O'Neill: Long Day's Journey into Night by Brenda Murphy (review)

Reviews vision of the "authorities" rounding up radicals and catching a few "innocents " in the net, or silencing liberal voices who raise concerns about civil liberties . This play could and should be produced today. Gainor reads Glaspell's critically controversial play The Verge as a "call for female/feminist modernism" (158) in that it is about a woman who cannot tell her story or create her art in the forms that are available to her, and who must destroy the bonds of patriarchal normativity that constrain her if she is to be able to create. Gainor reflects that Glaspell suggests here that no matter how radical, no single form - expressionism or symbolism, for example - will do and that it is only through experimentation with form, through constant reshaping and exploration, that a woman's art can breathe and grow. There is a wonderful section in this chapter on the responses of Heterodoxy members to the play, which many male critics could not make sense of: in the words of Ruth Hale, "If we cannot understand her, it would be smart of us to try" (qtd. in Gainor (69). Gainor's excellent book goes a long way toward helping modem readers and audiences understand Glaspell. It will be very useful for anyone wanting to produce a Glaspell play or to find an American drama on a progressive political theme. All in all, Gainor succeeds in placing Glaspell's plays in their political, cultural, and social context. What is missing from the book, however, is the theatrical context. What else was going on in the American theatre? Besides Glaspell and O'Neill, who else was experimenting with form, and how did the critics respond to their efforts? Who else, if anyone, was tackling the same themes, and how was Glaspell's work - and the critical response to that work -different? How has theatre history treated Glaspell's work differently in comparison with that of other progressive and experimental playwrights? Gainor seems to indicate that the American theatre absorbed Glaspell's ideas and then, as Veronica Makowsky has stated, "ignored their creator" (qtd. in Gainor 263). I'd like more of this. As Gainor says in her afterword, she is not aiming for a totalizing narrative (what feminist scholar would?) but hopes to provide a starting point for other scholars who wish to take up one of the many themes introduced in this useful book. "Many questions remain, and many avenues of inquiry lie uncharted" (262). Without a doubt, this book will inspire you to read (and hopefully teach) more ofGhispell's plays. BRENDA MURPHY. O'Neill: Long Day's Journey into Night. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xviii + 250, illustrated. $59.95 (Hb); $21.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Kurt Eisen, Tennessee Technological University Brenda Murphy's insightful and thorough production history of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Jourlley into Night conveys the sense that this much REVIEWS analyzed play must be understood finally in performance terms, through the choices made by theatre artists. Never the most collaborative playwright during his lifetime, O'Neill exerts perhaps his strongest authorial hold on the work for which he was awarded his fourth Pulitzer when it reached Broadway three years after his death in [953. That O'Neill's autobiographical masterpiece existed only as a script for the better part of two decades underscores the special problems it has posed for actors, directors, and producers since 1956 when his widow, Carlotta Monterey O'Neill, allowed its first staging in Stockholm. Though she covers an ample array of productions from around the world, Murphy rightly devotes a lengthy first chapter to the New York premiere as the moment when Long Day's Journey became an essential text in modem theatre. Murphy studies the contributions of each key player, including director Jose Quintero and actors Fredric March, Florence Eldridge, and Jason Robards, Jr., but also designer David Hays and, perhaps most crucially, Carlotta O'Neill. Along with detailed accounts of the rehearsal process and the post-Broadway road tours, Murphy gives a careful, balanced picture of Carlotta 's still-controversial decision to release the play in 1956 despite her husband 's apparent ban until twenty...