Miles to Babylon: A Play in Two Acts by Ann Harson (review)

Like many playwrights, Ann Harson has chosen to dramatize an important occurrence in someone’s life about which little is known. She takes as a premise what Eugene O’Neill revealed about his mother in his masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey Into Night: that she struggled with a seemingly incurable addiction to morphine. Harson knew, too, that Mary Ellen (Ella) Quinlan O’Neill eventually freed herself from that crippling, twenty-five-year illness through a prayerful visit to a convent. Anything between those two facts is fair game for a dramatist. The playwright only needs to convince the audience that the imagined events really could have happened. In her preface Harson writes that she created this full-length play about Ella O’Neill “to vindicate her from her son’s scathing depiction in his famous play,” to write a drama with strong roles for middle-aged women, and “to explore a setting and way of life that is seldom witnessed by the outside world” (1–2). She achieves the first two goals; the third is problematic.

Harson finished Miles to Babylon in time for a reading on October 16, 1988, the centennial of Eugene O’Neill’s birth. The play debuted in Monte Cristo Cottage, his childhood home in New London, Connecticut. After further readings and several awards, it was produced in New York in 2006 and London in 2008. The few reviews I found were generally laudatory. In a review of the 2006 New York production, which is reprinted in this edition, Robert S. McLean calls it “an interesting and gripping drama” (133) as well as “moving and credible” (134).

Since plays are written primarily to be staged—O’Neill’s contrary opinion aside—a review of a published version could render a disservice to a play and its author. On the other hand, because productions are ephemeral and all too rare, a published script may be the only way to become familiar with a dramatic work. The reader’s experience begins with the book itself. Miles to Babylon is an attractive paperback with large, clear type and seven production photos, but the organization diverges from the expected sequence. Information about previous productions and cast appear not in front as is usually done but in the back, followed by McLean’s review. The book begins with a preface by the author and a brief introduction by O’Neill biographer Stephen A. Black. These lead logically into the play but three lists (of costumes, sound, and props) break the mood for the reader—one reason why such technical details are usually presented in the back, if at all. “Cast and Settings,” which appears next, indicates four scenes in act 1—but there are only three.

The action of Miles to Babylon begins in 1953, a significant year for O’Neillians as the year that O’Neill died, but the play contains no mention of this. (One wonders if the playwright knew about it.) Catherine (Sister Mary Ellen), a nun of the order of the Sacred Cross, faces the audience and reads a letter she is writing to the current mother superior, her former classmate Amelia. Catherine left the convent forty years earlier and now asks what has happened since her departure, especially to Mrs. O’Neill, “that unfortunate woman. She has haunted my waking hours these last few years” (15). Catherine then steps back into the convent just before Christmas 1913, where she becomes a sassy, disrespectful postulant soon to take the vows that will make her a novice. She joins another postulant, the somber Amelia, and Mother Dolores, the convent’s mother superior and Ella’s former classmate.

We learn that the convent is in desperate financial straits and counting on monetary support from the wealthy Ella, wife of nationally acclaimed actor James O’Neill. Ella had attended the school as a girl and is returning to her beloved mentor, Mother Elizabeth, for help in conquering her addiction...