Arts Reporting: New Yorker Publishing Lost O'Neill Play

From the Guardian newspaper, UK:

Eugene O'Neill 'lost' play published, 91 years on

Rediscovered text of Exorcism, a one-act play drawing on O'Neill's suicide attempt aged 24, appears in New Yorker

Matt Trueman, guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 18 October

A lost play by Eugene O'Neill, arguably America's greatest dramatist, has been published by the New Yorker magazine. [ALT note: not yet available on-line]

The one-act play, entitled Exorcism, was staged in March 1920 by the Provincetown Players, but, according to the New Yorker's theatre critic John Lahr, O'Neill destroyed what he believed to be every copy of the play in order to save his father, celebrated romantic actor James O'Neill, embarrassment after a stroke.

But a copy of the play was discovered earlier this year in the possession of screenwriter Philip Yordan, who had received it from O'Neill's ex-wife Agnes Boulton. Yale University Press will publish the script next spring.

Exorcism's resurfacing is significant for historical as well as artistic reasons, since it sheds light on the playwright's own suicide attempt aged 24. Written seven years later, Exorcism centres on Ned Malloy, a 24-year-old with "an appearance of conflict, of inner disharmony," who takes an overdose, before being discovered by his friend Jimmy. In the final moments of the play, Ned exclaims: "The Past is finally cremated. I feel reborn, I tell you!"

Read more at www.guardian.co.uk . . . .

Upcoming: A Celebration of Eugene O'Neil's Birthday, Sidetrack Productions at the Hyde Park Theatre,October 16

A general invitation received from Sidetrack Productions

(Michael Stuart said it's okay to pass it along!):

You are invited to celebrate

Eugene O'Neill's 123rd Birthday

Sunday, October 16, 2011

at the Hyde Park Theatre,

511 W. 43rd Street near Guadalupe (click for map)

with a free (*) staged reading of

Hughie

done by Michael Stuart and Barry Miller at 5 p.m.,

followed by cake and carousing

(* donations gratefully accepted)

(if you RSVP to sidetrackmail@aol.com, we'll be sure to have enough cake!)

{This project is presented under the Actors Equity Members Project Code}

[illustration: Eugene O'Neill drawn by Al Hirshfeld]

ALT note: Here's Amazon.com's description of Hughie:

Hughie, the only surviving manuscript from a series of eight one-act monologue plays that O'Neill planned in 1940, was completed in 1941. In the play, only two characters appear on stage; Hughie, the third and most important one, is dead. It is Hughie's innocence, gullibility, and need to believe in a far more exciting existence than he ever knew that gives purpose to the shabby livs of the two who remain. O'Neill here again writes of the defeated and the courage that comes by way of illusions.

Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill, Ar Rude at the Off Center, May 27 - June 7

Eugene O'Neill did not want you to see this astonishing, bleak and deeply moving drama. When he died in a Boston hotel room in 1953, he had left it locked up in the vaults of his publisher Random House with instructions that it was not to be opened for 25 years after his death, and that it was never to be performed.

Instead, his third wife Carlotta Monterrey, who had fought with him and protected him and nursed him since 1928, inherited the rights. She deeded it to Yale University with the stipulation that proceeds be used to build a drama library and to award scholarships for drama.

Long Day's Journey Into Night was first produced at the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theatre in February, 1956. The venue was apt. O'Neill's realistic, sometimes naturalistic drama shared much with the theatrical traditions of Strindberg and Ibsen. In 1936 the Nobel Committee had awarded O'Neill the Nobel Prize for literature, the only Nobel given to an American dramatist. The Broadway premiere at the Helen Hayes Theatre in November, 1956, received Tony awards for Best Play and Best Actor in a Play, as well as the New York Drama Critics' Circle awards for Best Play.

O'Neill wrote 19 one-act plays between 1914 and 1919, drawing extensively on his experiences as a seafarer, and over his career, a total of 32 full-length plays. His work was instrumental in converting the carefree, largely brainless American stage into a medium for serious literature. These were powerful stories, usually on dark subjects. Many drew on Greek mythology. Only one, Ah, Wilderness!, was a comedy, a fantasy version of the years of his youth in New London, Connecticut, as the bookish son of a successful actor.

Long Day's Journey into Night takes exactly that setting. The characters are his parents, his brother, himself and an indolent maid. Their last name is changed to Tyrone, but not to protect any innocents. The action of this one long day in the summer of 1911 includes the moment of confirmation that the younger brother Edmund, the surrogate for O'Neill, has tuberculosis ("consumption") and shows us his mother Mary, lonely and desperate as she gives in to her addiction to morphine.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com. . . .