Iceman Cometh Research Articles

James Light: “The Parade of Masks” (c. 1928)

James Light: “The Parade of Masks” (<i>c</i>. 1928)

Eugene O'neill and the Tragic Tension

Eugene O'neill and the Tragic Tension

Editor's Foreword

The dedicatee of this volume, Kurt Eisen (1958–2019), first appeared on the EOR's masthead in 2004, upon his assumption of the book review editorship. Kurt served in that capacity until 2015, and as a board member in 2016 and 2017. The next year, he began his all-too-brief tenure as general editor. After I became editor in 2019, Kurt returned to the board and became an invaluable advisor, supporter, inspiration, and friend. (“Mensch” is the word that Steven Bloom uses in the tribute that appears elsewhere in this volume.) From personal experience, I know the benefits that Kurt's impeccable sense of sound and cadence could confer on a needy sentence: he heard prose, and wrote it, like the discerning lover of music that he was. I learned from him that an editor's criticisms can be indulgent without cost to their utility, although I still don't know whether his description of me as “the master of the comically inapt metaphor” was meant to signal indulgence or exasperation. What I do know is that the man who said this was radically decent and vast of heart and mind. Long ago, John Dryden hit the right note: “Farewell too little and too lately known ….” Goodbye, Kurt. And thank you.This issue marks debuts as well as departures. Brice Ezell, a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, kicks off his career as a publishing scholar with an argument for the Wyeth family in Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities as a “mediatized” neoliberal version of O'Neill's Tyrones. Joel Minor appears in the EOR for the first time with an informational piece on the newly opened Harley Hammerman Collection on Eugene O'Neill at Washington University. In a Lost & Found entry, Daniel Wetmore—another newcomer to the EOR—debuts as a poet. His subject is drawn from family history: his great-grandfather's confrontation with a drunken Eugene O'Neill who, probably in summer 1912, lurched up the Wetmore driveway in New London, hoping to visit with the old man's daughter. A rare photograph captures Portia Wetmore and Eugene O'Neill at the beach around that time.Two other Lost & Found entries publish work by O'Neill's Provincetown Player comrade James Light, both for the first time. “The Parade of Masks,” discovered by Robert Dowling while he was researching his 2014 biography of O'Neill, discusses O'Neill's interest in masks and “physical masks” from the Players' production of Strindberg's Spook Sonata through Strange Interlude. Dowling's introduction focuses on Light's illumination (if I may) of O'Neill's yearning to write novels. David Clare ably introduces Light's notes on the Provincetown Players' production of The Hairy Ape, compiled for the English theatre impresario Harold Marsh Harwood. Reading this piece alongside Ronald Wainscott's Staging O'Neill (1988) and Jackson Bryer and Robert Dowling's edition of The Contemporary Reviews (2014) should suggest some exciting topics for research.For this issue, the Practitioners' Colloquium moves from the stage to the classroom. Theatre professor Beth Wynstra joined four of her colleagues from Babson College for a transdisciplinary discussion of Beyond the Horizon. Wynstra's transcription is jovial as well as instructive. Ever wonder how much in today's money Andy Mayo makes in Argentina? Short answer: a “crap-ton,” as my teenage daughter might put it.Elsewhere, an old book by Doris Falk gets a fresh look from Bess Rowen; David Palmer reviews Thierry Dubost's new monograph on O'Neill; Patrick Chura handles Max Shulman and J. Chris Westgate's edited collection on Progressive Era drama; and William Davies King, Jo Morello, Laura Shea, and yours truly review productions from hither and yon.I'll sign off by noting two oddities from the fall 2019 theatre and television seasons. In Larissa FastHorse's The Thanksgiving Play, which ran at eight American theatres last fall, a high school drama teacher's decision to stage The Iceman Cometh with a cast of fifteen-year-olds prompts 300 parents to demand her dismissal. In season 3, episode 3 of The Magnificent Mrs. Maisel, Sophie Lennon (Jane Lynch) recalls an orgy at which an evidently nonplussed O'Neill repeatedly proclaimed his enthusiasm for … Strindberg. As another Nobel laureate beloved of the current editor and his predecessor once wrote, “I'd tell you what it means, if I just didn't have to try so hard.”

"The Death of Salesmen": David Mamet’s Drama, "Glengarry Glen Ross", and Three Iconic Forerunners

This essay places Glengarry Glen Ross in the context of David Mamet’s oeuvre and the whole of American drama, as well as in the context of economic capitalism and even U.S. foreign policy. The author pays special attention here (for the first time in English-language scholarship) to the subject of salesmen or selling as depicted in Mamet’s drama and earlier in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire—each of which also features a salesman among its characters.

Directing O'Neill: Mourning Becomes Electra, Long Day's Journey Into Night, Desire Under the Elms, Days Without End

Directing O'Neill: <i>Mourning Becomes Electra, Long Day's Journey Into Night, Desire Under the Elms, Days Without End</i>

Sara Melody: Stripped Stark Naked in the Cycle

Abstract Eugene O'Neill invoked the phrase “stripped stark naked” to describe the desired effect in The Iceman Cometh, but he actually used that same phrase, and several other similar iterations, in the immediately preceding Cycle plays, A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions. Although the Cycle plays seem to set up what happens in O'Neill's “dive” play, they function differently. Sara Melody Harford, the protagonist, sinks almost as low as the derelicts at Hope's bar, but she does not stay sunk. Her husband, Simon, strips her naked, literally and figuratively, but she rejects the humiliation and transforms the violence into a purification rite. Sara sins against herself and her husband due to her passionate and greedy nature, but, unlike the characters in The Iceman Cometh, she redeems what she has done in the act of love. The Cycle dramatizes compulsive behavior, The Iceman Cometh showcases the art of denial.

The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage by Kurt Eisen

Reviewed by: The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage by Kurt Eisen Aaron Scully The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. By Kurt Eisen. Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018. Cloth $91.80, Paper $26.96. xiii + 241 pages. Kurt Eisen’s The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage is a fascinating examination of O’Neill’s works, situated in the context of the modernization of the American theatre during the first half of the twentieth century. By utilizing O’Neill’s evolution as a wary social progressive grappling with competing forces—including his appreciation of traditional theatre techniques, his desire to contribute to social progress, the advancement of the American stage, and his quiet yet apparent need for adulation—Eisen constructs an analysis that is well worth the read for not only theatre scholars but anyone interested in O’Neill or theatre during O’Neill’s career. Through the lens of American modernism, which Eisen defines as “an ideological and aesthetic response to how . . . new possibilities had been realized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reflecting a fundamental change in the nature of experience itself amid rapid changes of modernized, often mechanical society, frequently critical but at times celebratory of those changes” (7), the author effectively places O’Neill in the middle of modernism and describes, through his plays, how O’Neill both reacted to and facilitated the modernization of American theatre. The book is organized into seven chapters and a conclusion. Eisen begins by first defining and contextualizing American modernism. In the first chapter, he places the young O’Neill in the middle of the evolving American theatrical landscape, providing crucial insight into O’Neill’s early years and his decision to become a playwright. Chapter 2, “A Modernist in the Making: O’Neill Before Broadway,” is a chronological analysis of O’Neill’s playwriting and its relationship to American modernization prior to his Pulitzer-Prize winning production of The Emperor Jones. Chapter 3 delves into O’Neill as a reactionary to the revolutionary social progressiveness of the 1920s and 1930s with his plays The Hairy Ape, Lazarus Laughed, Days without End, and The Iceman Cometh. Eisen states that with these plays O’Neill is “reflecting not a revolutionary vision but a sympathetic iconoclasm in its image of society constructed of many sustaining if illusory narratives” (49). Chapter 4, “New Women, Male Destinies: The ‘Woman Plays,’” is perhaps Eisen’s most successful chapter, as he smartly discusses O’Neill’s drama in response to “the emergence of women from the home into the public sphere” (71). Two of the plays analyzed in this chapter are Anna Christie and what Eisen deems O’Neill’s “woman play”: Strange Interlude. With Strange Interlude, Eisen declares that “No play more fully conveys O’Neill’s ambition as a modernist in its relentless imposition of form on experience, and thus reveals his inescapable involvement with the American modernity that he generally sought to critique, as well as his obsession with the feminine anima he persistently sought both to reveal and to [End Page 125] contain” (83). Chapter 5, “‘Souls under Skins’: Masks, Race, and the Divided Self,” is an engrossing examination of O’Neill’s fascination with the convergence of the science of psychoanalysis and the advent of cultural anthropology, and of how these fields related to black experiences in America. “O’Neill himself was less interested in any solution to black urban problems than in how his predominantly white audience would feel the emotional impact of this representation, however stereotyped and sensationalized, of lives uprooted from the tradition that once gave them identity and meaning” (98). Chapter 6, “Transience and Tradition: O’Neill’s Modern Families,” considers the plays Beyond the Horizon, Mourning Becomes Electra, Ah! Wilderness, and Long Day’s Journey into Night, and how these plays illuminate O’Neill’s belief that the American family was the “primary force resisting modernity and its ideal of wholeness that can repair a divided modern self” (144). In his analysis of Long Day’s Journey, Eisen profoundly states that O’Neill’s use of the mother’s “drug-induced...

The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O’Neill

The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O’Neill

“They're lowering the boats! She is lost! She is lost!”: Maritime Disasters and Onomastics in Eugene O'Neill's Early One-Act Plays

Abstract The article examines how O'Neill turned to his memory of the sinking of the Titanic in several of his early one-act plays. Thirst, Warnings, and Fog function as a triptych showing details related to the catastrophe, including the story of expert John J. Knapp, whose name O'Neill gave to the wireless operator in Warnings. Other writings—S.O.S. and In the Zone—take the fear of sinking by German U-boat as context. Ile and Where the Cross Is Made contain multiple references to sea calamities of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Finally, some characters (especially Maud Steele in Bread and Butter, two female figures in The Iceman Cometh, and the Mildreds in Recklessness and The Hairy Ape) symbolically wear names inspired by vessels that shipwrecked in 1912, the year of O'Neill's “second birth.”

The Hairy Ape

The Hairy Ape

Harlots and Hunted: Prostitutes in O'Neill's Work

Abstract Prostitutes (harlots, whores, or tarts) appear throughout Eugene O'Neill's canon in various contexts, from his early play The Web to later works including The Great God Brown, The Iceman Cometh, and Long Day's Journey Into Night. These characters form a complex collection of personalities, including the disaffected (Rose Thomas), the romantic (Anna Christie), the maternal (Cybel and Fat Violet), and the monogamous (Sara Melody Harford). The common thread linking all of these characters is that the prostitutes invariably serve to reveal flaws and inadequacies of the male characters. O'Neill's own experience with prostitutes informs his portrait of these women.

The Iceman Lab

The Iceman Lab

Editor's Foreword: Long Day's Journeys and Deposed Emperors

Might it be a register of our current cultural moment that several productions of Long Day's Journey Into Night—arguably O'Neill's darkest play—were performed this past year, four of which are reviewed in this edition of the EOR? Or that O'Neill's expressionistic portrait of a despotic ruler meeting his demise (The Emperor Jones) in the Irish Repertory Theatre's revival felt all the more poignant as our first black president left the White House after divisive elections? Or, when transferred across the Atlantic to the cavernous Armory, that Richard Jones's neon production of The Hairy Ape felt less like a period piece and more of a current snapshot of how the average Yank clashes with a culture obsessed with Fifth Avenue capital?It is precisely during times of tumult that we turn to great thinkers. With a country deeply divided since the election, works like 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, and It Can't Happen Here have risen to the top of best-seller lists. While O'Neill's dramas might not be among the must-read lists, they are certainly on the “must stage” list. For it is in the living room of Monte Cristo Cottage that we find insights into how families are torn apart; it is on the giant red throne that we find the possibilities—and limits—of tyrannical rule; and it is within the stokehole of a ship where we can see the sweltering labor for a chance to belong.Whether staged on Broadway, in Los Angeles, or within O'Neill's summer home in New London, Long Day's Journey Into Night was among O'Neill's most prominently performed plays this past year. Robert McLean recounts how the fine acting in the Palm Beach Dramaworks production resulted in one of the best Long Day's Journeys he has witnessed. The much-anticipated Broadway production of Long Day's Journey starring Gabriel Byrne and Jessica Lange delivered a raw and aching interpretation, with Lange giving a heart-wrenching portrayal of Mary Tyrone—and justly winning a Tony Award for Best Actress. On the West Coast, the LA production of Long Day's Journey featured a different—but no less stunning—pair of actors in the title roles: Alfred Molina and Jane Kaczmarek. With dramaturgical work by former EOR editor William Davies King, this production included projections of O'Neill's family and recordings of O'Neill reading poetry to bring the autobiographical elements of the play to life, as Jaime Leigh Gray's review reveals. But what could be more autobiographical than staging Long Day's Journey within the home in which Eugene grew up? Robert Dowling's review shows how the Flock Theatre for the first time brought the play to Monte Cristo Cottage, where the house itself became a character. Sitting just feet away from the actors, the audience felt the intimacy not only of the actors' work but also of references to New London life.New York's 55,000-square-foot Park Avenue Armory drill hall functioned as another kind of actor in Richard Jones's transfer of his London production of The Hairy Ape. With the “gritty and charismatic” Bobby Cannavale leading the ensemble as Yank, Ryder Thornton tells us, the production was significantly restaged to take advantage of the site-specific space. In contrast to the expansive Armory, the Irish Rep's tiny theater—not unlike the original Provincetown Playhouse on Macdougal Street—gave their revival of The Emperor Jones intimacy, demonstrating “that O'Neill is once again the playwright for another new American century, unmasking the appetites and transgressions that lie beneath the dream of empire,” as Kurt Eisen writes.Two deconstructed productions of O'Neill's dramas showed the desire to make new art and innovate, much as O'Neill turned away from the theater of his father. In an evening of one-acts (Recklessness and Now I Ask You) entitled O'Neill (Unexpected), the Metropolitan Theater Company subverted genre conventions, Zander Brietzke observes, playing the tragic Recklessness as comedy and Now I Ask You—O'Neill's only comedy other than Ah, Wilderness!—as tragedy. And Kurt Eisen describes the experimental nature of the Brooklyn-based Target Margin Theater in its fracturing of The Iceman Cometh under the title The Iceman Lab, in which different directors each took on one of the play's four acts.Whether deconstructing O'Neill's dramas with postmodern adaptations, enmeshing O'Neill's biography into the production, or casting Broadway stars in award-winning revivals, the slate of productions reviewed here reveals a need to wrestle with the challenges in front of us. We cannot afford to be crushed like Yank in a gorilla's cage, or be caged by the claustrophobic trauma of dysfunctional families. And we cannot afford to be complicit with despotic rulers. In this way, for our current moment, O'Neill is indeed unexpectedly relevant.

The Hairy Ape

The Hairy Ape

O'Neill on the Musical Theater Stage

O'Neill on the Musical Theater Stage

The Gelbs' Lifelong Journey with O'Neill

The Gelbs' Lifelong Journey with O'Neill

The Second Girl

The Second Girl

Journey: (an excerpt from a three-act play)

During my senior year at Vassar, I directed a production of O'Neill's Dynamo in the Powerhouse Theatre. During the research phase, I became fascinated with the relationship of O'Neill's life and work. After college I ended up writing and producing an Equity showcase Off-Off-Broadway production of Dreams of the Son: A Life of Eugene O'Neill in New York City. Fred Wilkins, editor of the Eugene O'Neill Newsletter, noted in the Summer–Fall 1984 edition that this was the first play to be produced about O'Neill: “The play deals with O'Neill's life, including his relationships with his father, mother, brother, Louis Halliday [sic], Agnes Boulton, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Terry Carlin, Carlotta Monterey and others.”In that play, my first, I attempted to take on the entire scope of O'Neill's life and canon, adhering to the “well-made play” structure and applying melodramatic storytelling and characterization techniques. This time I am approaching my play about O'Neill in a more fragmentary and postmodern manner.I have learned over the years that the best innovative plays find a way to marry subject and form. That is, a play about chaos not only examines chaos but suggests the chaotic in its shape, tempo, rhythm, and feel. At Tao House in 1944, Eugene O'Neill wrote, in a poem called “Fragments”: “All this, as I have said before, happens where silence is; Where I, a quiet man, in love with quiet, live quietly among the visions of my drowned, deep in my silent sea.”My play journeys from 1937 to 1944 at Tao House, where O'Neill, as we all know, completed his greatest plays but where he also encountered his family, both the living—his children, Shane, Oona, and Eugene Jr.—and the dead—his father James, mother Ella, and brother Jamie. It is made of fragments, pieces of the fractured, disjointed memory of Eugene O'Neill, including all those figures of a drowned past.A narrative thread takes up Eugene O'Neill's life and work from the moment he picks the site for Tao House in Danville, facing Mount Diablo, and takes us through the building and furnishing of the home, the completion of The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten. O'Neill encounters his living children and haunting ghosts, his obsession with the rise of Hitler and the war, and many of his tempestuous—loving/hating—encounters with his third wife, Carlotta Monterey O'Neill. We come finally to the last day at Tao House in 1944.Entwined in the fabric of this play is a dance of memory that reconstructs the past through fleeting moments and stealthy ghosts that make their presence known only on the periphery of the mind's eye. I hope this way of seeing dramatically relates to the amazingly complex thought process of Eugene O'Neill, for whom the past is the present and the future, too.Eugene O'Neill, male, 50sCarlotta O'Neill/Ella, female, 50sSanders/Driscoll/Father, male, 50sFreeman/James, male, 50sOona, female, 20sShane/Young O'Neill/Dorm Mate, male, 20sEugene, Jr./Young Jamie/Older Dorm Mate, male, 30sKitty/Sister, female, 20sJim/Dark Figure/Voice in the Trunk/Voice in the Dark, male, 40sLights rise on an empty stage. Whistling wind. Eugene O'Neill climbs a ladder, footed by his driver Freeman, and looks out.Author's note: The trunk is rolled into another time and place, the backstage dressing room of O'Neill's father, James O'Neill, after he has completed one of his final touring performances of Monte Cristo in 1911. The play continues to move jaggedly through time and space, animating the playwright O'Neill's disjointed memory but also revealing to the audience the dystopian world that the characters, O'Neill, and the Misbegotten inhabit: a Nietzschean eternally recurrent purgatory from which there is no apparent escape.The first draft of the play Journey was written in the “trunk room” of the Tao House estate that has been converted into an office for recipients of the Travis Bogard Artist in Residency Fellowship. I was honored to receive the Bogard Fellowship in 2015 from the Eugene O'Neill Foundation.

O'Neill on the Musical Theater Stage

O'Neill on the Musical Theater Stage

The Second Girl

The Second Girl