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BOOK REVIEWS O'NEILL AND HIS PLAYS: FOUR DECADES OF CRITICISM, edited by Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher, New York University Press, New York, 1961, 528 pp. Price $7.50. Into this volume have been collected almost one hundred letters, reviews, and essays about Eugene O'Neill, his views on the theater, his reputation in America and abroad, and his achievement in more than thirty plays. Although the dust jacket seems to indicate otherwise, no previously unpublished material is inĀ· cluded. The most recent piece reprinted is Sean O'Casey's tribute to O'Neill in November, 1959, but more than half of the pieces were first published in the 1920'S or earlier. Because the "four decades of criticism" are represented so unevenly and because about one third of the pieces are reviews or letters first printed in newspapers, the collection has something of the character of a theatrical scrapbook , in spite of the editor's efforts to draw complementary essays together under such titles as "Early Recognition-Foreign" or "The Quest for Belief." The value of such a scrapbook, of course, depends upon what is included and what left out. The editors found themselves "confronted by a body of material so vast that to reprint it all would have required a set of volumes. . . . Many sharp perceptive critics have had to remain unrepresented." Among the authors not represented are four of the seven American authors of book-length studies of O'Neill: Winther, Skinner, Engel, and Mrs. Boulton (Barrett Clark is represented only by a 1919 review). Such perceptive writers on O'Neill as Basso, Raleigh, Dobree, Muler, Edel, and Asselineau are not included, and the articles in the December, 1960, Eugene O'Neill issue of Modern Drama apparently appeared too late for any to be republished here. On the other hand, the editors have printed a number of pages which might have been left in the newspaper and magazine files but which one must read through in order to come to such sharp attacks on O'Neill as Robert Benchley's review of "Dynamo," Bernard De Voto's "Minority Report" on the Nobel Prize, and Eric Bentley's "Trying to Like O'Neill," or such able defenses as those by Homer E. Woodbridge, John Gassner, and Joseph Wood Krutch. As the very useful bibliography in the extensive appendices indicates, so much has been written about O'Neill that no two editors could fully agree upon the proper composition of such an anthology as this. Still the total effect of this collection is not unlike the impression which O'Neill himself made on Croswell Bowen in 1946, "the impresion of a down-and-out man who had been completely outfitted the day before by some well-meaning friend." Has O'Neill fared badly with Bentley or Ferguson? The editors direct our attention to Maida Castellun's review of "The First Man" in the New York Call in 1922. Has Mary McCarthy attacked O'Neill's verbal gifts? The editors print a letter from him contending that "the best one can do is to be pathetically eloquent by one's moving, dramatic inarticulationsl" Are there ideas of any subtlety in O'Neill's plays? We are told that the critic of the Baltimore Sun thought the television version of The Iceman Cometh was "a somber, terrifying masterwork." The case for Eugene O'Neill must 323 324 MODERN DRAMA December be made by admitting his defects and applying rigorous literary standards to his work. That we must read and see his plays anew is certain; whether we must revive the old praise and blame is much less certain. WILLIAM L. PHIILIPS University of Washington CREATING A ROLE, by Constantin Stanislavsky, translated by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. Edited by Hermine Isaacs Popper. Foreword by Robert Lewis, Theatre Arts Books, New York, 1961. Price $4.00. Creating a Role is the seventh of Constantin Stanislavsky's books to be published in the United States, and it may be hoped that it is to be the last. The new volume adds nothing new or significant to what we have already gleaned from the autobiography, the theoretic volumes, or the prompt...

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