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REVIEWS Ronald H. Wainscott. Staging O'Neill: The Experimental Years, 19201934 . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. Pp. 384 + 25 illustrations . $40.00. This is a fine work of theater history, a necessary and welcome complement to the great amount of dramatic analysis and biographical study devoted to Eugene O'Neill in recent years. Ronald Wainscott analyzes and evaluates the production problems confronting directors and designers of O'Neill's plays during his "experimental years" of 1920-34. Because Wainscott's examination is careful, intelligent, and sensitive, what emerges is a plausible and interesting reconstruction of first performances. Any performance is difficult to capture on a page, especially a performance the writer has not seen. By offering the reader selected information gathered from unpublished manuscript notes, promptbooks, theater ground plans, photographs, letters, programs, contracts , and publicity materials as well as from more available sources— the printed plays and the printed reviews of the plays—Wainscott allows those first stagings to come alive, a wonderful example of the use of meticulous research to recapture theatrical moments. Wainscott's analysis begins with O'Neill's first Broadway play, Beyond the Horizon (1920), which gave O'Neill his first of four Pulitzer Prizes, and ends with Days Without End (1934), an artistic and box-office failure, after which the Broadway theater would not see another new O'Neill play until 1946. Wainscott proceeds chronologically through this fourteen-year period, during which O'Neill experimented with almost every kind of theatrical technique and device, every dramaturgical form and method. The challenges that O'Neill forced upon his directors and designers were enormous; how they met these challenges is the story Wainscott tells. He pinpoints the choices that directors and designers had to make; he identifies the major problems; then he discusses the performance results of the choices and the performance resolution of the problems. Along the way we get an interesting picture of O'Neill's relationship with those responsible for putting on his plays. We also get Wainscott's fairminded evaluation of the accomplishments of the various directors and designers, with his high esteem of Philip Moeller and Robert Edmond Jones shining through. Wainscott's method of presentation is rather uniform throughout the book. He comments on the play's preproduction history; he discusses the selection of the director and designer and actors; he analyzes the play's design with close attention to sets, lighting, sound, costumes, and music; he evaluates the work of the director and designer, and then of the actors; and he presents selected comments by reviewers of the first night's performance. Although such uniformity of presentation has a built-in share of monotony, Wainscott's subject matter never allows the monotony to be felt. The details themselves are fascinating. Wain95 96Comparative Drama scott's discussion gives greatest weight to O'Neill's experimental devices and forms, and he is always sensitive to the director's and designer's difficulties in trying to meld O'Neill's "realism" with O'Neill's "stylization," as in The Hairy Ape, for which James Light and Arthur Hopkins had "to straddle differing styles of presentation which borrowed from the naturalistic as well as the abstract" (p. 110), or in Desire Under the Elms, for which Robert Edmond Jones had to combine "poetic imagery with stark realism, innovative staging with familiar techniques, and sensitive subject matter with traditional classical tragedy" (p. 160). The battle of "realism" vs. "stylization" is an important motif, and how exactly a difficult experimental device is handled—e.g., the masks in The Great God Brown, the interior monologue in Strange Interlude, or the split-person in Days Without End—provides much of the interest in the book. Throughout we get to know more about O'Neill, the important center of all his relationships. The most successful productions seemed to emerge when O'Neill and his director and designer not only shared the experimental excitement of the New Stagecraft but also respected one another as artists. The most successful collaboration, according to Wainscott, occurred when the director Philip Moeller, "first among O'Neill's directors of the experimental period" (p. 292), and the designer Robert Edmond Jones, "an unsurpassed...

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