O’Neill after Exorcism

The essays gathered in this issue of the Eugene O’Neill Review represent a first step in revisiting some assumptions that have shaped O’Neill scholarship and stage production since the 1950s, when the emergence of another previously unavailable text, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, confirmed not only his mastery as an artist but also the confessional drive behind many earlier plays that are less overtly autobiographical. Whatever its merits as dramatic art, having in hand the actual script of Exorcism for scholarly analysis and theatrical performance, with all its fascinating details drawn from the playwright’s personal experience and echoed in his other works, affirms a distinctive feature of O’Neill’s art: that one most usefully approaches it with a broad understanding of his life and cultural circumstances. Or, to adapt Derrida’s well-known assertion, there is no “outside-text” in coming to terms with either a particular O’Neill play or the entire arc of his playwriting career, nothing in his life or the world he lived and worked in that should be considered heuristically or dramaturgically out of bounds.

These essays by veteran O’Neill scholars and two stage practitioners demonstrate how a play so slight, with almost no tradition of performance, can loom suddenly so large in the O’Neill canon. Much of its allure derives from the story of O’Neill’s own determination to kill “all memory of it,” and the sense of destiny one can’t help but feel in its discovery and publication some ninety years after its first and final staging by the Provincetown Players. The essays by Jo Morello, Jeff Kennedy, and William Davies King speculate in varying ways on how this lost manuscript was resurrected, including playwright Morello’s brief dramatic rendering at the start of her essay of that fateful moment in February 2011 when Faith Yordan exhumed a manila envelope from the unruly heap in her late husband’s office and sensed that she might have found something really important. This is the kind of moment that sends us back to well-worn copies of those mainstays of O’Neill criticism and biography by Travis Bogard, Louis Sheaffer, Stephen Black, and Barbara and Arthur Gelb, reviewing their speculations on the fate of Exorcism, along with King’s definitive work on Agnes Boulton and Kennedy’s detailed chronicles of the Provincetown Players’ New York productions. Robert Dowling’s thorough summary of its extant traces in the article for his 2009 Critical Companion to Eugene O’Neill now seems a prophetic glimpse of the play’s reappearance two years later and certainly a “prequel” of its own kind for the compelling reading of the play he offers here. Likewise Thierry Dubost’s insightful essay exemplifies how scholars can start to integrate this new text within the prevailing tradition of O’Neill studies—in this case his own 1997 book, Struggle, Defeat or Rebirth—so that the next generation of scholars and readers will take as given (as Dowling has) that Exorcism has always been lurking like an insistent ghost in the O’Neill “text.”

To the basic question of why O’Neill decided to kill the memory of Exorcism alone among all his produced works must be added the question of why he wrote it or decided to let it be produced, as if his secret goal was to make public confession and then expunge all memory of the sordid events behind the play. Anyone attempting to stage the play confronts a dated style and undeveloped structure that, as Michael Fenlason recalls thinking upon his first encounter with the script, make it “almost impossible to stage in a meaningful way for a modern audience,” but also the fascinating and somewhat uncanny challenge of reviving a play that its author wanted dead, albeit one in which the author’s own alter ego, Ned Malloy, survives a suicide attempt to start life anew. Like Fenlason, student dramaturg Kati Donovan describes how she and her fellow MFA candidates came to see their production of Exorcism at San Diego State last year as a ritual of posttraumatic healing or, as Fenlason...