I first became aware of the conflict between O’Neill’s biography and an understanding of his plays when I taught an O’Neill course several years ago.¹ I assigned Long Day’s Journey Into Night as the first reading rather than as the culmination of a long semester. The advantages of this pedagogical strategy proved threefold: first, students engaged quickly with compelling and emotionally volatile material; second, they encountered an enormous amount of biographical information about the playwright in a highly condensed form—they thought the play was long, but it is much shorter than all the weighty tomes on O’Neill; third, the relevant biographical facts of the play produced a critical paradigm with which to analyze all of the preceding works: the sea plays, the New England plays, the family plays, all received a context rooted in O’Neill’s personal experiences. In short, my little trick wrapped up O’Neill very tidily into a neat bundle of information that was easy to pack and unpack within the limits of the fifty minute lecture and the fifteen-week course.

What happened as a direct consequence of this practice, however, was that, encouraged by the syllabus, students grafted O’Neill’s life back onto the plays. A chorus of questions arose: “Did this really happen to him?” “Is that really true?” In such discussions, biographical truth inevitably served as the litmus test for artistic merit, a conclusion which convinced me that the relationship between the play and O’Neill’s life clings too close for comfort. In my first book, copies of which are still available, I argued that O’Neill’s biography obscures an assessment of his artistry as a playwright.² Realizing, however, that one book often does not make a career, I plan to reverse tacks in this essay, damn the hypocrisy, and propose how to make good use of biography when interpreting O’Neill’s plays. How can I, as a teacher and a director and a reader, reconcile the narrative of a man’s life with the arc of an artistic work? Does not reliance upon the former run the risk of simplifying the latter? Can the facts of life pluck out the mystery of a great play? Since it is O’Neill’s most biographical and best play, I’m going to test my case with Long Day ’s Journey Into Night.³

Before wading any further into this murky stream of interpretive inquiry, allow me to come clean and admit that I’ve only taught O’Neill in theatre departments where I suspect the approach differs a bit from that in the main quadrangle. Theater folk tend to look at a play in terms of how to produce it right now for the spaces available and the audiences immediately accessible. Such thinking produces an inevitable tension between an historical understanding of how the original and even subsequent productions were staged and the means at hand. It is not untypical for students eventually to ask, “What would O’Neill think of this?”—at which point, I gesture to an imaginary phone and suggest that they dial 1-800-EONEILL for assistance. Surprisingly, such a witty response frequently does not quell dissension in the ranks. Conditioned by years of institutional learning in which they were rewarded for punching the right answers, students invariably pine for an authorized version of a play.

Unfortunately, complete reliance upon biography as truth may prove very misleading for an inquisitive classroom of students or a theatrical audience. Matthew Wikander, for example, has correctly observed that there is no mention in the play of the fact that Edmund, the Eugene O’Neill character, has married, fathered a child, and completely abandoned that family.⁴ That autobiographical fact, which greatly impacted O’Neill’s own life, is completely absent from the fabric of the play. Richard Eyre, the English director, claimed, rather melodramatically, in his PBS documentary “Changing Stages,” that Long Day’s Journey Into Night is “the saddest play ever written.”⁵ And yet, in real life, events turned out dramatically differently than the cyclical action of endless pain and despair depicted in the play. O’Neill’s mother kicked her drug habit, O’Neill reconciled with his parents, and his father lived long enough to applaud his son’s first great success as a playwright. Even O’Neill’s brother, Jamie, before ultimately drinking himself to death, reformed for a brief period of time and lived his happiest days as the caretaker for his mother. So, as Agnes Boulton titled her memoir about her famous husband, the connection of O’Neill’s great play to his life is only “part of a long story.”⁶

Faced with the mountain of critical works devoted to O’Neill and his plays, all of which at least recognize the connections between his life and works, students and directors ignore such evidence at their own peril. Still, I’ve known auteurs who pay no attention whatsoever to anything other than their own imaginations when staging a play and use the playwright’s words to fuel their own creative energies and artistic agendas. They disregard stage directions and throw out everything save the dialogue, often changing even that, in order to lick their artistic stamp upon the play and post a unique interpretation. I have, at times, been such a director. But I’m not going to renounce my former ways now and get down on my knees and beg forgiveness to the great god O’Neill or any other playwright. Shakespeare has profited from some of my timely revisions. Let me add the heretical statement that I enjoyed and respected very much the Wooster Group’s production of The Emperor Jones.⁷ I don’t think it had much to do with O’Neill, but I think it did speak directly to why we don’t do that play much today or even engage in serious talk about it. To me, that’s a valid artistic statement.

What’s a poor director to do? Embrace biography as truth whole hog? Chuck it out completely? To adopt either radical position, it seems to me, endorses a kind of interpretive fundamentalism which leads to straitjacketed theatrical tyranny. As with most things, there is a middle ground to take which recognizes that the tremendous amount of written material available on O’Neill and his plays obligates the director to at least acknowledge such a rich accumulation. Time, the most precious resource in the theatre, always ticks and dwindles fervent hopes to accomplish intended tasks. The practical question for the director remains: how to allocate scarce resources in order to stage a play most effectively? Perhaps one cannot read O’Neill’s collected works, selected letters, Gelbs’ two volumes plus Sheaffer, Bogard, and Black, to name a few stalwarts, in preparation for a production.⁸ The age of mastery is over. One can’t expect to read everything while the body of knowledge expands all the time with fresh insights and keen observations, but that fact is not license to read nothing. Directors conduct research in order not to master material, but to find inspiration and enlightenment, to unlock the mysteries of the text, to find confirmation in criticism for personal truths they already feel but have failed to articulate. Stephen Black, for example, details the most concise and theatrically and psychologically useful profile of the O’Neill family in the first three chapters of his biography that I’ve ever encountered. In other words, I agree with him!

While researching my book (copies of which are still available), I ran across a quote from the playwright which has stuck with me to this day. Since at that time I wasn’t too interested in biographical influences (recall previous comments regarding zealotry), I didn’t write it down and I subsequently lost all traces of the source. When asked about his family once, O’Neill responded: “We were a very close family, perhaps too close.”⁹ Simple as it sounds, that quote has inspired me to imagine an entire production of O’Neill’s most autobiographical play. When I finally got around to visiting Monte Cristo Cottage for the first time only a couple of years ago (how many more confessions will I make before this essay ends!), O’Neill’s statement about his family resonated deeply within me as I toured through that house which, according to Mary in the play, was never a home.¹⁰ Surprisingly, what stunned me most were the upstairs regions, unseen parts in the play, but very important areas of contiguous space which impact much of the action. In general, I don’t hold much truck with seeing where the artist slept; but without actually having been there I could not have responded viscerally to what I experienced and subsequently developed the thoughts concerning the play which I’m about to impart.

Looking from the outside, I thought, “What’s wrong with this house? I’ve lived in far worse. What’s Mary complaining about?” Walking in, the downstairs looked very familiar. It is, after all, staged as O’Neill wrote his play. The downstairs doesn’t have the feeling of a cottage at all. James O’Neill apparently raised the ceiling of the first floor to give it a greater feeling of grandeur. That renovation, however, robbed the upstairs of ordinary dimensions. I assumed a stoop as I walked upstairs—and I’m not very tall. As I retraced Mary’s steps down the cramped and narrow hall, I began to imagine her life as she paced above the visible action below. Her ghost-like presence haunts the play. The reality of her life, often alone in her room, seemed palpably painful to me. The tininess of the bedrooms, the thinness of the walls separating them, the smallness of the windows looking outside, and the lowness of the ceiling disturbed me as I moved about the private spaces of one of the great literary dysfunctional families. The upstairs seemed more like a scale model than an actual living space for a family.

One of the things that bothers me about the play, too, is that the nuclear family isn’t about parents and children, but about parents and grown, overgrown, clearly sexually active men. The family sleeps in close proximity to each other; the sons are too old and too big to live in such rooms and in such close quarters next to their parents. This was not the era of master suites and private bathrooms, kids at one end, if not on one floor, and parents sequestered far away. The family instead huddled together. In such an environment, everyone knows everyone’s business; everyone hears everyone’s business. O’Neill’s statement about his family relationships took on a literal meaning for me. “We were a very close family, perhaps too close.” The repetition of close, the break between the phrases, an emphasis upon the intensifier, announced, for me, an ominous, frankly sexual, threat.

The rhythm of kinship, to borrow from Michael Manheim, is fueled by desire. The entire play is rife with what my former teacher, Charles Lyons, liked to refer to as “libidinal energy.” As a director, I ascribe to a “kiss or kill” theory of drama: you either want to kiss or kill the other person on stage. In really great plays, you want to do both! That’s primitive! That’s drama! The currents of overflowing desire in Long Day’s Journey Into Night relate directly to those found in earlier, more overstated sexual plays such as Desire Under the Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra, and all the cycle plays. One of the things that make O’Neill such a great playwright is his ability to wed the personal with the political. In these plays of sexual passion, desire is a kind of greed linked directly to O’Neill’s observations and critiques of American materialism. Desire in Long Day’s Journey is desire for dominance and possession. Specifically, I would add, it is male desire directed toward capturing Mary’s undivided and sole attention. Mary, alone among the four main characters, is aware that she cannot fulfill the desires of the male characters. She cannot fulfill the simultaneous demands of James as a husband, Jamie as a rival to James, and Edmund as a child in need of mother love. Mary’s drug addiction and withdrawal from the family indicate her recognition of her inability to slake the unquenchable desires of the competing males in the play. The action of the play, to me, dramatizes an economic fact: there are unlimited desires in the world but very limited resources to satisfy them. The action shows the failure of characters to draw boundaries between them, separate as individuals and achieve independence. The dysfunctional family blurs all distinctions and seethes for boundless love which no single individual can possibly return in kind.

The test for the rampant libidinal energy that I believe fuels the play resides in the text and the clues begin early, in fact with the first lines of the play. The action starts casually in the morning as the family emerge from having had breakfast in the back parlor. However, if the play is as sexually charged as I think it is, if the family is “perhaps too close,” then the opening scene retains an electric charge. James, for example, comes in with Mary and O’Neill’s stage directions (I do think that they are significant) indicate that he has his arm around his “wife’s waist” and that upon their entrance into the living room he gives her a “playful hug.” His first lines read: “You’re a fine armful now, Mary, with those twenty pounds you’ve gained.”¹¹ Mary has only recently returned home to the family from a stay at a sanatorium; James compliments his wife affectionately, but he also makes clear his desire to re-establish the sexual bond with his wife, and his gesture is a visible sign of his re-possession of her. He continues to associate Mary’s weight gain with health and sexuality when he remarks to Jamie and Edmund: “She’s so fat and sassy, there’ll soon be no holding her.”¹² Much is made of James’s tremendous appetite in the play: “I’m as hungry as a hunter” is the expression he repeats throughout. O’Neill describes him as “remarkably good looking.” A matinee idol, who looks ten years younger than his 65 years, James’s sexual appetite remains as hearty as his desire for food.

The relationship of weight to sexual desire receives further proof in a parallel scene near the end with James’s chief rival for Mary’s affection, his own son Jamie. Like the earlier scene from the beginning, the tone is light, but here, too, there are plenty of gathering shadows which inform the scene. In the final act, after returning from the brothel at Mamie Burns’ place, Jamie relates the story of the fat whore Violet, whom he says he picked as a joke, but slept with because he felt sorry for her. Undoubtedly his motives were not as pure as all that. While he may indeed have cheered her up, he also acted out his own rage against his mother for abandoning him and punished himself, too, for his unquenched desire for her. This, of course, is the buried secret in A Moon for the Misbegotten in which James Tyrone, Jr. buys the services of the “blonde pig” on the train for his debauchery in the presence of his mother’s dead body in the baggage car ahead.¹³ In Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Jamie dramatizes his self-defilement in a typical self-mocking way: “I shall give the art of acting back to the performing seals, which are its most perfect expression. By applying my natural God-given talents in their proper sphere, I shall attain the pinnacle of success! I’ll be the lover of the fat woman in Barnum and Bailey’s circus!”¹⁴ Jamie casts himself as a poor actor in the role of his father, but a cheap imitation. Just so, the fat whore is a tawdry copy for his mother, and such play-acting plunges the humor of the scene into an acid bath of self­loathing and bitter realizations. Jamie suffers because James’ hand, not his own, slips around Mary’s waist.

The cheerfulness of the opening exchange, as I’ve described it, belies deep anxiety already in play. An emphasis upon weight as a sign of sexuality highlights the absence of food and nourishment in the action. Mary, it turns out, has not been eating much lately. The second act reveals, too, that Mary left her husband’s bed on the previous night and was seen by Jamie in what’s called the “spare room,” perhaps the room which would have belonged to the dead child, Eugene.¹⁵ Certainly, the word “spare” connotes images of aridity and aloofness in keeping with Mary’s psychological state. She has already started her retreat from the family and perhaps even her descent into morphine­induced euphoria. When exactly she starts injecting herself again is subject to question. It’s possible to imagine that Mary had already started the night before when she first went into the spare room—thus provoking the men’s anxieties and keen interest in all her actions. Judith Barlow makes a terrific argument that Mary does not actually begin taking drugs until she makes her exit to go lie down in Act One. In her view, the men’s constant watchfulness over her drives her to distraction and ultimately forces her to retreat and, under the constant pressure of scrutiny, resume her drug habit.¹⁶

Barlow’s thoughtfulness about this issue fuels my interest in Mary as a victim of male scrutiny in the play. Even if Mary had begun taking drugs previous to the action in the play, the collective spying, really, of James, Jamie and Edmund drives her to distraction. This is yet another example of family relationships that are too close. Mary says to Edmund: “It would serve all of you right if it was true!”¹⁷ Everyone is consumed with Mary’s problem but no one can save her. The dramatic tension in the early part of the play revolves around a question: “Has she, or hasn’t she? Has she started taking drugs again?” All the men look for the familiar signs of Mary’s drug abuse: the look in her eyes; the manner of her speech; the way she controls her physical movements, particularly her hands. In the beginning of the play, the men desperately want to see Mary as healthy and cured. Do they delude themselves? Certainly, when Mary enters in the second act the worst fears of all have been confirmed. Whether she started taking the drugs prior to her first entrance, or only after her exit at the end of Act One, the environment of the home quickly becomes an unbearable hothouse focused on Mary’s every move as a sign of her guilt or innocence.

In keeping, too, with the correlation of food to sex, meals or, really, the absence of meals, structure all of the scenes. Meals typically are scheduled times for family members to sit down convivially and share with one another the events of the day. This does not take place in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Significantly, the meals are always staged in a part of the house that remains unseen and out of view. And there are pointed reminders about how the cook prepares the meals but that they continually go cold before they’re eaten. Only in the first act, in the humorous story of Shaughnessy’s pigs, does the family enjoy each other’s fellowship together. The rest of this long play, until the final moments, fractures into scenes which are mostly with only two characters present at a time, with each individual character imparting singular, often contradictory, versions of experience. Long Day’s Journey Into Night contrasts significantly with the other New London family play, set at about the same time, Ah, Wilderness!, in which the dinner scene in the second act is a major focal point emphasizing family love and deep ties. Instead of bluefish, lots of booze drenches Long Day’s Journey. The whiskey bottle is omnipresent. The Tyrone men drink morning, noon and night, so much so that it’s easy to forget exactly how much they do consume, how obsessive it is, how addictive, and how destructive. The bottle acknowledges their pain and their lack of nourishment. Edmund, who is in the early stages of tuberculosis, is thin and gaunt and the most in need of food and fattening. Mary refuses to admit that Edmund is very sick at all and retreats to the drugs upstairs to deny the facts and escape from the scene over which she fears she has no control. Meanwhile James and Jamie drink themselves into stupors. Jamie eventually passes out in the last act; James is such a hardened drinker that he merely grows silent. They drink, but they can’t quench their thirst for what they all desperately need. Mary is gone.

Ironically, while James accuses Mary of retreating from the family, it is Mary alone who physically never leaves the house. While the men work in the yard, walk in the fog, go to their clubs, visit their whores, Mary spends much of her time by herself or with the sole company of the maid. In Act One, she tells Edmund: “Your father goes out. He meets his friends in barrooms or at the Club. You and Jamie have the boys you know. You go out. But I am alone. I’ve always been alone.”¹⁸ Act Two ends with all the men leaving her once again, and Mary asking herself, “Why do I feel so lonely?”¹⁹ Later, in Act Three, Mary recalls the earlier days of her marriage, touring on the road with James and his traveling acting companies: “I got on my knees and prayed that nothing had happened to you—and then they brought you up and left you outside the door. I didn’t know how often that was to happen in the years to come, how many times I was to wait in ugly hotel rooms. I became quite used to it.”²⁰ Ostensibly, the men leave Mary behind because they can’t bear to look in her eyes anymore and see the signs of the creeping poison. But Mary’s recollections above indicate that they have always left her behind. Still, for her part, Mary retreats in order to avoid their judgmental stares. By the end of the play, Mary walks the unseen hall upstairs, while the men cower below with a bottle and listen to her footfalls above. As Edmund says about her in the early part of the final act: “She’ll be nothing but a ghost haunting the past by this time.”²¹ Edmund later describes Mary’s retreat in personal terms: “The hardest thing to take is the blank wall she builds around her. Or it’s more like a bank of fog in which she hides and loses herself. Deliberately, that’s the hell of it! You know something in her does it deliberately—to get beyond our reach, to be rid of us, to forget we’re alive! It’s as if, in spite of loving us, she hated us!”²²

Attraction brings the family together, but they cannot stay together; they cannot even stay in the same room for long. I don’t think this is so much a case of love/hate as it is an inability of Mary, particularly, to meet all the conflicting and simultaneous demands of love. Although she says some of the most wicked and hurtful things in the play, it is possible, as James insists, to blame much of it on “the poison.” I believe that Mary’s love for her family is unequivocal. Her love for James, like his for her, remains powerful and steadfast for the duration of the play. I can’t think of any example of mature couples in literature who manifest such devotion and enduring passion. In Act Two, Mary puts her arms around her husband and exclaims: “James! We’ve loved each other! We always will! Let’s remember only that, and not try to understand what we cannot understand, or help things that cannot be helped—the things life has done to us we cannot excuse or explain.”²³ If the rhythm of the play alternates between love and hate, hate only emerges because feelings of love are so powerful that they melt into their opposite. Love within the bonds of the family becomes unendurable and characters look for a way out.

The advantage of this outlook, it seems to me, is that it lends Mary much needed sympathy. All the biographies I’ve checked agree on the point that while O’Neill’s relationship with his father improved in later years—indeed it became a source of pride—he never completely forgave his mother. While I wouldn’t agree with Wikander’s assessment that Long Day’s Journey is a testament of rage, I think there is a lot of evidence to suggest that, despite blame for family ills getting spread around pretty evenly among the four principals, Mary remains the most guilty and culpable character.²⁴ Her drug addiction and her refusal to engage with Edmund and recognize his illness are just two examples of visible actions which make her seem less sympathetic than the others. An interpretation which bolsters a good perception of her might help to balance the play.

While I think it is important to build sympathy for Mary as a victim, I think it is equally important to build sympathy for her as an agent of her own destruction. She talks about things life has done to her, but it is important to see ways in which aspects of her own character have proven to be “too close for comfort.” She claims to regret never having become a nun and never having pursued her calling as a concert pianist, but these ascetic choices seem at odds with what we see onstage. I can’t think of any literary representation which portrays the sexual chemistry and bond between mature characters (Mary is 54, James is 65) so intensely powerfully. Quite simply, at a very young age, Mary fell in love with a matinee idol who swept her off her feet and to whom she remained passionately in love all her life. She did not love him because she perceived him as a great artist. She was sexually attracted to him, as much as he was drawn to her. In Act Three, when Mary talks revealingly about her dreams of becoming a nun, Cathleen responds bluntly and somewhat drunkenly: “Well, I can’t imagine you a holy nun, Ma’am.”²⁵ About his wife in Act Four, James says even more explicitly: “She was never made to renounce the world. She was bursting with health and high spirits and the love of loving.”²⁶ Indeed, while Mary blames Jamie for infecting and killing her second child with measles, she also blames herself for abandoning that baby in order to be on the road with James. Despite what she says about those traveling conditions, she does not wish to be away from his bed. If anything is the first cause for disaster in the play, it is the marriage between James and Mary. And, like Othello and Desdemona, they married, not wisely, but too well. The action of the play, to me, is about the consuming nature of the unlimited desires of love and the human limitations on answering its many needs and diverse forms.

If I were putting my plan into production, I would devote my energies to casting the play in such a way as to reflect the intense physical and emotional bonds that exist between the elder Tyrones. I would want to cast the play with as much sexual energy as possible between the major characters. In light of how I think about the play, two recent productions are worth mentioning. Jessica Lange, for her evident sexuality, seemed to me like an inspired, and hitherto not obvious, choice to play Mary. On the other hand, Brian Dennehy seemed like an odd pick for James Tyrone. He is no matinee idol. He’s obviously playing the part because of his recent success in Death of a Salesman, but in that production he played Willy as a kind of overgrown child who needed babying from his wife. He seemed to need a mother far more than a lover. James Tyrone is a simple man whose relationship with his wife is primarily sexual. But, of course, I reserve the right to be wrong about Dennehy. There’s certainly room for a lot of different productions of Long Day’s Journey Into Night.²⁷

Interpretation is a matter of seeing more of the text and seeing different things and seeing things differently as time passes. I remember very well a young man who frequently auditioned with Edmund’s big fourth-act speech and who loved hearing himself say that he was “a little in love with death.” How comical, how Treplev-like, that young man seems to me now. And now that that same young man is the father of two, Old Gaspard, Tyrone, seems wise and much put upon. Has the play changed so much? Or have I? The Gelbs, too, have articulated their reasons for rewriting their biography of O’Neill, not just in terms of uncovering more available facts, but in terms of shifting predominating sympathies from the children to their parents.²⁸ Right now, I find my own interests in the play turning to the mother.

Unquestionably, times are different now than they were when O’Neill wrote the play in 1941 and when it so famously premiered in 1956. We are much more concerned today with the position of women in society and within the domestic family. It is much more possible now to see Mary as a victim not just of things she can’t help and can’t control, but the unwitting and somewhat unwilling victim of male desire in the play. In A Touch of the Poet, Sara Melody remarks: “Oh, father, why can’t you ever be the person you can sometime seem to be?”²⁹ In Long Day’s Journey Into Night it is no wonder that Mary can’t be the person that James, Jamie and Edmund each simultaneously want her to be: wife, lover, mother.

My thoughts about a hypothetical production began with a remark by O’Neill that I could not forget: “We were a very close family, perhaps too close.” Of what was I thinking? My own family? Why did I remember this one, fairly insignificant little remark? I don’t know. I do know that I would not have found it if I hadn’t pored over a tremendous amount of research material. In executing my plan, in putting the ideas of this paper into an actual production, I would retreat from the O’Neill family altogether. As the production progressed, I would not concern myself with biographical fidelity. The truth, whatever it is, is no excuse for being boring on stage. Biography, in the end, is a launching pad for an artistic event which may or may not bear resemblance to anyone’s actual life. By concentrating on the intense passions, boundless emotional needs, and familial bonds among the Tyrones in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, I would hope to create an experience that engages an audience cerebrally, and emotionally. I would hope to expose a network of love that channels the pain of everyday existence and in so doing opens a cathartic experience for an audience who know the pain of love and the depths of desires which have no bottom.

To return to the classroom, I believe that one of the challenges in teaching O’Neill, really in any subject, is to help students find themselves in the work. The pleasure in O’Neill studies cannot lie in applying the events directly from his plays to corresponding ones in his life, as if the study of literature were a connect-the-dot exercise. The joy of study is to discover that a work is new each time I return to it, that an experience with a work of art changes me and allows me to return with a different perspective the next time I encounter it. I like to remind my students that O’Neill never made it past his freshman year at Princeton. While his classmates were dutifully attending class, O’Neill perused Benjamin Tucker’s Bookshop and discovered Nietzsche, Wilde, Ibsen, and a world of other writers not dreamt of in Princeton’s philosophy. It’s easy to romanticize a college drop-out, as George Jean Nathan did with stories about O’Neill being expelled for throwing a beer bottle through university president Woodrow Wilson’s window. In truth, O’Neill flunked out for the same reason that I’ve failed many students—not attending class. Nonetheless, there’s a real appeal to the educational dream of sitting under a tree all day and reading a good book. I alluded earlier to several good books on O’Neill which I’ve never assigned as readings because they were too long to fit within the strictures of the class structure. I’m not convinced at all that our educational system is set up with the actual needs of students in mind. Would it be such a bad thing if I were to look up from my lecture notes and catch my students in active pursuit of their own imaginations? To stay within the friendly confines of the classroom might prove a little too close for comfort.

NOTES

¹ I am grateful to the Dean’s Office and the Department of Theatre at The College of Wooster in Ohio for encouraging me to create and teach “O’Neill and his Contemporaries” in 1995 and 1997 as a regular offering in the theatre curriculum.

² Zander Brietzke, The Aesthetics of Failure (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001).

³ I first presented these ideas in a paper with the same title at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association in New Orleans, December 27, 2001. I was part of a panel, sponsored by the Eugene O’Neill Society, with the title “O’Neill and Biography.”

⁴ Matthew H. Wikander, “Eugene O’Neill and the Cult of Sincerity,” The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill, ed. Michael Manheim (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 231-233.

⁵ See Episode 3, “America,” which begins with Eugene O’Neill. This 6 hour series premiered in 2001 on PBS in conjunction with the release of a companion book. See Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright, Changing Stages: A View of British and American Theatre in the Twentieth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001).

⁶ See Agnes Boulton, Part of a Long Story (New York: Doubleday, 1958).

⁷ See my review of their production at the Performing Garage in NYC in Theatre Journal 50 (October 1998): 382-385.

⁸ See Louis Sheaffer, O’Neill: Son and Playwright (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968) and O’Neill: Son and Artist (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973); Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill (1962; New York: Harper & Row, 1973); Travis Bogard, Contour in Time, rev. ed., (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Stephen Black, Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). As an example of the prolific biographical O’Neill industry, the Gelbs are currently rewriting their 1962 work on the playwright and will produce three new volumes. The first, Life with Monte Cristo (New York: Applause, 2001) has already been published.

⁹ Sheaffer, Son and Playwright 96. I am grateful to James Hong who contacted me through the rich resources of Dr. Harley Hammerman’s website <http:// www.eoneill.com/> with the correct citation.

¹⁰ “House” and “home” are repeated frequently in the play, and connotations surrounding these words and what they mean resonate throughout the action.

¹¹ Eugene O’Neill, Complete Plays 1932-1943 (New York: Library of America, 1988): 719. All further citations from Long Day’s Journey Into Night and other plays will refer to this third volume of the edition and will be abbreviated as CP3.

¹² CP3 723.

¹³ CP3 931.

¹⁴ CP3 817.

¹⁵ The fact that O’Neill exchanged names with his dead brother in the play is an unending source for comment in classroom discussion.

¹⁶ See Judith Barlow, Final Acts: The Creation of Three Late O’Neill Plays (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985): 79.