Eugene O'Neill at Work: Newly Released Ideas for Plays by Virginia Floyd (review)

Book Reviews 581 When Piscator became director of the Second Proletarian Theatre in 1920, he had to free the theatre from the individualism and irrationalism of Expressionism before political drama could be born. Yet, as Patterson points out, "the abstractionist style of Expressionistic acting ... carried within it the de-individualized quality appropriate to collectivist political theatre," It was Brecht, not Piscalor, however, who realized this fact, accepting the nonrealistic, representative characters and setting ofExpressionism, but transforming its individual concerns into social and political ones. The book examines in detail the production values of Expressionism and the early political theatre through focusing on several plays. As an example of the abstractionist strain in Expressionism, Patterson analyzes productions of Kaiser's Von Morgens bis Mitternachts; he follows a similar strategy with the 1919 production of Toller's Die Wandlung, an example of primitivist theatre. In the political theatre, he deals with Piscator's staging of Toller's Hoppla, wir leben! and Brecht's production of his own Mann isl Mann . In explaining the rationale for this study. Patterson notes that although the styles that dislodged realism were primarily theatrical as opposed to literary, the accessibility of texts and the inaccessibiJity of performance infonnation have left us without a sense of the productions - and hence of the movements - that were responsible for establishing Gennany's national dramatic identity. Through an ambitious assembling of production notes, reviews, and other information concerning expressionistic and political play productions, however - particularly at West Berlin's Kaiser, To1ier, and Piscator archives and East Berlin's Brecht archives - Patterson has re-created the styles that characterized such plays and redeemed an extremely important era in Gennan drama. One would hope that the forthcoming books in this series are as successful as Patterson's in illuminating the productions of plays we might otherwise be content with knowing only through their texts. JUNE SCHLUETER, LAFAYETTE COLLEGE VIRGINIA FLOYD, ed. Eugene O'Neill at Work: Newly Released Ideas/or Plays. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing 1981. Pp. xxxix, 407, illustrated. $25. Virginia Floyd's Eugene O'Neill at Work is an edition, with extensive annotations, of the Notebooks of O'Neill that are in the possession of the Beinecke Library at Yale. These Notebooks contain either ideas for plays never finally brought to completion sometimes only the briefest reference, at orner times a fairly extensive scenario - or working notes on the ongoing task of revising a play that will finally be brought to completion, performance, and publication. Four Notebooks, 1918-1938, containing over one hundred ideas for plays, are published in their entirety. The last chapter, 4, of the present book contains concepts that were either completed or contemplated in O'Neill's final period, 1939-1943 (a claim of completeness is not made here). Notes and drafts related to the American Cycle plays were not available to the editor; and the Notebooks do not contain extensive material on all of O'Neill's plays, such as, for example, The Emperor Jones or The Hairy Ape. The editor's commentary is extensive and relies on other MSS. - notes, scenarios, drafts of the various plays, a large body of material. Obviously, any scholar wishing to pursue a particulartheme or study in detail a particular play should consult the MSS. themselves. The present edition is, howev~r, a Book Reviews very useful overview and introduction to the considerable corpus of unpublished O'Neilliana, and for some plays, such as Mourning Becomes Electra or Lazarus Laughed, the various phases afthe evolution of the play are spel1ed out in some detail. So what does this considerable body of material tell us about O'Neill? There are no sensational revelations, nothing that would entail a major reassessment or revaluation of O'Neill as dramatist. If anything, this material reinforces existing notions of what he was and how he worked: an obsessive man, in love with easeful death by more than half, endlessly circling around throughout his life his early memories of his family and the friends of his younger days, unconsciously dramatizing them in his early and middle careeragain and again in a more or less disguised way, until on June 6, 1939, "fed up and stale...