Editor's Foreword

This issue of the Eugene O'Neill Review, compiled from March to November, 2020 …But which “issue,” or, really, issue in what sense? One in a series of periodical publications, obviously. Also a fraught topic, a birth, or an outlet? An emotional effusion or an earthier eructation, blunt and discomfiting? An emergence or, downstream, “the action of flowing, going, or coming out,” per the OED's jingly entry? A discharge—an unseemly noun that, verbed, gestures nobly at duty and obligation?A “chain of evidence.” “Fortune or luck in an undertaking.” A minting. Both an emanation and “the end, termination, or close of something.”A fluidity: a clefter of old rock.All, might we agree? The times ask this of us. We have issues.EOR 42.1 is not diluvial or unitarian or even particularly loud. Like its predecessors, it records a diversity of grapplings with a playwright equally disdainful of ossified systems and inartful assaults on them. The sober study of Eugene O'Neill is a prophylaxis against what one of Tom Stoppard's characters calls “moral exhibitionism.”But. But. This one feels different. Maplessly emergent. Re-runneled. Freer with its discontents. How could it not be, given the span of dates at … issue? I submitted the previous issue to our publisher in mid-April 2020, shortly after the theatres went dark. People in all but a few states were already sheltering at home. The numbers were horrifying, and Breonna Taylor was dead. I didn't need to invite the zeitgeist into the journal. I just needed to welcome it when it arrived.Throughout the spring, I gathered commitments from theatre-makers to share their responses to an O'Neill play that they had not previously or recently read. The last piece of this issue's Practitioners' Colloquium fell into place on May 4, when Octavio Solis signed on to revisit The Emperor Jones. Reading O'Neill's “curiously dark tale of a toppled tinpot despot” would soon become more challenging as “George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, and the stark social/racial inequities laid before us by COVID-19” crowded into the nation's consciousness. As a college student, Solis had “responded deeper” to The Emperor Jones than to The Iceman Cometh. This time, he writes, Jones “beg[an] to breathe again” as he filtered the play through his “present-day biases and ‘triggers.’” O'Neill gets props but not a pass. O'Neillians get a meditation on an artist's maturing relationship with a play under stress but “breath[ing]” anew, if, Solis suggests, sometimes raspingly.Also in the Practitioners' Colloquium, Dana Schultes finds “Anna Christie” timely for its characters' status as immigrants. Might “lightly adapt[ing] the text to allow the characters to be from Haiti or Ecuador” allow a contemporary audience better to appreciate this play, she asks? (I'm a “yea.”) But Schultes keeps the focus on an Anna “torn apart by society for simply trying to survive.” Her ideas about acting and directing that character testify to decades of work on both sides of the footlights. Yvette Nolan also selected “Anna Christie.” Nolan, whose channeling of the murdered Mi'kmaq activist Anna Mae Aquash informs her remarkable play Annie Mae's Movement, entitles her present contribution “I Called Myself Anna Christie.” The bond feels real and tight. Her Anna is long on righteous misandry and splendid in her vanquishing of the play's sodden, violent men. As a First Nations woman in Canada—where, we learn, Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls are identifed en masse by a familiar acronym—Nolan appreciates “how a lack of choice and opportunity puts women at risk.” O'Neill “seems to understand this.” But Nolan adds that Anna has to escape a misogynist trap that the playwright has helped set.Michael Paller nudges the Practitioners' Colloquium back toward the disinterested criticism that has tended to characterize the EOR throughout the years. Paller's presentation of Beyond the Horizon as the work of a playwright “yet to learn how to develop the material he's invented” emphasizes the resoluteness of O'Neill's move into what he called “simon-pure tragedy” while tacitly countering hyperbolic assessments of that play's achievement. Beyond the Horizon as “a bow in the direction of Peer Gynt, had Peer Gynt lowered his horizons and stayed home” wraps up an astute examination of the play's Ibsenite moorings.This issue's longer essays, both of which I first read before all Hell broke loose, also occupy a critical mainstream that the moment has deepened. Zander Brietzke's bold essay on O'Neill's indebtedness to the Ashcan artist George Bellows in Beyond the Horizon, Bread and Butter, and, more briefly, The Great God Brown and Long Day's Journey Into Night covers great swaths of material without ever losing sight of its argument. So EOR 42.1 gives us contrapuntal Robert Mayos: Paller's Gynt manqué and Brietzke's day-late-and-dollar-short rebel against fate. When Brietzke's Robert crawls out of his window in Horizon's penultimate scene, he is both “break[ing] the picture frame through which he had viewed the world as a sickly child” and enacting O'Neill's response to the canvases that Bellows had amassed in the rustic home the two young artists briefly shared. Bellows's unpeopled landscapes “invite the viewer on a journey that seems to stop shy of the horizon point”; Brietzke wonders if “O'Neill, who would later present the individual's struggle to attain significance in a hostile world, [might] have looked at the series of paintings and questioned what lay beyond.” Sebastian Williams follows with an original and persuasive investigation of “animal ethics” in O'Neill's “Last Will and Testament of Silverdene Emblem O'Neill.” A work long recognized as lovely becomes substantial as well. Who'd have thought that canophilia and postmodern theory could snuggle so?“Streaming” seems an apt contribution to the metaphor du jour, although one wishes that COVID-19 were not prerequisite to its topicality. Cheryl Black discusses “liveness” in the Metropolitan Playhouse's virtual series of spring and summer readings. She focuses on Zoom readings of The Rope and Where the Cross Is Made but attends throughout to the “interactive” features that Zoom enables. Her conclusion conveys a welcome buoyancy: “The Playhouse's interaction with its virtual audience managed to create the illusion of shared space; to underscore the actuality of shared time; and … to foster a crucial sense of connection and community during a time of social isolation, thereby reaffirming the power of theatre to remind us of our common humanity.”Laura Shea augments Black's contribution with a review of the Virtual Playhouse's September 2020 reading of Susan Glaspell's Woman's Honor. The play's themes sound clearly across hyperspace, Shea asserts, buttressed by Rifka Miler's creative settings and director Rachel Langdon's insertion of Photoshopped crowd imagery at play's end. Innovation is again front and center in Paul Meltzer's review of the virtual Tao House script-in-hand productions of The Web, Recklessness, and Abortion. Meltzer commends the socially distanced “entrances and exits, combinations of characters, and action” that allowed director Eric Fraisher Hayes to enliven the sometimes static Zoom experience. No one is pretending that Zoom can “replicate the magical spell that's cast when an audience shares space with live performers,” to quote Meltzer, but all three reviewers celebrate the survival of creativity in a time of loss.Like Hayes, whose trilogy has reached nearly 700 viewers to date, the Metropolitan Playhouse's artistic director, Alex Roe, has fought crisis with community. Roe has built an online audience of more than 10,000 viewers with his months-long program of out-of-copyright plays, most pertinently those by the youngish O'Neill and other Provincetown Players. Roe's own contribution to EOR 42.1 mixes nuts-and-bolts comments on virtual production with deep thoughts on what the theatre has suddenly become. His has been a voice of singular eloquence since March 2020 when, six days after the implementation of New York's “stay at home” order, the Playhouse moved into to hyperspace with a reading of Alice Gerstenberg's He Said and She Said. Week after week throughout the spring and summer, Roe prefaced his company's increasingly sophisticated productions with appeals to love, compassion, and activism. His frontline account should become a go-to source for scholars of pandemic theatre, whose arrival we await.Herman D. Farrell III's Lost & Found entry seems “big” to me: a long-rumored but not previously discovered letter from Tennessee Williams to Eugene O'Neill following the opening of The Iceman Cometh. Williams was not often magnanimous in his appraisals of fellow artists. As Farrell demonstrates, however, his praise for O'Neill's script telegraphs both kindness and critical acumen. Farrell's recreation of O'Neill's state of mind in November 1946 allows him to argue that Williams's letter helped relieve the “let-down” that O'Neill was experiencing after the tepid response to his new play. I thank Dr. Farrell for making this important document available first in the Eugene O'Neill Review.This issue issues two more tributary tributaries. Noelia Hernando-Real's Used Books review of Linda Ben-Zvi's 2005 biography of Susan Glaspell affirms the book's durability while tactfully pointing out the odd age spot; and Robert Baker-White praises William Davies King's new edition of The Iceman Cometh for “provid[ing] context, insight, interpretation, and historical background to guide the reader in masterful fashion through the complexity of O'Neill's difficult text.” Now more than ever I am struck by the decency of contributors who take time to remark on the achievements of their colleagues. This, too, “foster[s] a crucial sense of connection and community during a time of social isolation.”That EOR 42.1 will issue into a world quite different from the one in which it was compiled seems certain. Perhaps, in the manner of Jack Arnold in Shell Shock or Stephan Murray in The Straw, we'll be emerging from the crucible of disease newly determined and, if lessened, lessoned, although admittedly O'Neill's canon provides an abundance of less salubrious possibilities. Regardless, when I look back on the spring and summer of 2020, I will remember more than sickness and mendacity. I will remember the succor I found in fine minds, well-chosen words, and reasoned commentary on engaging subjects from Ashcan to Zoom. I will remember tough topical reckonings with our canonical drama, immersed in the “now, very now” but swelling “the best that has been thought and said.” I will remember the new “liveness” and the creative energies it occasioned, even as I hope to witness its recession. I will remember the kindness displayed by a young playwright to an elder. I will remember the generosity of contributors who shared themselves when incentives to selfishness were abundant and near to hand.As the author of that letter to O'Neill was fond of saying, en avant! I take this to mean “let's flow and go and cleft some old rock!”Thank you.

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