A more succinct title for Jeremy Killian’s debut monograph, Eugene O’Neill’s Philosophy of Difficult Theatre: Pity, Fear, and Forgiveness (hereafter O’Neill’s Philosophy of Difficult Theatre), could be O’Neill: Thinker or Feeler? Although numerous studies of O’Neill frame him as a distinctly philosophical playwright, and O’Neill was integral in moving American drama away from the tawdry emotions spurred by melodrama, Killian reminds us that reverence was not always the default position for viewers of O’Neill’s work, even when he was winning Pulitzer prizes. Some in O’Neill’s own time regarded him as a “melodramatist” (25); others claimed that he was “simply not a good playwright” (22). Writing just a decade after O’Neill’s death, Robert Brustein assessed the landscape of O’Neill criticism by saying that the playwright would be “primarily remembered for his last plays,” though “the earlier ones are not all without value.” Brustein also identified the key challenge for “the O’Neill critic” as an “account[ing of] the extraordinary disparity in style and quality between the earlier and later work.”1 In O’Neill’s Philosophy of Difficult Theatre, Killian aims to answer Brustein’s challenge, and in the process provide clarity to what he sees as the enduring emotional value of O’Neill’s theater.Two principal concepts anchor the core argument of O’Neill’s Philosophy of Difficult Theatre. The first is Killian’s usage of the word “noncognitive” to describe O’Neill’s vision of tragedy. This word has different valences depending on one’s discipline. For those from a psychological background, noncognitivism may seem like an answer to cognitivism, the school of thought that challenged behaviorism in the mid-twentieth century. However, the usage of noncognitivism closer to Killian’s comes from philosophy, specifically the field of ethics. There, “noncognitivism” denotes ethical theories that hold that ethical utterances—such as “it is wrong to lie”—are not truth-apt, meaning that they are not subject to judgments of truth or falsity. One famous noncognitive theory of ethics that emerged in O’Neill’s lifetime is emotivism, the view that ethical statements merely express the feelings of the speaker. For Killian, O’Neill’s theater is best understood through a noncognitivist lens, meaning that O’Neill’s “true appeal [. . .] lies not in the fact that his plays illuminate the human condition, but [rather that] the elicit a certain set of emotional responses that are valuable and increasingly rare in our workaday lives” (38). So, in contrast to something like a Platonic drama of ideas, where discursivity and argument are central to the drama onstage, O’Neill’s plays—though philosophically rich in many respects—do not live and die by their philosophizing. It does not matter that the audience learns something, in the way they might in a philosophy seminar. By Killian’s estimation, “the knowledge O’Neill imparts is not what makes his works great; in many cases, he was an intellectual dilletante that lacked a great deal of the psychological insight attributed to him” (162). What the audience gleans from an O’Neill play, in Killian’s reading, are a cathartic release and communal sharing of the two emotions and the interpersonal action named in the subtitle of his book: fear, pity, and forgiveness.The second important principal concept of Killian’s monograph is also named in its title: “difficult theatre.” In contrast to how he deploys noncognitivism, however, Killian’s usage of this term is less clear. Early in his introduction, he teases the idea that O’Neill had an “approach to difficult theatre” (7), and even posits at the end of the first chapter that O’Neill had a “theory of difficult theatre” (22, emphasis mine). Killian thoroughly outlines numerous intellectual and critical histories in the first half of this book, yet spends comparatively less time detailing what makes a work of theater “difficult.” The lone citation he provides that engages with “difficult art” as a concept is a 2016 article by Antony Aumann, which theorizes difficult artworks as those “that require a good deal of time and energy to appreciate, works that defend positions that challenge our deepest moral beliefs, or works that expose us ‘to deeply unsettling issues or compel us to face distressing truths’” (42). To be sure, much of O’Neill’s drama fits that bill: the depiction of alcoholism’s effects on family and social life in The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey is difficult stuff indeed, and formally O’Neill’s grandest experiments like Lazarus Laughed (the subject of chapter 3 here) and Strange Interlude made him one of the more difficult playwrights in his own time. But this “difficult theatre” notion extends to many works of American theater outside of the O’Neill bibliography; his contemporaries Susan Glaspell, Sophie Treadwell, and Clifford Odets also penned dramas that fit the ordinary language definition of “difficult” that Killian advances through Aumann. While Killian correctly identifies numerous threads of “difficulty” that run through O’Neill’s theater, this concept, by virtue of its generality, is less intriguing than the noncognitive approach to O’Neill, especially considering how many studies of the playwright have taken him to be particularly philosophical (or, in this parlance, cognitive) in character.Taken together, the noncognitivist and “difficult theatre” concepts form the backbone of Killian’s overarching argument that O’Neill challenged his audiences, and continues to challenge audiences today, through difficult plays that rely on a neo-Aristotelian understanding of catharsis in which audiences experience an “emotional response accompanying the realization of one’s tenuous life in the hostile and unforgiving world” (42). In Killian’s rendering, O’Neill is not purely Aristotelian, as his plays do not require that his audiences completely purge the emotions wrought by the plays, nor do those emotions totally subsume any intellectual content. “Emotions can be discursive,” writes Killian (70). O’Neill’s Philosophy of Difficult Theatre advances this position over eight laconically titled chapters: in order, “Puzzle,” “Paradigm,” “Passions,” “Pity,” “Fear,” “Forgiveness,” “Paradox,” and “Finis.” Despite the esoteric feeling of these chapter titles, Killian structures the book clearly, and his argument flows well from beginning to end.“Puzzle” and “Paradigm” make up the literature review portion of O’Neill’s Philosophy of Difficult Theatre. The former details the critical reception of O’Neill, noting the divide between those who praise O’Neill as the groundbreaker of early twentieth-century American theater and those who pushed back against the critical mass around him (such as Eric Bentley). In the latter chapter, Killian tackles the question of genre, assessing centuries of theorizations of melodrama (given that it was a label often affixed to O’Neill) and then of tragedy, where he most directly makes the case for O’Neill’s tragedy being noncognitive in nature. These two chapters establish the theoretical groundwork for claims about individual O’Neill works in the subsequent chapters, where Killian delves into detailed readings of specific O’Neill plays.Boldly, Killian takes the rarely performed moonshot Lazarus Laughed as the case study for chapter 3, “Passions.” Though he ultimately concludes that “it is unclear if O’Neill operates upon a fully coherent and grounded theory of emotion” (70), Killian argues that the characters in the play become “caught up in Lazarus’ holy laughter” which in turn “enliven[s] [. . .] them, empowering them to live beyond their mundane lives as Lazarus has” (69). The following chapter, “Pity,” examines O’Neill’s autobiographical 1920 play Exorcism (which dramatizes his 1912 suicide attempt) through the lens of Nietzschean philosophy, a subject that recurs in the chapter on Long Day’s Journey. (Unfortunately, Killian elides the most recent Nietzschean study of O’Neill in David Kornhaber’s The Birth of Theater from the Spirit of Philosophy [2016], a natural discussant with this volume.) Of the chapters that deal with the emotions engendered by O’Neill’s tragedies, “Pity” is the most out of place, which Killian at one point acknowledges. He admits that Exorcism “fails to elicit a ‘tragic pity’ in the audience [. . .] for the fate of the protagonist,” but pity nonetheless “does play a role in the internal dynamics of the play” owing to O’Neill’s “echo” of Nietzsche’s thought on pity (80). Of course, Killian’s claim about what the audience experiences derives from his own reading, rather than from audience testimony, so it could well be that some might find pity—Nietzschean or otherwise—in the barely veiled O’Neill of Exorcism.Chapters 5 through 8 continue this strategy of focusing on one emotion’s resonance with a specific O’Neill play. “Fear” centers on The Emperor Jones, which Killian characterizes as “a work of art horror” (103) that engenders fear with the audience because of the way O’Neill invites the members of his audiences to “see themselves in the fate of Jones” during the play’s intense final image (102). The final three chapters focus on O’Neill’s family-centered late plays A Moon for the Misbegotten and Long Day’s Journey, beginning with “Forgiveness,” in which Killian sees theater in the dramatization of O’Neill’s own family history “as a venue whereby forgiveness might be portrayed and even experienced” (123). This is an “emotion-based conception [of] forgiveness,” in which the audience does not literally grant forgiveness, but rather affectively participates in an act resembling it (159). Returning to Nietzsche, Killian in “Paradox” addresses the eponymous dilemma posed by David Hume in his essay “Of Tragedy.” Put simply, if people pursue positive emotions and avoid negative ones, how can we explain why people have enjoyed tragedy in the arts for centuries? Killian sees O’Neill’s answer as a Nietzschean inheritance, specifically from The Birth of Tragedy: audiences are enraptured by a play such as Long Day’s Journey, even with the difficulty of emotion expressed therein, because, just as the Tyrones do at the end of that play, they come together “in the fellowship of their suffering” (146). Killian further extends his analysis of Long Day’s Journey with the epilogue chapter, “Finis,” in which he writes, persuasively, “The strangeness of the negative emotions generated by tragedy paired with our enjoyment of it offer a unique occasion to experience community for a moment in our lives of increasing isolation”—an isolation, of course, that is a regular subject of O’Neill’s plays, from the estranged bar patrons of The Iceman Cometh to the dichotomous personalities in Strange Interlude (162). In the end, O’Neill’s is a feeling theater for Killian; for all the intellectual trappings of O’Neill’s major works, what resounds throughout his voluminous output are the points of emotional connection he facilitates with his audiences.Killian’s interdisciplinary argument, drawing from numerous corners of philosophy, theater studies, and literary studies, provides an answer to the challenge foisted by Brustein, even if he overclaims when he says that O’Neill created a “theory of difficult theatre.” Given how often Killian notes the disparate ways O’Neill’s rendering of emotion onstage can be read, “theory” feels too neat to characterize the latter-day quasi-Aristotelian account he creates. What O’Neill’s Philosophy of Difficult Theatre truly offers is a third way between the O’Neill acolytes and those who deem much of his work to be melodramatic, if not simply overrated. (I am reminded of Bentley’s 1946 zinger, in which he refuses to put O’Neill “in the class of Aeschylus where his friends put him.”2) Killian bridges the divide between early and late O’Neill, spanning the Provincetown Players era to the posthumous production of Long Day’s Journey, by arguing that O’Neill wasn’t so divorced from the heightened emotions of the melodramatic theater that preceded him, but he was also channeling the much older emotions prized by the Greek tragedians: pity and fear. Though Killian’s position would have fared more strongly if it leaned more heavily on the noncognitivism angle rather than the more nebulous “difficult theatre” notion, the noncognitivist case he does present opens new discussions for scholars and fans of O’Neill in thinking about his legacy and why his plays remain subjects of performance and study to this day.