The Second Girl

PREFACE

The bridging of two worlds, Ireland and America, is something I have been trying to construct creatively for quite a while. But I couldn’t find a way to bring them together cohesively until I picked up Long Day’s Journey Into Night. I heard the laughter from the boys at breakfast and then those long arias of melancholy, and I wondered how the servants related to it all. I wondered what they were doing while Mary Tyrone was in the spare room. I wondered how it informed their day, what were their worries and concerns, where were they from, and what was their story? And this is why writers write. They need to know the answers to slake their thirst.

The Second Girl is located in the kitchen of Monte Cristo Cottage and tells a story from the perspective of the three servants working there on the same day in August 1912 when Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night took place. It is not a tragedy, but it evokes the spirit of the tragedy going on in the living room. It is separate, and yet it can be in conversation with that great play as the servants, working their daily grind, explore the cultural and economic aspects of what it means to thrive in America.

The ghost of Eugene O’Neill has been on my back for many years. My first play, The Lepers of Baile Baiste, was set in a bar in Ireland with eight male characters ripping each other’s illusions apart. Those illusions were born of their determination to forget the abuse they suffered at the hands of a Christian brother. The protagonist’s name was Daithi O’Neil, and he had returned from England to battle the local parish priest, to cleanse his soul, so he could finally move on with his life. In O’Neill’s Days Without End, John Loving wanted to set himself spiritually free by admitting his sin, not unlike Jamie Tyrone in A Moon for the Misbegotten, or like Hickey who wanted to open the eyes of his deluded, drunken pals in The Iceman Cometh. It seems to me—like O’Neill when he states: “Most modern plays are concerned with the relation between man and man, but that does not interest me at all. I am only interested in the relation between man and God”—that I consider the plays I’ve written as a conversation between the human and the divine. I want to know what it is we have to sacrifice before we understand who we are, what we are, and where we come from.

Yet I have more in common with Eugene O’Neill’s father than I do with O’Neill. We were both born in Ireland. I understand the elder O’Neill’s ambition, the deracination, the miserly anxiety, and the desire to succeed. I understand there is an innate determination to prove it worthwhile when you leave behind your home, your culture, your accent, and the land of your birth for America. I recognized in his son’s play some of my own sacrifice, guilt, and desire to prosper, but everything I write is a purgation of the spirit, neither fact nor fiction, but guaranteed to be a full-blooded response to life, and with that in mind I wanted The Second Girl to find the joy in the struggle.

I committed to this project with some rules and convictions. One: I would learn from a master. Two: I would give voice and dignity to the women in the kitchen who had been referred to as ignorant and stupid. Three: I would do no harm. Four: I would step into this world with admiration and devotion. Five: I needed to write this play.

To name some of the research and inspirations: I read John Millington Synge’s travel memoir Aran Islands and Connemara and Tim Robinson’s trilogy of books on Connemara, because that is where I came from and where I decided Cathleen and Bridget were born. I read Maureen Dezell’s Coming into Clover, William Shannon...