Editor's Foreword: “Staging Archaeological Digs”

Abstract

As recent issues of the EOR have documented, O'Neill's plays have been performed in major cities throughout the world of late: Chicago, New York, London, Paris, Madrid, Cape Town, and Adelaide, South Australia. Theater artists are digging up O'Neill's works and interpreting them anew.In this issue we feature another exciting transnational moment in O'Neill studies: a world premiere of one of O'Neill's early one-acts, Recklessness, together with the Japanese premiere of A Wife for a Life. As Yuji Omori tells us, there is a vibrant group of O'Neill scholars and theater artists in Japan who have been translating and publishing O'Neill's one-act plays (the first edition appeared in 2007), offering workshops and symposia dedicated to O'Neill, and staging these works since 2013. Based in Tokyo, Theatre X has approached O'Neill's early dramas with postmodern experimentation and transcultural lamination in order to make his work fresh—and familiar—to modern Japanese audiences. The use of onstage musicians and slow, stylized movement in Recklessness invoked both the traditions of Noh theater and postmodern theater artist Tadashi Suzuki. Yoking such disparate performance practices together with minimalist set design, the company deconstructed O'Neill's melodramatic play to give it new meaning. We hope to learn more about this group's exciting work in the future.London theater artists appear to be continuing their love affair with O'Neill. The Young and Old Vic are producing bookend pieces from the O'Neill canon. In Fall 2015 the Young Vic staged O'Neill's only comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, while the Old Vic has The Hairy Ape on the docket for spring 2016. As revised and interpreted by director Natalie Abrahami, Ah, Wilderness! is not quite the comedy O'Neill wrote. Polly Heinkel tells us this production was adapted as a memory play, creating a ghost-like O'Neill character who haunted the production. As if buried in the sands of time, the set conveyed a powerful metaphor of excavating the ruins of family history. Another notable London production, not reviewed here, was The Lost Theatre's production of the rarely performed The Emperor Jones—the first production in London since the National Theatre's mounting of it in 2007.Stateside, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) staged two productions central to O'Neill's biographical story: Long Day's Journey Into Night and The Count of Monte Cristo. Dramaturgically, this pairing is rich with meaning. These are the quintessential plays that defined the careers of James and Eugene O'Neill. Moreover, each play represents the epitome of its genre: Monte Cristo (“that God-damn play,” as James Tyrone puts it, that ruined him with its “promise of easy fortune”) is representative of nineteenth-century melodrama and the Romantic theater of the elder O'Neill, while Long Day's Journey, his son's autobiographical masterpiece, is still regarded as the pinnacle of American realism. While OSF planners often create seasons in which productions comment on each other, this particular pairing has unique intertextual poignancy. Serious treatment of melodrama is rare on US stages, Eric Levin tells us in his review, and in spite of using elements from the Peter Sellars/William Davies King postmodern adaptation, OSF reverted to a nineteenth-century aesthetic in its presentation.Last but not least, the Williamstown Theatre Festival offered a high-profile production of A Moon for the Misbegotten, featuring Tony Award–winner Audra McDonald. Gordon Edelstein's production transferred the plot from Irish to African American oppression, suggesting the synergies between the Black and Green Atlantic. Unusual choices were made not only with the casting, as Zander Brietzke's review notes, but also by powerhouse designers (Ming Cho Lee and Jennifer Tipton), whose sparse design boldly omitted the central image of the moon. If we cannot count on the moon and stars to anchor our understanding of Moon, or the familiar Irish American family often found in O'Neill's works, then perhaps we must question what we know more broadly. It is a fitting way to approach O'Neill's last play, which is about one life ending and another starting out in a new direction.As these productions suggest, directors and production artists have transferred O'Neill to their own cultural moments to reimagine his work, throwing out old assumptions about where the foundation lies and excavating deeper. This kind of approach is archaeological, philosopher Michel Foucault would say, because it allows new knowledge formation. We keep digging because who knows what we will next unearth?