Scholars and writers, from Louis Sheaffer, Edward Shaughnessy, Stephen Black and Christopher Morash to Christopher Fitz-Simon, have cited the 1911 United States tour of Dublin's Abbey Theatre as a seminal influence on Jig Cook, Susan Glaspell, and Eugene O'Neill. On a practical level, the Abbey's first American tour delivered the European independent theater movement, presenting certain Americans with a vital alternative to commercial theater while opening the door to early modernism. As the tour moved from New England cities to New York, the Irish American attorney and arts patron John Quinn wrote in the press of the Abbey Theatre's "deliberate simplicity of staging," and the fact that "they are not driven to put on plays for the sake of profit only." Quinn asked, "What lesson can America get from this example?" (107).[1] As if in direct response to Quinn, O'Neill later recalled: "As a boy I saw so much of the old, ranting, artificial, romantic stage stuff that I always had a sort of contempt for the theatre. It was seeing the Irish players for the first time that gave me a glimpse of my opportunity" (qtd. in Sheaffer 205). The opportunity that the Abbey Theatre illuminated was two-fold: its restrained acting style and production values arguably led to American independent, non-commercial theater ventures like the Washington Square Players and the Provincetown Players, while the works of the Abbey's John Millington Synge specifically offered O'Neill a methodology into folk lyricism. In fact, O'Neill's contact with the Abbey Theatre's 1911 tour resulted in an American dramatist in a Syngean vein.

In 1910, the Abbey Theatre lost its six-year patron, Annie Horniman. In an effort to secure its financial stability (perhaps despite Quinn's commentary), the Theatre's directors, William Butler Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory, accepted the offer for an American tour from the New York booking and theater owners Liebler and Company. Liebler's director in 1911 was George Tyler, who was a friend of Eugene O'Neill's father, the popular actor James O'Neill. Opening in Boston in September, the Abbey tour was extended into March 1912. Plays selected for the tour included works by Lady Gregory, the Gregory and Yeats collaboration Kathleen ni Houlihan, G.B. Shaw's The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet, two plays by Lennox Robinson, one by William Boyle, T.C. Murray's Birthright, and four by J.M. Synge—namely, In the Shadow of the Glen, Riders to the Sea, The Well of Saints, and The Playboy of the Western World. Various Irish-American Catholic organizations, including certain Catholic metropolitan parishes, encouraged and organized protests against Synge's plays, especially The Playboy. They were determined to repeat or exceed the morality protests leveled at The Playboy when it had premiered in Dublin in 1907. The protests at heart, as all contemporary protests against Synge's plays, had to do with the fact that Synge portrayed modern, assertive, and independent women who define men rather than allow men to define them—undermining the colonial paternalism of Britain and Catholicism.[2] However, the American Catholic protests, especially in New York and Philadelphia, translated into full houses for the Abbey Players during their first American tour. This was unprecedented for the Abbey.[3]

So while controversy attracted audiences, those Americans desiring a theater void of the bombastic nature of commercialism found much to see with the Irish Players. Susan Glaspell and her husband Jig Cook, the prominent organizers of the Provincetown Players in 1915, saw the Abbey Theatre's 1911 tour in Chicago.[4] Glaspell later recalled: "Quite possibly there would have been no Provincetown Players had there not been Irish Players. What [Jig] saw done for Irish life he wanted for American life—no stage conventions in the way of projecting with the humility of true feeling" (qtd. in Harrington 42). Visually, designer and director Robert Edmond Jones, the lone theater professional among the Provincetown Players, claimed that the Abbey tour heavily influenced him with its "very simple set design" (qtd. in Morash 146). Early Abbey sets characteristically were suggestive in their simplicity, stemming from both a reaction to the elaborate sets of English popular theater, and a lack of financial resources for expansive settings. Recalling the early Abbey Theatre's design principles, W.B. Yeats wrote in the 1930s that the Abbey's pre-1920 sets consistently utilized only three colors (Memoirs 277).[5] This contrasted significantly with the lavish sets of the commercial American and English theaters as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth.

Popular melodramas of the late nineteenth century delighted audiences chiefly through spectacle. Under the Gaslight (1867), for example, depicted a life-size train locomotive running on tracks. The star-actor productions of Shakespeare, like those of Henry Irving, did much the same as they strove to dazzle by sparing no expense with rich costumes and settings that were archeologically correct to the play's portrayed time. These presentations were meant to enthrall audiences, whereas the Abbey Theatre endeavored to shift the audience's attention from the stars, actors and settings alike, to the given play's words and ideas. Rather than awe an audience with a set that faithfully reproduced an elaborate room or outdoor area, the Abbey sets were designed to suggest, not re-create, an environment. When a would-be designer in 1904 told the uncompromising W.B. Yeats that her designs were archeologically correct, Yeats thundered back during a rehearsal, "Hang archeology: it's effect we want on the stage!" (qtd. in Holloway 137).

The sets from the 1911 Abbey tour followed the simple or restrained philosophy of suggestion. In Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, for instance, the Abbey's design suggested the interior of a rural Irish shebeen and thematically used a three-color scheme. A contemporary described the set: "The Playboy scene [. . .] was the effect of brightness against the lime-washed walls of the set in a pleasantly unobtrusive manner. The fittings were a lovely deep brown, the colour of turf [. . .]. The scene will long remain in memory" (Nic Shiubhlaigh 82). The turf-brown color suggested the earthy nature of the play's County Mayo setting, while the lime-stoned white walls pointed toward a rural Irish shebeen. The third color came out in the contrast between the characters' costumes: Shawn Keogh's was black like a priest's, while Pegeen's was bright like the walls. There were no popular images or sights of Ireland presented; there were no round towers or Killarney lakes as found in Dion Boucicault's Irish melodramas. Essentially the Abbey's sets formed the background, and not a main attraction. American audiences could see, here, theater produced in simple and ordinary settings.

Similar to the suggestive scenery, the Abbey's acting style was also restrained and also delivered an impact on American theater. Stephen Black writes that the "superb unmannered acting" of the Irish Players became O'Neill's "standard for the art" (116). In a similar vein, Edward Shaughnessy asserts that the influence of the Abbey's acting on O'Neill "can hardly be overstated. Not only did this experience [witnessing the Abbey Players in 1911] confirm his judgment about the tawdriness and limitations of the American popular theater, but he gained a vision of what modern drama could be" (34). Without a doubt, the Abbey acting style of 1911 was far more life-like for O'Neill than the large and exaggerated style of Broadway theater. The Irish form appeared much more natural and truthful as the actors slowly and deliberately delivered their lines. The accompanying photograph of James O'Neill as Edmund Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo reveals the popular actor in a dramatic pose stretched out on a rock having just escaped from the Chateau d'If. In essence, the actor appears larger than life in a larger-than-life setting. In comparison, the 1911 photograph of Sara Allgood and J.M. Kerrigan in Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, as Widow Quin and Shawn Keogh respectively, we see two actors standing as two people might actually stand with one another while in conversation. The actors are looking at one another in an ordinary and non-dramatic manner, not as Dantes heroically looks to the heavens.

The Abbey pre-1920 restrained acting style had been theorized and developed by early company member Frank Fay. Fay had started with the French representational acting style descended from the theories of eighteenth-century philosopher Denis Diderot.[6] Basically, Diderot argued that the actor must neither try to become the character nor allow the character's emotions to expand beyond the limits of usual behavior, but rather the actor should create a score of the character that he or she constantly controls while intellectually maintaining the character within life-like boundaries. A prescient forerunner of modern, Brechtian techniques, Diderot's acting theories came to Frank Fay via the late nineteenth, early twentieth-century French actor Constant Coquelin. Fay described the subtlety of Coquelin's exit as the eponymous hypocrite in Tartuffe being led to prison: "[he] simply turns his back on the audience [. . .] and walks off," adding that the English 1890s popular star actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree would, in the same scene, take "five minutes to get off the stage, and he would have walked to and fro with multiplication of gestures" (6). Fay's representational style is intellectually epitomized by his direction to actor Mary Walker for the 1903 premier of Synge's In the Shadow of the Glen: "Be the mouthpiece of Nora Burke, rather than Nora Burke" (Nic Shiubhlaigh 43). In practice, the Abbey style was characterized by restrained movements. Rather than the excessive crossings and re-crossings and constant fidgeting of commercial actors of the time, the Abbey Players remained stationary, moving only when absolutely necessary. In a 1902 article titled "Irish Acting," Frank Fay explains that two actors "should be able to sit [. . .] without ever leaving their chairs, and to hold our attention breathless for as long as the playwright likes" (6).

James O'Neill as Edmund Dantes in Monte Cristo following the escape from the Chateau d'If. Note the dramatic or stagey pose in the larger than life moment with the actor stretched on the cliff face. Photograph by Marc Gambier, New York. Laurence Senelick Collection.

Sara Allgood and J.M. Kerrigan as the Widow Quin and Shawn Keogh in J.M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World during the Abbey Theatre's 1911 United States tour, Plymouth Theatre, Boston. In contrast to James O'Neill's Dantes, the two Dublin actors stand as two people might naturally stand in conversation. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archive, Boston.

Abbey Theatre actor Fred O'Donovan, who was with the company during the 1911 tour playing Christy Mahon in The Playboy of the Western World, was asked by a reporter for the New York World if the Irish Players sought "to be as natural and lifelike as possible."[7] O'Donovan replied:

We seek first of all to act truthfully [. . .]. Simplicity [. . . is] but a means to obtain that end. [. . .] we seek to use as little exaggeration as possible. [. . .] having begun to exaggerate, [. . . the actor] will unintentionally heighten his exaggeration, for effect or for applause, until the essential truthfulness of his portrayal becomes lost. That is why we seek to be as simple and truthful as possible in all the plays which we present. (102)

O'Donovan's choice of words, "simple" and "truthful," reflects a style of acting that refused to showcase the actor's abilities at the expense of the character and the play. To perform a character "simplistically" was to play the role as suggestive of a real person, and playing "truthfully" meant being truthful to the play, serving the play's ideas not the actor. When Eugene O'Neill directed amateurs (including himself) in Bound East for Cardiff and Thirst during the summer of 1916 in Provincetown, perhaps the Abbey style was the acting he tried to emulate. This might be especially so given that O'Neill viewed his father's theater as the arena where the actor performed as a trained seal, a simile suggested by Jamie in Long Day's Journey into Night. Perhaps rewardingly for O'Neill, when The Iceman Cometh premiered in 1946, Dudley Digges performed the role of Harry Hope. Digges had been a Dublin actor with the company that became the Abbey Theatre, and he was among the first actors trained by Frank Fay.[8]

Arguably, the possibilities of restrained acting combined with the Abbey's simple, non-spectacular sets suggested the opportunity to O'Neill and others for a relevant theater. In 1926, O'Neill noted that the Abbey Theatre in 1911 "first opened my eyes to the existence of a real theatre, as opposed to the unreal—and to me then—hateful theatre of my father, in whose atmosphere I had been brought up" (qtd. in Shaughnessy, Eugene O'Neill 36). Perhaps O'Neill most importantly realized that the Abbey Theatre—in the greatest possible contrast to his father's theater—was a playwright's theater and not an actor's theater. The Abbey, for O'Neill, had shifted the focus from the actor's physical body or presence to the speech of an actor's voice. The simple sets and acting were designed to place emphasis on a playwright's words.

In seeing all of the Abbey's productions presented during the 1911 tour in New York, O'Neill also witnessed the intent and purpose of this Irish theater. Shortly before the tour, W.B. Yeats stated in an interview that it had always been the Abbey Theatre's "view that the company could not claim to be a truly National [Irish] Company unless it played before the great Irish population in America as well as the Irish at home" (qtd. in Hogan with Burnham and Poteet 131). While such sentiment is surely an example of Yeats's press spin, it echoes the early Abbey Theatre's efforts to re-image the Irish and Ireland. Indeed, Yeats from the beginning had wanted an Irish theater that while playing to the few, would transform the Irish into a nation. Of course, how nation was defined varied greatly among the Abbey Theatre's company members. Yet, it must have been evident for O'Neill and other intelligent Americans who saw the Dublin theater's 1911 American performances that the Abbey's productions, while varied, were all in service to the imaging of Ireland. Not for mere profit, but for cultural—even political—agendas, the plays served a theater of ideas. Perhaps this focus, as well as the Abbey's non-commercial values, influenced those seeking non-commercial theater in America.

The imaging of America, a task different from the imaging of British-and-Catholic-occupied Ireland, was a task that awaited a voice in 1911. While O'Neill initially was attracted to the Abbey Theatre because it was from Ireland, he and other Americans, even non-Irish Americans, were able to see the struggles for national identity in the plays the Abbey performed during its first American tour. Issues of oppression, prejudice, capitalism, immigration, and family survival all were presented by the Abbey, and all had been experienced by O'Neill during his time in New London. In fact, these very issues formed the American identity that was emerging in the early twentieth century as wealthy Yankee families began to loosen their grip on the American scene. No doubt, various Americans, like Cook, Glaspell, and O'Neill, read the publicized histories of the Abbey Theatre that circulated in the American press during the 1911 tour which detailed the Theatre's amateur beginnings; beginnings that had emerged with one-act plays that were still in the company's repertoire. Similarly, the Provincetown Players emerged in 1915 with its own original American one-act plays.

While the first intent of the Abbey's 1911 tour was to survive financially without polluting its goals and nature, its second intent, and perhaps most important to Yeats, was to establish Synge's international reputation which, according to Yeats, would "consolidate" the Abbey's international standing (McCormack 393). Solidifying Synge's reputation for Yeats had become crucial following the 1907 premier of The Playboy of the Western World, but turned paramount concern when Synge died in 1909 of cancer, one month short of turning thirty-nine, after having written only six plays. To this end, Yeats, at the cost of his own plays, centered the Abbey's American tour on Synge's work, especially The Playboy. Most of the American press signaling the coming of the tour focused on Synge with headlines like one that ran in the magazine The Theatre: "A Great Irish Playwright: John M. Synge." As Yeats selected the tour's plays, he knew that 1911 would also see the first non-private publications of Synge's works in America.[9] So, while the Abbey Theatre's production values suggested a vibrant alternative theater, appealing to O'Neill, Glaspell, Cook, Jones, and others, Synge's work, especially in published form, became enticingly accessible during the year of the tour.

Many have seen similarities between O'Neill and Sean O'Casey, rather than between O'Neill and Synge. No doubt, this is due to the gritty portraits O'Casey presents, especially in his Dublin trilogy plays. However, O'Casey's 1920s agenda followed his view that the Dublin working class had been overlooked during the Irish political struggles from 1916-1922. There is little sense of an Irish identity in O'Casey's trilogy, but rather an effort to indict nationalists, even those with socialist directions. Unwittingly for O'Casey, his trilogy plays became propaganda for the conservative Irish Free State politicians who sought to erase radical nationalism and socialism. In effect, O'Casey's effort to indict nationalism on behalf of the Dublin proletariat was void of poetic lyricism. Therefore, the comparisons between O'Casey and O'Neill are not necessarily helpful in understanding the latter, but promote a view that O'Neill is like O'Casey, a non-poetic playwright. Rather than commenting on the ignored or overlooked, O'Neill dramatizes them as shaping an emerging and modern America in the early twentieth century. As such, O'Neill's efforts by nature are more similar to Synge's than O'Casey's. Voicing a defining Irish identity was more open to a lyrical approach than O'Casey's effort to merely indict. It is in Synge's approach that one finds illuminating similarities to O'Neill. Besides, O'Neill became a playwright in Synge's wake, several years before O'Casey.

Numerous O'Neill scholars have seen Synge's Riders to the Sea as influential to the young O'Neill. Edward Shaughnessy writes that "O'Neill was fairly stunned by the folk lyricism that elevates the tragedy. He was moved by Synge's [. . .] austere commentary on our existential fate unmatched by any other modern play" (Eugene O'Neill 36). Stephen Black reminds us that O'Neill "long remembered the old woman in Riders and once [. . .] compared himself to her feeling he had `gotten to that stage now where nothing can hurt or anger me'" (116). This is directly voiced by Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night in act 3, when distracted by her failing hands, she states, "But even they can't touch me now" (106). This, too, is almost a direct echo of Synge's Maurya near the end of Riders: "there isn't anything more the sea can do to me" (11). Black also suggests that Riders to the Sea's presence may be found in O'Neill's Children of the Sea, or in its later form Bound East for Cardiff. Black sees the continual and "unfolding" loss that Synge's Maurya suffers as a convention O'Neill seizes and builds upon toward his own "particular genius [. . .] to express the meaning of feeling" (Black 159).

In Riders, Synge portrays the Irish identity in Maurya, particularly as she embraces her and Ireland's pagan culture by play's end. Maurya, in the presence of the dead body of her last son Bartley, gradually gives up her Christian beliefs in favor of pagan rituals. After sprinkling the Holy Water over Bartley's body in the priest's absence, her final speeches become part of the pagan keening that the village women perform. The transformation is complete with Maurya's last lines:

Bartley will have a fine coffin out of the white boards, and a deep grave surely. What more can we want than that? No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied. (12)

Maurya at this point has turned away from the fundamental Christian belief in an afterlife (Kiberd 45). Through this return to the native culture, which in Synge's theater is a positive development, Synge portrays the reality of colonized Ireland in 1904, which he observed first hand in Ireland's remote Aran Islands:

The maternal feeling is so powerful on these islands that it gives a life of torment to the women. Their sons grow up to be banished as soon as they are of age, or live here in continual danger on the sea; their daughters go away also, or are worn out in their youth with bearing children. (Aran 113)

Through Maurya, Synge portrays Mother Ireland watching her children disappear. Significantly, Synge presents an Irish identity only through Maurya's suffering and it is this example that O'Neill embraces in much of his work. It is through the extreme suffering of his characters, as in Synge's Maurya, that O'Neill finds and refines his portrait of America.

On a direct and tangible level, one can suggest that the pagan Gaelic keening song ritual in Riders to the Sea that envelops Maurya's final speeches (a song that was a prominent feature of the Abbey's early productions of Riders but rarely performed in post-1920 revivals), might have at first suggested the song that the sailor sings in O'Neill's early play Thirst.[10] An actor who sang the keening song in the early Abbey productions of Riders described the Gaelic ritual:

The lament itself has a strange savage quality about it when sung [in Gaelic] by an expert. Its effectiveness probably lies in its repetition. Over and over the women repeat the lines, softly at first, rising gradually on a sustained note to the eerie splendour of the climax. Rocking backwards and forwards to the beat of the music they [the singers] seem to lose themselves in the beauty of the lilt. (Nic Shiubhlaigh 54)

The unnerving stage effect of Riders's keen may be quite similar to the effect of the sailor's "folk" song in Thirst, described by the dancer character as "a queer monotonous song [. . .] more of a dirge than a song" (Thirst 33); yet, the employment of each ritualistic song is for different purposes in the two plays as Synge's Maurya casts off her Christianity for native Irish paganism and O'Neill's sailor alienates himself further from the dancer and gentleman. Louis Sheaffer suggests that Riders to the Sea's keening influence is even present in O'Neill's late work, as in James Tyrone's epitaph in Long Day's Journey into Night of his wasted career, "That God-damned play I bought for a song and made such a great success in" (809), spoken "with keening emotion" (Sheaffer 35).

Similarly, Con Melody's speeches in act 4 of A Touch of the Poet, after he shoots his mare, are spoken as a keen, keening for the death of whom he thought he was: "Wasn't she the livin' reminder, so to spake, av all his lyin' boasts and dreams? He meant to kill her first wid one pistol, and then himself wid the other. But faix, he saw the shot that killed her had finished him, too. [. . .] seeing her die made an end av him" (273). Significantly, the keening for the keener (the one who keens) rings loudly in Riders to the Sea as well. Maurya, at play's end, keens not only for her dead sons but also for the death of who she had been:

It isn't that I haven't prayed for you, Bartley, to the Almighty God. It isn't that I haven't said prayers in the dark night till you wouldn't know what I'd be saying; but it's a great rest I'll have now, and great sleeping in the long nights after Samhain [autumn], if it's only a bit of wet flour we do have to eat, and maybe a fish that would be stinking. (11)

Again, this development, while excruciating for Maurya, is a positive development for Synge as it moves her (and the Ireland she represents) to her native pagan culture. This development thematically rejects Catholicism and Christianity, which Synge viewed as foreign and colonial influences. As O'Neill's Con Melody echoes this change in Maurya through his keening for the Major he believed he was, Melody's self-keening delivers him (and the America he represents) away from the dream of being a gentleman. The gentleman dream was the product of the British class system when he was in Ireland, and is even more exclusive of the Irish in a northern US state like Massachusetts in 1828, which was politically and culturally dominated by wealthy Yankees descended from earlier British colonists. Con sees the place he, and other immigrants must adopt, "The Major's passin' to his eternal rest has set me free to jine the Democrats, and I'll vote for Andy Jackson, the friend of the Common men like me" (278). This, like Maurya's return to Ireland's native religion and culture, can arguably be construed as thematically positive, regardless of Con's momentary agony.[11]

While one can find aspects of Riders to the Sea in examples from O'Neill's dramatic canon, the fact remains that the two playwrights are different. Still, O'Neill voiced an American identity of immigrants that challenged the preeminence of Anglo-Saxon Protestants, or Yankees, just as Synge had attempted to re-image Ireland away from conservative paternalism. But Synge was concerned with the Irish and Ireland as a whole, and O'Neill was more interested with how the individual in America "fit in" (Shaughnessy, Down the Nights 27). Fitting in, of course, was what America was about for the vast number of immigrants who began to arrive in the nineteenth century. Therefore, O'Neill's strong sense of the individual in his work has suggested to scholars that there are more similarities in focus between the Abbey Theatre playwright T.C. Murray's Birthright and O'Neill's plays, as Louis Sheaffer suggests, than between O'Neill and Synge. Certainly, as Edward Shaughnessy indicates, O'Neill must have been intrigued by Birthright's portrayal of two brothers, "each of whom is favored by one of the parents" (Eugene O'Neill 35). O'Neill explored the troubling or haunting nature of Birthright's two brothers in hurtful statements hurled throughout Long Day's Journey into Night, and in earlier plays such as Beyond the Horizon and Desire Under the Elms. Nonetheless, the reality was that Synge was far more accessible for the young O'Neill than Murray.

Following the Abbey's 1911 tour, Louis Sheaffer notes that Synge was among the "foreign dramatists" that O'Neill read while recovering from tuberculosis. Edward Shaugnessy argues that O'Neill's late 1912 to early summer 1913 stay in the Gaylord Sanitorium was the time that ended his "protracted period of self-destructive behavior" (Down the Nights 23). Shaughnessy adds that it was during this time that O'Neill "read and wrote, inspired by the Irish Players of the Abbey Theatre [. . .]. By now [. . .] he had come to see, not just in anger but with a critical eye, the actual problems of his father's theatre and to fathom somewhat the significance of the new drama [. . . and] to appreciate what gifted and serious writers might accomplish" (Down the Nights 23). O'Neill was exposed further to Synge when taking George Pierce Baker's playwriting class at Harvard in 1914, where Baker "could explain very precisely how [. . .] Synge used the speech rhythms of the Irish counties to create a character" (Black 174). Baker also stressed the process of sketching "a detailed scenario" for a play before "writing dialogue" (Black 174). Interestingly, this was the process that Synge had used, which Baker may have read about in Maurice Bourgeois's John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre (1913). While all of this may indeed have been influential and inspiring, perhaps it was Synge's methodology for gathering material that proved most helpful to O'Neill as he began writing for a theater. When the young, eventual Irish playwright Lennox Robinson saw Riders to the Sea in 1907, he had an immediate reaction, recalling later: "It came to me in a flash, as a revelation. Play-material could be found outside one's own door, at one's own fireside" (qtd. in Morash 150). Arguably, O'Neill had a similar reaction; worthy plays could focus on common people rather than on kings and wronged heroic French noblemen.

As Eugene O'Neill read Synge, he presumably read the prefaces and introductory notes that were published with Synge's plays and works in America. While the two prefaces that Synge wrote himself were mostly intended to deflect anticipated attacks from his conservative detractors, Synge reveals facts about his playwriting methodology. In the preface to The Playboy of the Western World, Synge relates how he borrowed his ideas and dialogue phrases from Ireland's country people, as well as from "beggar-women and ballad singers nearer Dublin." He adds: "All art is a collaboration." After speculating that Shakespeare must have also written from personal and direct observations, Synge recounts:

When I was writing The Shadow of the Glen, some years ago, I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen. This matter, I think is of importance. (v-vi).

The preface to Synge's The Well of Saints, written by W.B. Yeats, details how Synge went to the Aran Islands. Yeats quotes, perhaps enlarges, the advice he gave to the young Synge in 1898 to go to Aran: "Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression" (52). Synge's book The Aran Islands was published in the United States, also in 1911, with an introduction composed by an American, Edward J. O'Brien, which further documents Synge's observational efforts in gathering material and experiences for the plays that he wrote. O'Brien writes of Synge: "Here he lived life as he had never lived it before [. . .]. It is to Inishmaan [one of the Aran Islands] that we owe his two great tragedies. The stories were told to him that formed the germs of Riders to the Sea and In the Shadow of the Glen" (xi-xii). Even a casual reading of The Aran Islands, in the context of reading Synge's plays, reveals that Synge's time in Aran of living and observing island peasant life—first encountered before he decided to write plays—flavored his entire dramatic canon.

While reading Synge's plays and the prefaces, the young O'Neill encountered a methodology of turning observations and experiences into artistic plays. Suddenly, O'Neill's experiences on the American Line, in bars, within his family, etc., all could have relevance and resonate—"express a life that has never found expression"—within a dramatic canon. Synge's dark view of Ireland, a hero-less landscape where thematic gains and victories come at the cost of agonizing loss, might have appealed to O'Neill's own view of life in the years following the Abbey Theatre's 1911 tour. The dead Synge and his living theater based on personal experience may have led O'Neill to write in a letter to George Pierce Baker, "I want to be an artist or nothing" (qtd. in Sheaffer 292).

As the young O'Neill found a methodology in Synge and populated his plays with common, hero-less people, an older and mature O'Neill recognized precedents in a play like The Playboy of the Western World, a work presenting bar folk and the barroom setting. O'Neill's shebeen play, A Touch of the Poet (1939), while ringing of the keening from Riders to the Sea, echoes The Playboy with its exploding dark comedy as O'Neill touches on one of Synge's favorite themes—the undermining of paternalism. The paternalism of O'Neill's Con Melody embodies the two sources of paternalism at work in The Playboy—that of the blood father as well as the paternal power dripping down to the Irish from the British military. In both Playboy and Poet, the publicans' daughters are assertive and attracted to their visiting young men (Christy and Simon), and expose the absurdity of their fathers who are clearly delusional to the point of intellectual numbness. Futhermore, Con's absurd service as an Irishman in Wellington's army—much like the Irish-born Wellington himself—echoes Synge's Old Mahon, who mimics bullying British army officers: "he a man'd be raging all times [. . .] like a gaudy officer you'd hear cursing and damning and swearing oaths" (34). At play's end, Christy joins his father imitating manhandling British army officers to convince himself that he has relevance after Pegeen banishes him: "Go with you is it? I will then, like a gallant Captain with his heathen slave. Go on now and I'll see you from this day stewing my oatmeal and washing my spuds, for I'm master of all fights from now" (110).

The Irish desire to find relevance and worth in the British military is, of course, greatly played by O'Neill's Con Melody, even to the point of being the play's joke. Con states in act 4 of himself as he gives up his pretense as the Major, "Be Christ, if he wasn't the joke av the world, the Major. He should have been a clown in a circus" (278). Even the clown of popular entertainment reverberates from The Playboy's Christy, who is repeatedly described as having "a little switch in his hand" (66), the switch being the short stick the clownish Punch always carries in the popular British entertainment "Punch and Judy." Being the butt of the joke for Con and Christy goes further, of course, as Con pompously adorns his old cavalry uniform in act 2 in hopes of redeeming and impressing himself to the Yankee Deborah Harford, who laughingly sees him as a drunken Irishman. In The Playboy, Christy plays at being a hero to Pegeen, but is ultimately nothing more than "the laughing joke of every female woman where four baronies meet" (69). Both characters are empty boasting would-be heroes, and arguably O'Neill borrows Christy's vanity of playing to a mirror for Con. Christy sees himself and comments, "Didn't I know rightly I was handsome" (44). Con flatters himself before his mirror image prior to reciting Bryon's heroic verse, "I still bear the unmistakable stamp of an officer and a gentleman" (36). Furthermore, in A Touch of the Poet O'Neill enters the debate among the Irish playwrights Synge, Shaw, and O'Casey over the use of the name Nora and what Nora may or should be in her representation, submissive or strong.[12]

Interestingly, when the Theatre Guild premiered O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1947, the American press reaction curiously echoed some of the Dublin presses' condemnations of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in 1907. The Columbus press, too, found Moon to be obscene due to its offensive language (Black 492). Similarly, Dublin's Sinn Fein newspaper wrote that Synge's play made use of "the language of the gutter" (Griffith, "The Abbey Theatre" 4). The Columbus press too found O'Neill's play to be an insult to the Irish, and, in Detroit, it was found to be a "slander on American motherhood" (qtd. in Black 492). Likewise, Dublin's Freeman's Journal charged that The Playboy was "an unmitigated protracted libel upon Irish peasant men, and worse still, upon Irish peasant girlhood" (qtd. in Hogan and Kilroy, Abbey Theatre 125). In fact, more than a few O'Neill plays were attacked in one form or another for being amoral—as were Synge's plays.[13] As police in Philadelphia closed The Playboy during the Abbey Theatre's 1911 tour for being a supposed obscenity, the Detroit police closed A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1947. Perhaps the latter closure reminded O'Neill of the 1911 closure, and, if so, did it provide a sense of accomplishment?[14]

Stephen Black argues that O'Neill in his late plays made no "concessions at all to public mood or current values" (492). While O'Neill could have learned this lesson, the lesson that lasting and relevant theater is based on plays of truth regardless of popular tastes, from any of the important dramatists that he read prior to 1916, the example of Synge (given the public disturbances Synge's plays created in New York and Philadelphia in 1911), had to have been prominent. Like Synge, O'Neill's dramatic canon was determined by the truth, as dictated by his methodology. In 1905 Synge noted privately, "I write of Irish country life I know to be true and I most emphatically will not change a syllable of it because B. or C. may think they know better than I do" (qtd. in Greene and Stephens 187).

A testament to the truthfulness of O'Neill's work is found in his late great plays, such as The Iceman Cometh (1939). Set in Harry Hope's bar, Iceman is a reconfiguration of O'Neill's down-and-out experiences in Jimmy-the-Priest's bar. Did Synge's Playboy also serve as a specific precedent for Iceman? In addition to the settings and the drunken publicans/bar-owners, both plays present visitors who are celebrated and received by the regulars of each bar as saviors. Harry Hope's patrons await Hickey's visit that covers their drinks and encourages their hopeless pipe dreams, while Synge's Christy Mahon is embraced with his tale of killing his oppressive, brutish father. The braggart Christy is part of Synge's thematic equation for Ireland—the uneasy union between Christianity and pagan or native culture (with the play's character Pegeen representing pagan like her name). Christy proves a false savior—a false Christ (as his name suggests) when all learn that his myth is truth-less. Similarly, the usually bragging Hickey fails to live up to his old or former myth. Instead of buoying the pipe dreams of Hope's patrons and leading them to alcoholic oblivion, Hickey tries to lead them to abandon their hopeless dreams as he confesses murdering his wife. Saviors and myths crash in both plays, with both publicans calling for more drinking at their plays' ends. As Synge had encountered Irish peasants within colonized Ireland awaiting a hero but willing to welcome a Christy Mahon instead, O'Neill had witnessed among the forgotten, numbing, guilt-ridden, redemption-less lives at Jimmy-the-Priest's—literally in the bowels of the American city—the false hopes and dreams of the best pals he ever had. O'Neill confronted his American audience with the horror of human ambition within the American landscape that promised so much hope for immigrants but offered so little to the dispossessed (the figurative and literal dispossessed). Synge confronted his Irish audience (in Ireland and America) with the failure of their pseudo, counter-revolutionary nationalism for as long as they mimicked the conservative paternalism of their colonizers.

An extremely important area of connection between O'Neill and Synge lies in the philosophical sense of the characters or people about whom they write. O'Neill surrounds his characters in fog, real and metaphorical fog, that clouds the individual but at the same time, or for some characters, comforts or enhances individuality via the fog's isolative properties. Arguably, this works through much of O'Neill's canon, but it is most prominent in his masterwork, Long Day's Journey into Night. The fog, particularly through the sound of the foghorn, haunts Mary Tyrone throughout the play, reminding her how lost she is to her addiction. In act 4, Edmund reveals his fascination with the fog:

The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can't see this house. You'd never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn't see but a few feet ahead. I didn't meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted—to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost. (795-96)

Arguably, the fog was how O'Neill saw his life, himself, and his characters. They are lost if they fight it, but can find some peace if they embrace it. In a sense, it is a process of giving one's self to nature, with nature symbolizing the outside forces one cannot control. Synge found this same philosophy on the Aran Islands, and it propelled him into writing plays for Ireland and helped him to deal with his constant poor health as the cancer that would kill him worked its way through his body while he wrote his master plays. Rather than fog, Synge wrote about characters in literal and figurative mist. In The Aran Islands, Synge comments on the islanders amid their difficult life: "One cannot think of these people drinking wine on the summit of this crumbling precipice, but their grey poteen [home-brewed potent whiskey], which brings a shock of joy to the blood, seems predestined to keep sanity in men who live forgotten in these worlds of mist" (24).

Synge's play, In the Shadow of the Glen, presents Nora, a rural Irishwoman, forgotten in a loveless, isolative, abusive marriage:

I do be thinking in the long nights, it was a big fool I was that time, Michael Dara, for what good is a bit of a farm with cows on it, and sheep on the back hills, when you do be sitting, looking out from a door the like of that door, and seeing nothing but the mists rolling down the bog, and hearing nothing but the wind crying out in the bits of broken trees were left from the great storm, and the streams roaring with the rain? (22)

Quite simply, the mists have led Nora to recognize the mistake of her marriage that will lead her to leave her husband by play's end. Both O'Neill and Synge, within their specific contexts, wrote of the forgotten and their quest for peaceful satisfaction.

Perhaps O'Neill's greatest philosophical connection to Synge is found in a brief but telling moment in Long Day's Journey into Night. In act 4, Edmund speaks of being at sea aboard a square rigger: "I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight [. . .] and the high dim-starred sky!" (811-12). In The Aran Islands, Synge writes of an evening when he sat on a pier on Innishmaan, of becoming one with nature: "The sense of solitude was immense. I could not see or realize my own body, and I seemed to exist merely in my perception of the waves and of the crying birds, and of the smell of seaweed" (148). Edmund, the young O'Neill's proxy, and Synge both found momentary peace in nature at sea through a methodology of participatory observation. When told by his father that he has the makings of a poet, Edmund in Long Day's Journey into Night says no: "I couldn't touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That's the best I'll ever do. [. . .] Well, it will be faithful realism, at least" (812). Despite Edmund's response, James Tyrone is right, Edmund as Eugene O'Neill has touched what he tried to say and is indeed a poet, even a lyrical poet. O'Neill like Synge was able to express his sense of his country's truthful life. Expressing the revelations via suffering and experience allowed Synge to poetically reflect the life of the Irish of his time who were forgotten and abused by Britain and Catholicism, while O'Neill was able to reflect the forgotten Americans abused by their society and pipe dreams of fitting in with it, finding humanity in a world that would have preferred to forget the bums' existence.

In the end, O'Neill's dramatic canon is tied to Synge's, specifically to the closing sentiment of Riders to the Sea, "What more can we want than that? . . . No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied" (12). The journey of O'Neill's characters is to be satisfied with their lives, including with that which they cannot control. Only through achieving satisfaction is there peace, and surely peace is what the Tyrones desire—whether they are capable of it or not.

NOTES

1. John Quinn was very familiar with the Abbey Theatre by 1911. He had been heavily involved as a supporter of the Dublin theater since the beginning of the century and avidly collected manuscripts from its leading writers such as W.B. Yeats and J.M. Synge, and assisted in securing their United States copyrights. Quinn also proved a valuable ally to the Abbey Theatre during its 1911 tour in his professional capacity as legal counsel.

2. The radical images, especially female images that Synge's plays presented within original Irish political and cultural context, separated and defined in Ireland the differing nationalist camps. The conservative nationalists attacked Synge's plays and ultimately portrayed themselves as non-radical. This was abundantly evident when the Irish Free State was formed in 1922, which pursued a counter-revolutionary agenda as it heavily aligned itself with conservative Catholic values, essentially erasing much of the radical and liberal goals of the leaders of Ireland's 1916 Easter Rising. The Free State's first president was the editor Arthur Griffith, who had been Synge's most vocal detractor. See my books Synge and Irish Nationalism: The Precursor to Revolution and Performative and Textual Imaging of Women on the Irish Stage, 1820-1920: M.A. Kelly to J.M. Synge and the Allgoods for more on the politics behind Synge's dramatic canon.

3. The Abbey Theatre rarely generated large audiences in Ireland during its first phase, 1904-1920. Generally, the Abbey attracted full houses when it toured London, English industrial cities like Birmingham and Manchester, and Scottish cities. (Each of these locations had interested Irish populations as well as those who enjoyed seeing new and non-commercial theater). Touring, early on for the Abbey, was financially rewarding. In Dublin, the Abbey's directors consciously sought not to be popular. However, full houses when touring were assured for the Abbey when controversy existed. Often, controversy was purposely pursued by the Abbey Theatre. See Lucy McDiarmid, "The Abbey and the Theatrics of Controversy, 1909-1915," A Century of Irish Drama: Widening the Stage, eds. Stephen Watt, Eileen Morgan, and Shakir Mustafa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000). The Abbey Theatre, specifically Lady Augusta Gregory, enlisted the assistance of the influential Bostonian art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner to assist in countering the organized protests that were meant to disrupt the 1911 American tour. Whether due to Gardner's assistance or not, the Boston runs (there were two during the tour) encountered little trouble. Gardner called on her friend, the former United States President Theodore Roosevelt to assist the Abbey's tour in New York. Roosevelt made numerous public statements in support of the Abbey Theatre's tour, especially in New York.

4. While Jig Cook and Susan Glaspell formed a small amateur theater group during the summer of 1915 in Provincetown, Cape Cod, which carried into the next summer, the group did not officially become the Provincetown Players until re-formed in New York in the autumn of 1916.

5. Specifically, Yeats wrote: "the old Abbey [scenery] principle: two colours and a third for accent, one colour always predominant in the background" (Memoirs 277). Such a principle grew from Yeats's fascination with Edward Gordon Craig's innovative, non-commercial scenic designs of the twentieth century's first decade. Other members of the early Abbey company also were initially fascinated with Craig's designs, and soon created their own simplistic style.

6. Throughout the 1904-1920 period, the Abbey Theatre experienced numerous secessions from its acting company. Prior to 1917, most of the secessions were countered by the training of new actors in its existing style; this even occurred after Frank Fay and his brother William left the Abbey in 1908. Following the Easter Rising rebellion in 1916, the Abbey suffered major secessions and losses of actors (some killed or imprisoned as a result of their involvement in the rebellion) that led to profound changes in the acting style of the company by 1920. Specifically, the company's style became less representational and more naturalistic, which was introduced by certain new or remaining actors and, arguably, the increased performances of plays by George Bernard Shaw from the fall of 1916. Prior to 1916, the Abbey had only regularly produced one Shaw play, The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet. Blanco Posnet premiered in 1909, after England's Lord Chamberlain banned its performance in Britain. The play was performed during the Abbey's 1911 American tour.

7. Fred O'Donovan took over the role of Christy Mahon in 1909, when The Playboy of the Western World was revived following Synge's March 1909 death. O'Donovan was known as one of the finest of early Abbey actors, having been trained in the Theatre's early acting style. The original Christy Mahon in 1907 was William Fay, who left the Theatre in 1908.

8. Dudley Digges was an original member of the Irish National Theatre Society in 1902, but left the company in 1903 in favor of a rival theater. Digges first came to the United States in 1904 to perform Irish plays at the St. Louis World's Fair. He earned respect from some Irish in America because he refused to perform Irish plays for the Fair that presented degrading stereotypes of the Irish. While en route back to Ireland, Digges, buoyed by his American-Irish supporters, decided to remain in New York where he pursued an acting career. The Irish National Theatre Society opened the Abbey Theatre in 1904 and became the National Theatre Society Ltd. in 1905.

9. During late 1911, Synge's works, including his plays and The Aran Islands, were published in the United States by John W. Luce and Company of Boston. Yeats was well aware of the negotiations between Synge's brothers and American publishers, and knew the American publication was coming in 1911. While Synge's plays were mostly published in Dublin in 1907 by Maunsel and Company, Synge's Collected Works were first published by Maunsel in 1910—leading the way for the American publications. Maunsel's editor was George Roberts, who had acted with the Abbey Theatre's predecessor, including in Synge's In the Shadow of the Glen in 1903. Roberts may have been involved in the negotiations with the John W. Luce Company.

10. Early Abbey Theatre actor Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh, who was in the 1904 premier of Riders to the Sea and was in the Abbey company during the 1911 US tour, recalled during the 1950s: "Many present producers ignore its [the Gaelic keening song's] value, and in [. . .] every case the play loses much of its tragedy; the poignancy of the climax is blunted. As Synge meant it, it provides a strange eerie background to the final speeches of Maurya, the old woman" (54)

11. The failure of Catholicism and Christianity that Synge portrays in Riders to the Sea also undoubtedly appealed to O'Neill, especially in what Edward Shaughnessy calls O'Neill's contention of "the God who has been lost" (Down the Nights 75). The failure of the Church in Riders is portrayed through the unanswered prayers of Maurya and the absent priest who refuses to stop Bartley from taking his horses on the sea. This is epitomized in the priest's comment that is related by the daughter Nora, "`let you not be afraid. Herself does be saying prayers half through the night, and the Almighty God won't leave her destitute,' says he, `with no son living'"(4). Perhaps the failure of religion, or as Synge viewed it, the failure of the foreign religion for Ireland, was taken up by O'Neill in his own way during the 1920s when his "every new play in these years was an attempt to answer the question of life's meaning without God" (Shaughnessy, Down the Nights 66).

12. Synge, Shaw, and O'Casey all used the name Nora to present their views of Irish womanhood in their plays In the Shadow of the Glen (1903), John Bull's Other Island (1904), and The Plough and the Stars (1926), respectively. Arguably, one can interpret these different Noras as a debate, of sorts, between these Irish playwrights over Ireland and the Irish woman. O'Neill's use of Nora in A Touch of the Poet may also be a conscious use of the name in regard to this debate—just as Synge's use of Nora was his effort to Irish-ize Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House. While Synge's Nora is assertive and strikes for her independence by leaving her abusive husband in 1903 Ireland when marital separation was extremely taboo, Shaw's Nora is distinctly submissive as she depends on men to define her. O'Casey's Nora, too, is submissive, as her world explodes in political violence. Interestingly, O'Neill's Nora at first glance appears submissive, but arguably she is ultimately stronger than her husband who is certainly frail at the end of the day. While Synge, Shaw, and O'Casey are dealing in victims or non-victims, O'Neill's vision is one in which all are victims. Perhaps this is the difference between Irish theater in Ireland and Irish theater in the United States. One can add that the heavy influence from The Playboy of the Western World on O'Neill's writing of A Touch of the Poet mirrored Synge's re-working of existing plays into his own: Ibsen's A Doll's House into In the Shadow of the Glen, George Bernard Shaw's John Bull's Other Island into The Playboy of the Western World, and W.B. Yeats's Deirdre into Deirdre of the Sorrows. A few months following the 1907 premier of The Playboy, Synge wrote to an American journalist stating: "I am half inclined to try a play on Deirdre—it would be amusing to compare it with Yeats'" (Synge Letters, Vol. II 56). Synge re-worked existing plays into his own as his observations of Irish life dictated to him a greater truth than what was expostulated in such existing plays. He knew that what he witnessed first hand was a truth. As O'Neill seems to have transformed many elements of The Playboy into a mid-twentieth-century American context, O'Neill follows Synge's tradition. Synge's tradition, in turn, followed a native Irish tradition of itinerant bards. Perhaps this means that O'Neill belongs to the Irish tradition.

13. Specifically during the 1920s, there were efforts to close O'Neill's The Hairy Ape when "it moved uptown" in New York (Black 290), and Boston authorities forced a road company of Strange Interlude to perform in Quincy, Massachusetts rather than in Boston. Morality charges were leveled at both productions.

14. T.C. Murray's Birthright also provoked charges of indecent language from the American press when performed during the Abbey Theatre's 1911 tour. The Boston Post, a Catholic newspaper associated at that time mostly with the Boston Irish Catholic immigrant community, charged that the play's obscene language and depicted actions were "beastly, and unnatural, [. . . to] degrade, and defame a people and all they hold sacred and dear" (qtd. in Shaughnessy, Eugene O'Neill 35).

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_____. A Long Day's Journey into Night. Complete Plays 1932-1943. Vol. 3. 713-828.

_____. A Touch of a Poet. Complete Plays 1932-1943. Vol. 3. 181-281.

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_____. Eugene O'Neill in Ireland: The Critical Response. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988.

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_____. The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, Vol. II: 1907-1909. Ed. Ann Saddlemyer. Oxford: Clarendon, 1984.

_____. In the Shadow of the Glen. The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays. 13-26.

_____. The Playboy of the Western World. Boston: John W. Luce, 1911.

_____. The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

_____. Preface. The Playboy of the Western World. v-vi.

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_____. The Tinker's Wedding. Boston: John W. Luce, 1911.

Yeats, William Butler. "Preface to the First Edition of The Well of Saints, Mr. Synge and His Plays." The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays. 52-56.