electra. Her contribution to the Practitioners’ Colloquium reimagines that juggernaut as a telenovela. Skeptical? Hear her out: it’s a fascinating, viable idea, like the other proposals in this generally celebratory grouping. Odawa playwright Alanis King also tackles Mourning Becomes Electra. Critics often lament O’Neill’s wordy stage directions there as elsewhere, but the practitioner King sees it differently: “I don’t know another playwright who can set up a scene with such expansive detail before a line is uttered.” Her piece incorporates O’Neill’s play into her own life, as does the offering by actress and director Annabel Capper, a warm but forceful case for an unabridged Strange Interlude that would excavate that play’s feminist moorings. Alex Roe adds an analysis of The Great God Brown that, I hope, will serve as a template for a production at his Metropolitan Playhouse. Few commentators have addressed Brown’s “mask problem” more helpfully.William Davies King has been making O’Neill a part of his life for a long time. His current essay—on (stage?) whisperings of Gorki’s The Lower Depth in O’Neill’s work—builds elegantly from an exercise in comparative portraiture to a full-blown reassessment of influence and effect throughout O’Neill’s career. Rigor and range are never out of season.This iteration of the Lost & Found section “goes postal.” James H. Cox discusses a disarmingly fanboyish postcard that the Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs sent to Barrett Clark in 1928 after seeing O’Neill exit a patisserie in Biarritz. Next, Michele Slung unpacks a somewhat mysterious postcard to her uncle, O’Neill’s biographer Louis Sheaffer. Her skill in building a story testifies to her experience as a widely published journalist and miscellaneous writer. Like last issue’s collection of letters from Kyra Markham to Sheaffer, Slung’s entry brings us closer to a quiet man whose dedication to O’Neill’s legacy, and skill in preserving it, cannot be overstated.Brice Ezell and Steven F. Bloom round out the issue with frank appraisals of new books by Jeremy Killian and Max Schulman, respectively. I continue to appreciate the consistency with which subeditors Zander Brietzke (books) and Bess Rowen (performances) assemble reviews unsullied by either clubbish piffle or immodest fury, coyly to recall “vulgarities.”For the n[in]th time, readers, I thank you for your indulgence and support.