Get your rocks off O'Neill! The aborted Broadway run and sudden closing of Desire Under the Elms at the St. James Theatre might have been a referendum on Director Robert Falls' refusal to see the trees for the stones. Given the bleak scene, he simply had to cut the last line of the play, didn't he? The Cabot farm was not jim-dandy in this production! Instead, Falls focused on the opposition between hard and soft at the expense of other dynamics within the dramatic text. Indeed, Falls trimmed the play and excised the breaks between its three parts in order to pursue and fulfill his personal vision of the old play (1924) for a contemporary audience in the twenty-first century. His New York audience, at least, seemed to reject what he had to offer.

 

There are, however, many reasons that the play failed to delight the patrons of the Great White Way. Publicity for the production was not very good or creative. The play itself is difficult and not produced often. O'Neill plays have appeared on Broadway steadily during the last decade, but mostly the late greats such as The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten (twice). After the production was shut out of Tony Award nominations, eclipsed by Mary Stuart, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Waiting for Godot, and The Norman Conquests (the winner), the producers elected to close the play much sooner than they had planned. Desire Under the Elms, too, was perhaps a victim of its own success in Chicago and another example of an out-of-town play, ballyhooed for brilliance in a regional theater, which failed to impress a New York audience. Or, perhaps the continued collaborative team of Falls and Brian Dennehy, relatively fresh from Broadway kudos in Long Day's Journey into Night (2003), could not excite the crowd upon their return engagement. Such is the fickle nature of the commercial theater.

While some of Falls' directorial choices may have disappointed us, we are certain that O'Neill's play requires radical treatment. Just as the play itself came to life during O'Neill's experimental decade of the 1920s, so, too, must directors experiment boldly, creatively, theatrically in order to give the play new life today. In short, we do not think that Falls went far enough with his interpretation of the play. We greatly admire and respect what he was trying to do, however, and his courage to confront the big challenge: how to make the play interesting for an audience seeing the play today—at a certain time, at a certain place, in a certain manner. It is clear to us that Falls would have had no better chance at success if he had tried to conform slavishly to O'Neill's specific and detailed notes.

Without planning as such, this issue of the journal pursues questions of interpretation similar to those faced by Falls. Turn to Thierry Dubost's account of a recent production of Hughie in Paris, for example, and marvel at the twisting of that play into a very successful event, due largely to the star power of the actor/director. Was it a faithful production of the play we know? Clearly not. Was it successful? Absolutely. Was it a more radical departure from O'Neill's text than Falls' Desire? Yes, again! In the performance review section, read Madeline Smith's account of A Moon for the Misbegotten at the Pittsburgh Public Theater. That production certainly did not adhere to O'Neill's lengthy stage directions regarding the setting or the character descriptions. Yet, the casting seemed in tune to the spirit of those directions. How did the director arrive at such decisions? Luck? Perhaps. More likely, though, she matched qualities inherent in the text with qualities of her principal actors that transcended and even contradicted surface appearances. And aren't appearances what that wonderful play trades in for dramatic and theatrical paydirt? Regarding Moon, we recommend checking out Laura Shea's new production history (reviewed this volume) of that play. Kurt Eisen admires Shea's meticulous scholarship that suggests that the interpretive problems facing contemporary directors and producers of that play have, in fact, always been present.

In our coverage of the O'Neill festival of plays at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Erika Rundle discusses the challenge of staging the ending of The Hairy Ape with respect to the director of The Hypocrites' decision not to represent the gorilla onstage; Jeff Kennedy and Timothy Dugan voice pro-and-con opinions regarding the Goodman's Desire Under the Elms; and Katie N. Johnson applauds the energetic and comic Strange Interlude as imagined and produced by the Neo-Futurists. While we offer no review of the one-act sea plays produced by Brazil's Companhia Triptal de Teatro, we encourage our readers to see their productions of The Long Voyage Home and Bound East for Cardiff in full on Harley Hammerman's excellent eOneillTV at eoneill.com. Also featured at the festival was the Wooster Group's much-traveled production of The Emperor Jones (see Johan Callens' insightful article in Vol. 26 [2004]) and Ivo Van Hove's slick and clean and hard, modern, modish production of Mourning Becomes Electra from Amsterdam. This director, of course, to the alarm of many, also produced a racy, sexy, wild production of More Stately Mansions in New York a few seasons ago. Anyone who endured the New Group's production of MBE this year at Theatre Row in New York will appreciate the daring integrity of Mr. Van Hove.

While the productions above take license with O'Neill's texts, the spread of essays in the first part of our book compares our playwright to some unlikely figures and events: Irish playwright Brian Friel; English novelist and sometime critic D.H. Lawrence; Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard; and the development of narrative cinema in the first part of the last century. Does each essay stretch the credulity of the reader regarding a real relationship with O'Neill? After all, Lawrence did not even choose to include O'Neill in his criticism. We feel that these comparisons, however, do what the daring productions of O'Neill do: they ask us to think about a playwright we think we know in new ways. And, if we do that, we have probably done enough.

Does such scholarship signal that there is nothing more to do or say? We do not think so. We trust that the greatness of O'Neill's drama will inspire us to see something new each time we return to him with fresh eyes and open hearts. Looking for something new to say? Richard Eaton and Madeline Smith, who also authored a fine piece that begins our journal on the life of Carlotta's first husband, have just published a chapter, "Eugene O'Neill," in Prospects for the Study of American Literature (II), edited by Richard Kopley and Barbara Cantalupo (New York: AMS, 2009). Their detailed article surveys O'Neill Studies at the present time and might inspire new paths for intrepid scholars.

Whether we are writing about O'Neill, working on one of his plays in production, or seeing a performance in a theater, we cherish our naiveté that allows us to embrace an aesthetic experience in a childlike way. Let us lose ourselves in the work! As we bump along with our little lives, not knowing what is next, but often fearing what lies at the end, we delight in life's analogues of artistic expression in which all has been wrought for our enjoyment.