Enough Shakespeare, time to stop quoting the father, Old Gaspard, and look to the son in Long Day's Journey, Edmund, who experiences transcendent bliss when the unseen hand draws back the curtain and allows him to see, for an instant, the mysteries of existence. Edmund's recollections at sea remind us of what we see fleetingly on occasions in contemplative solitude among a hushed audience in communal observation and understanding of something happening onstage. As in Edmund's gorgeous, metaphysical speech at the end of the play, the curtain drops too soon for us, the lights come up, and we go home. Though images remain in our consciousness, over time we forget what we have seen. When we chance to see the play again, maybe years later, it strikes us differently, even though the text remains the same. What, who, has changed?

It is so very easy to shake our heads, cynically, and say, sadly, "It's all been done before." In fact, doing something new is relatively easy, for one only has to survey the scene and then do something slightly different. That approach doesn't lead to very good productions and it doesn't make for good dramatic criticism either. We're all aware of the classic antagonism in O'Neill's work between illusion and reality. Certainly, Edmund's speech referred to above articulates this clash quite dramatically. And yet the dualism that comes so easily to our logically-conditioned minds breaks down under the pressure of the essays in this volume, as well as the books under review, as scholars hammer away at binary oppositions that categorize O'Neill like so many books on the Tyrone shelves that separate the father from the son.

Taken as a group, the contents of this issue trace an oscillation in the plays between polarized positions: past and future, madness and sanity, the one and the many, selfishness and selflessness; and shifts in the playwright's sensibilities moving from activist to individualist, modernist to romanticist, realist to experimentalist, historicist to fabulist, and back again! Scholars, in pursuit of what interests them in the various plays under consideration, spanning O'Neill's growth as an artist from his early one-act sea plays, when he wrote seemingly realistic plays while living among such diverse artists, amateurs, bohemians and political radicals as Terry Carlin, John Reed, Emma Goldman, Jig Cook, Susan Glaspell, Louise Bryant, and Agnes Boulton, through his "experimental" period with such wonderful plays as The Hairy Ape, The Emperor Jones, and Strange Interlude, to his final mature and somewhat autobiographical masterpieces, Long Day's Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten, discover and rustle complacent views about what these plays do and give us a fresh perspective on the dynamism and contradictions and tensions between any set philosophical, political, or literary positions that were seemingly inert before investigation. These are the very elements that good productions jostle loose in performance to stir our emotions.

As we greet the new production of A Moon for the Misbegotten and recognize Mr. Spacey as a serious O'Neill actor in the wake of Jason Robards, having previously played Jamie in Long Day's Journey and Hickey in Iceman, we appreciate the gravitational pull of the late, great plays on star actors. James O'Neill would have been so very proud. We're glad, though, that his son also illuminates many constellations of directors and creative artists and ensembles who, in the past year, in New York alone, have enriched the theatrical universe with dazzling productions of The Hairy Ape, The Emperor Jones, and even, believe it or not, Marco Millions. There is always more to see in an O'Neill play than any one production can deliver. But, it is also true that there are more than a few O'Neill works that are worth seeing and that challenge our received opinions about the playwright and his plays.