Editor's Foreword
2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/eugeoneirevi.37.1.v
ISSN2161-4318
Autores Resumo"Born in a goddamn hotel room and dying in a hotel room." These often-quoted, deathbed words of Eugene O'Neill perfectly capture a pathetic irony of America's most accomplished playwright—the homelessness of a many-mansioned celebrity author. He does not mention that both hotel rooms in question were first-class residential suites, the first with a view of Times Square, the last looking on the Charles River in Boston. He occupied many rooms in between, but with the exception of a few, notably the one upstairs from Jimmie the Priest's, they were all decent accommodations. We need not picture our Nobel Prize–winning playwright coping with thin towels and a Gideon Bible at some EconoLodge or Dew Drop Inn, and even the most rustic of houses in which he lived, at Peaked Hill Bar, came to him with exquisite tableware left behind by its former owner, Mabel Dodge, and a luminous interior paint job courtesy of Robert Edmond Jones. Monte Cristo Cottage was no Newport mansion, but for a house on the shore it was spacious, well crafted, and on the right avenue.The implication that he lacked a home, in short, does not bear out, at least in any way that architecture and furnishings can measure. O'Neill's sense of homelessness had, instead, to be measured by the heart—feelings of not belonging, shattered security, and absent connection. His plays insistently uncover, and shelter, these feelings in characters familiar and strange. His life story records a series of gestures to repair his interrupted sense of home. Out of that uneasy sense of place (topos) came a topic of critical investigation of his life and work. As far back as 2006, the good people at McFarland sensed the emergence of new ways of reading the self-reflexive plays of O'Neill—major and minor—in conversation with the tortuous pathway of his life. They approached Cynthia McCown, the O'Neill Society's long-time board member and inveterate organizer of conference panels, with the idea of putting together an anthology.By 2010 she had a working title, "'Homemade': Eugene O'Neill and Domesticity," and she began collecting essays. The topic morphed a bit with some of the submissions, but there were numerous similar publishing projects developing in this period, including another McFarland anthology, one by Palgrave Macmillan, Robert M. Dowling's multiauthored Critical Companion, and Steven Bloom's multiauthored Critical Insights. Furthermore, the O'Neill Review was back in operation after a short hiatus. So, at last, the McCown/McFarland volume did not come to fruition, and instead the core of that work has come home, as it were, to the O'Neill Society through this journal, with other elements possibly to arrive in future issues. The first five essays in this issue were all written around 2010–11 with the idea that they would be used in the anthology, which had acquired a new working title: "Searching for the Magic Door: Eugene O'Neill, Domesticity and Dispossession." We are grateful to McCown and McFarland for instigating and preliminarily shaping this project. In the next phase, the authors have done excellent revisionary work, bringing their essays up to date and altering citations to our cherished Chicago style (deep dish).Andrew Lee's essay on More Stately Mansions at one point suitably preceded his essay on the image of the Irish in O'Neill, which appeared in the O'Neill Review in 2014, and now it aptly follows it with a minute examination of what became of the marriage of the Irish Melody family into the blueblood Harfords. He develops his argument in response to Laurin Porter's reading of More Stately Mansions, which appeared in the 1995 O'Neill Review. Porter had initially intended to follow up on her own essay in the McCown volume, and now we can hope that she will offer us her further thoughts in response to Lee's reinterpretation.Patrick Maley counters some of the critical abuse taken by the 2009 production of Desire Under the Elms with an illuminating study of how Robert Falls, as director, found extraordinary means to jar loose that play, which had been stuck in timeworn assumptions. Falls's dwelling on a six-and-a-half-minute song by Bob Dylan—"Not Dark Yet"—was a crucial move in allowing the play to be dark, now. O'Neill's outlook on normative domesticity is shown to be as pessimistic as ever.Rupendra Guha Majumdar brings his Rabindranath Tagorean poetic sensibility to the same play and also O'Neill's final play, A Moon for the Misbegotten, unveiling O'Neill's insistence on the Jungian anima figure as a way of articulating his confused feelings about his own mother. The analogy leads us to reflect that both Abbie Putnam and Josie Hogan were, as Mary Tyrone says at the end of Long Day's Journey, "so happy for a time."Yuji Omori sees Mary Tyrone as "Wandering About in the Moonless Darkness," a displaced spirit, like a shite figure in a Noh play, who seeks resolution and release from a world that has not used her well. Patriarchy and materialism have given this "swan maiden" little chance to recover her fine feathers, which she understands as anything but misbegotten. The misbegetting was still to come and perhaps should be interpreted as a term for what O'Neill did in writing a play.My own contribution to "the home" grew out of a paper I delivered at the 2011 O'Neill conference in New York—that most original, most abject, and most contested home of O'Neill—at the point when I was turning my attention from Agnes Boulton to Carlotta Monterey, both of whom were diarists in a limited way, like O'Neill. I noticed that little had been said of those diaries and the peculiar way they perform as historical documents of daily life.Also in this issue, Laura Shea has moved beyond her invaluable 2008 work on the stage history of A Moon for the Misbegotten (see the McFarland list below) to look at the troubled history of how A Touch of the Poet took to the New York stage. Long before he died, O'Neill came to see Broadway as an unwelcome home for his plays, and the posthumous record confirms that perception, and yet his plays live on, animating the worldwide stage, as the reviews and articles in this issue prove.This is a good moment to highlight the important contribution that McFarland has made to O'Neill studies over the years, including a recent arrival: 2015: The Ecological Eugene O'Neill: Nature's Veiled Purpose in the Plays by Robert Baker-White (to be reviewed in the next issue)2013: Intertextuality in American Drama: Critical Essays on Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller and Other Playwrights, edited by Drew Eisenhauer and Brenda Murphy2011: Eugene O'Neill and His Early Contemporaries, edited by Eileen J. Herrmann and Robert M. Dowling2011: Part of a Long Story: "Eugene O'Neill as a Young Man in Love" by Agnes Boulton, edited by William Davies King2008: "A Moon for the Misbegotten" on the American Stage: A History of the Major Productions by Laura Shea2004: Eugene O'Neill: A Playwright's Theatre by Egil Törnqvist2002: Jason Robards Remembered: Essays and Recollections, put together by the Eugene O'Neill Society, edited by Stephen A. Black, Zander Brietzke, Jackson R. Bryer, and Sheila Hickey Garvey2001: The Aesthetics of Failure: Dynamic Structure in the Plays of Eugene O'Neill by Zander Brietzke1997: Struggle, Defeat or Rebirth: Eugene O'Neill's Vision of Humanity by Thierry DubostI include here only the volumes that directly allude to O'Neill in the title, but the press has also played a major role in the study of Susan Glaspell and other topics in American drama.
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