Dramaturging the Dead: A Dramaturg’s Experience Excavating Eugene O’Neill’s Exorcism

“Art’s job is to enable people to slow down and be with—to be in the presence of—Others and different but human experience,” says playwright Edward St. Mast.¹ Or, as David Mamet more reverently puts it: “We are all here to undergo a communion.”² Every spring the MFA candidates in design at San Diego State University collaborate in a juried evaluation of their creative work. Each team is comprised of a set designer, lighting designer, costume designer, and, at the helm of the group, a director. In 2012 I was invited to participate as dramaturg, supplementing and enhancing the process, which culminated in a design presentation and performance of Eugene O’Neill’s Exorcism.

This article chronicles our process and resulting jury discussion, and seeks to defend the choice to publicly restore a play O’Neill attempted to destroy. My analysis reads our presentation as a performance of O’Neill’s traumatic memory. As such, it connects our collaborative exploration with Joseph Roach’s theories on the performance of memory as well as theories of trauma proposed by Theresa J. May, Sophie Tamas, and Judith Herman. According to Roach:

The social process of memory and forgetting, familiarly known as culture, may be carried out by a variety of performance events, from stage plays to sacred rites, from carnivals to the invisible rituals of everyday life. To perform in this sense means to bring forth, to make manifest, and to transmit. To perform also means, though often more secretly, to reinvent.³

A performance of Eugene O’Neill’s Exorcism transmits a survivor’s story, begging the question of whether we, as artists, have the right to tell the story for him after his death.

In 1920 O’Neill exposed an intimate personal trauma when he premiered his one-act play Exorcism at the Provincetown Playhouse. The piece received at least one encouraging review, from Alexander Woollcott of the New York Times; however, O’Neill pulled the play and sought to have every copy of it destroyed. It cannot be known with certainty whether the author did this because he thought the work was unworthy, because he feared repercussions within his family, or because he realized that it revealed something he preferred to conceal. In any case, the piece could be said to have died there and then, until ninety-three years later when it came to life among the papers of screenwriter Philip Yordan.

“The sooner all memory of it dies the better pleased I’ll be,” O’Neill declared of Exorcism; the experimental work of the 2012 San Diego State University student directors, actors, and designers sought to prove exactly the opposite. We embraced the task of presenting this intimate piece with reverent humility, focusing our efforts on the connection we hoped to make between the experiences of the playwright in 1912 and those of our student audience in 2012. In his essay “The Essence of Theatre,” Eugenio Barba discusses the importance of this approach to performance, saying, “For me the word ‘spectator’ has never evoked merely those who are brought together by a performance. My true spectators have been absences that are forcefully present, most of them nonliving: not only the dead, but also those not yet born.”⁴ For Barba this reevaluation of the term “spectator” is key to the evocative, humanizing power of theater. It connects artists with audiences separated by time and provides them with the opportunity to discover more about themselves through this interaction with another. Nearly one hundred years later, we presented Exorcism with the hope that, rather than defying the author’s wishes, we might be able to provide O’Neill with a kind of posthumous empathy.

In approaching the task of bringing O’Neill’s Exorcism to life, our team was respectfully nervous. Here was a play that, due to its sudden erasure, left no dramaturgical trail behind it. I decided that for the purposes of our investigation our best hope was to take O’Neill’s word as historical fact and delve into that moment of his...