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  • Editor's Foreword Long Day's Journeys and Deposed Emperors
  • Katie N. Johnson

Might it be a register of our current cultural moment that several productions of Long Day's Journey Into Night—arguably O'Neill's darkest play—were performed this past year, four of which are reviewed in this edition of the EOR? Or that O'Neill's expressionistic portrait of a despotic ruler meeting his demise (The Emperor Jones) in the Irish Repertory Theatre's revival felt all the more poignant as our first black president left the White House after divisive elections? Or, when transferred across the Atlantic to the cavernous Armory, that Richard Jones's neon production of The Hairy Ape felt less like a period piece and more of a current snapshot of how the average Yank clashes with a culture obsessed with Fifth Avenue capital?

It is precisely during times of tumult that we turn to great thinkers. With a country deeply divided since the election, works like 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, and It Can't Happen Here have risen to the top of best-seller lists. While O'Neill's dramas might not be among the must-read lists, they are certainly on the "must stage" list. For it is in the living room of Monte Cristo Cottage that we find insights into how families are torn apart; it is on the giant red throne that we find the possibilities—and limits—of tyrannical rule; and it is within the stokehole of a ship where we can see the sweltering labor for a chance to belong. [End Page 146]

Whether staged on Broadway, in Los Angeles, or within O'Neill's summer home in New London, Long Day's Journey Into Night was among O'Neill's most prominently performed plays this past year. Robert McLean recounts how the fine acting in the Palm Beach Dramaworks production resulted in one of the best Long Day's Journeys he has witnessed. The much-anticipated Broadway production of Long Day's Journey starring Gabriel Byrne and Jessica Lange delivered a raw and aching interpretation, with Lange giving a heart-wrenching portrayal of Mary Tyrone—and justly winning a Tony Award for Best Actress. On the West Coast, the LA production of Long Day's Journey featured a different—but no less stunning—pair of actors in the title roles: Alfred Molina and Jane Kaczmarek. With dramaturgical work by formerEOR editor William Davies King, this production included projections of O'Neill's family and recordings of O'Neill reading poetry to bring the autobiographical elements of the play to life, as Jaime Leigh Gray's review reveals. But what could be more autobiographical than staging Long Day's Journey within the home in which Eugene grew up? Robert Dowling's review shows how the Flock Theatre for the first time brought the play to Monte Cristo Cottage, where the house itself became a character. Sitting just feet away from the actors, the audience felt the intimacy not only of the actors' work but also of references to New London life.

New York's 55,000-square-foot Park Avenue Armory drill hall functioned as another kind of actor in Richard Jones's transfer of his London production of The Hairy Ape. With the "gritty and charismatic" Bobby Cannavale leading the ensemble as Yank, Ryder Thornton tells us, the production was significantly restaged to take advantage of the site-specific space. In contrast to the expansive Armory, the Irish Rep's tiny theater—not unlike the original Provincetown Playhouse on Macdougal Street—gave their revival of The Emperor Jones intimacy, demonstrating "that O'Neill is once again the playwright for another new American century, unmasking the appetites and transgressions that lie beneath the dream of empire," as Kurt Eisen writes.

Two deconstructed productions of O'Neill's dramas showed the desire to make new art and innovate, much as O'Neill turned away from the theater of his father. In an evening of one-acts (Recklessness and Now I Ask You) entitled O'Neill (Unexpected), the Metropolitan Theater Company subverted genre conventions, Zander Brietzke observes, playing the tragic Recklessness as comedy and Now...

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