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  • Exorcism: A Play of Anti-ClimaxRebirth of a Play and a Playwright
  • Jo Morello (bio)

It could be the setting for a Eugene O’Neill play, and in a sense it is—but one that O’Neill never wrote:

scene—February 2011. A 50-foot-long library/office occupies the entire second floor of the Yordan home in San Diego. Once the domain of Oscar-winning Hollywood screenwriter Philip Yordan, it is still crammed with the remnants of his prolific career eight years after his death.1Wall to wall and floor to ceiling, bookcases are stuffed with books, screenplays, videocassettes, albums, and papers. Tall filing cabinets fill all remaining wall space. On the floor, still more papers spill out from dozens of bulging boxes. Faith Yordan, 72, the screenwriter’s widow, stands at an open file drawer, plowing wearily through the inherited morass of material. She extracts a large, aged, manila envelope, its utilitarian aspects barely offset by holiday stickers in its four corners. In the center, two strips of red tape secure a diagonally placed gift tag showing a Christmas tree. A hand-printed message in capital letters, its words separated by hyphens, says, “something-you-said-you’d-like-to-have. agnes + mac [fig. 1].

Curious, Mrs. Yordan opens the envelope and lifts out a sheaf of brittle, brown pages [figs. 2–3]. She reads the first words on the front page, becomes excited, and quickly makes a phone call.

faith:

Paul, I’ve just found a script called Exorcism by Eugene O’Neill. A tag says it’s from “Agnes and Mac.” Do you think it’s important? [End Page 39]


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Fig. 1.

The manila envelope that contained the script for Exorcism. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Reproduced with the permission of the Yale University Committee on Literary Property.

Faith’s call was to Paul Nagle, a former television executive and current visiting assistant professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Film and Television.2 Thus began the discovery of O’Neill’s “lost” one-act play Exorcism, a dramatization of his suicide attempt in 1912.3 On March 26, 1920, the Provincetown Players opened the play for a two-week run at the Playwrights’ Theatre in Greenwich Village.4 For a reason he never revealed, O’Neill had all copies of the script collected and destroyed around the time of the play’s first and, until 2011, only production.5 The title inside the playbill, “Exorcism: A Play of Anti-Climax” turned out to be prophetic.6

O’Neill was never cavalier about destroying his work. From the time he began writing plays in 1913, the novice playwright was high on the value of his creations and convinced he would have a place in history. Consequently, he kept copies of almost everything: completed plays, ideas for plays, drafts, scenarios, and hundreds of letters to and from people. Speaking of 1913, he said, “That was the year I thought I was God. I’d finish one [play] and rush down to the post office to ship it off to Washington to be copyrighted before somebody stole it.”7

As he matured, O’Neill was more willing to discard certain manuscripts—work he considered inferior, scripts he had decided to rewrite, and, at the end of his life, plays he knew he could not finish—but not plays that had already been produced. Exorcism was the exception, and he was happy that it was gone. “Exorcism has been destroyed,” he wrote in 1922, “and the sooner all memory of it dies the better pleased I’ll be.”8 In the play Ned Malloy, O’Neill’s alter ego, exclaims, “The Past is finally cremated. I feel reborn, I tell you!”9 Like Ned/Eugene, the play itself has been reborn. [End Page 40]

Its rebirth followed a twisting path through a ninety-one-year gestation, from the day of the script’s destruction in March or April 1920 to Faith Yordan’s discovery in February 2011. “I was going through some of Phil’s big, tall files,” she said.


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