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  • Exorcism: A Play in One Act
  • Robert M. Dowling (bio)
Eugene O'Neill Exorcism: A Play in One Act 1919. Foreword by Edward Albee. Introduction by Louise Bernard. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. 85 pp. ISBN 978-0-300-18131-9

In October 2011 the New Yorker astounded the theater world by publishing the script of Eugene O'Neill's Exorcism—a play considered destroyed by O'Neill over ninety years ago—with a brief introduction by their drama critic John Lahr. Yale University Press then announced that in February 2012 it would publish a cloth edition of the script. O'Neill Society members will recall, however, the jolting declaration of the play's survival at the Eighth International Conference on Eugene O'Neill in New York. This came at the preview of Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori's one-act opera A Blizzard at Marblehead Neck on June 22, 2011, when one audience member at the talkback mentioned the tragic nonexistence of Exorcism. "But it does exist!" shouted Arthur Gelb, who was participating on a panel with his wife Barbara, Kushner, and Tesori. Few seemed more alert to the importance of this revelation than Kushner, a self-professed "O'Neill fanatic," whose feature film on O'Neill, in production with director Mike Nichols, might in some way, Kushner suggested after the performance, include the episode that Exorcism dramatizes: O'Neill's suicide attempt in the winter of 1911-1912 in his boarding room at Jimmy the Priest's waterfront flophouse with an overdose of the barbiturate Veronal.

The typescript was discovered by Faith Yordan in early 2011 among the papers of her deceased husband, the Hollywood screenwriter Philip Yordan. It was a Christmas gift from O'Neill's second wife, Agnes Boulton, and her husband at the time, the writer Morris "Mac" Kaufman. Boulton and Kaufman cheerily adorned the brown envelope that contained it with the kind of Christmas stickers one purchases in bulk at a drugstore, and Yale creatively used it as the image for the volume's endpapers. The holiday [End Page 282] greeting card taped at center reads, "Something-you-said-you'd-like-to-have Agnes + Mac."

Tastefully bound in austere black cloth with the title evocatively printed in gold, the volume is chapbook-size, with the edited script followed by a facsimile of the typescript—the only known draft to exist. The inimitable Edward Albee contributed a foreword entitled "Exorcism—The Play O'Neill Tried to Destroy," which is followed by an introductory essay, "Time and the Archive," by Louise Bernard, the Beinecke Library's former prose and drama curator. (It was Bernard who negotiated the acquisition for the O'Neill Papers with the dealer who purchased the script from Mrs. Yordan.) Ileene Smith, previously the executive editor-at-large at Yale University Press, also had a hand (though uncredited in the volume) in its production, editing, and design. There's no editor's note, but the facsimile makes clear that any corrections O'Neill made in longhand were respected.

Albee's foreword comes in at less than four pages, but it offers a fascinating insider's view on what it means for a playwright to forge his own canon. He points out that ever since Zoo Story enjoyed its New York premiere in 1960 (at the Provincetown Playhouse, no less), "there it sits in all definings: Edward Albee's first play." Pleased to uphold this fallacy over the decades, Albee admits that "the only possible complication here is that I wrote three or four plays before I wrote . . . my first play—before I wrote my Opus I" (viii). But he considered himself a student when he wrote those early plays, before his talent ("such as it was") brought him to what he considers a professional level (ix). The question of Exorcism defies such a paradigm, nevertheless. "What do we do," Albee asks, "about a playwright who decides to destroy his work, especially—as in Eugene O'Neill's case—when the usual designations (student; professional) are not helpful?" (ix). He proposes that the simple fact that Exorcism is a precursor to The Iceman Cometh alone makes the one-act a...

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