Exorcism: The Context, the Critics, the Creation, and Rediscovery

The 1919–1920 season of the Provincetown Players, the season in which Eugene O’Neill’s play Exorcism was presented, proved to be its most capricious since their New York beginning in 1916, primarily because for the first time they were not led by George Cram Cook. Bickering between the older and younger members of the company, particularly about the issue of paying their actors, finally caused Cook and his wife, Susan Glaspell, to decide that the younger members of the company should run things for a year while they took a sabbatical in Provincetown to write. The company was put under the direction of James Light and Ida Rauh, with Edna Kenton, Mary Eleanor Fitzgerald (“Fitzie”), and O’Neill as the seasoned veterans to work with the new regime. Internal conflict caused Rauh to leave her leadership position early on in the season, but not before directing O’Neill’s The Dreamy Kid and casting the black roles with African American actors, a first for any white theater company in New York. The young company members believed they would be able to evolve progressively with Cook away, increasing the number of performances in each bill and paying their actors after expenses were covered, but they found the task of obtaining plays worthy of performance daunting and more frustrating than expected. Light complained about the problem in the newspapers and made some odd programming choices, including a play by Arthur Schnitzler, the Players’ first by a non-American. He also attempted to adapt a short story by Edna Ferber into a play without her permission. These activities would lead critics to reprimand the company in print and remind them of their original goals as an organization. Ironically, when the group programmed truly experimental works by Alfred Kreymborg and Wallace Stevens, these would be ignored by the critics. Though the Players began the season financially sound, this was undone in the spring of 1920 when the Internal Revenue Service demanded two years of unpaid war tax on their ticket sales. Glaspell’s sabbatical meant the group would present no plays by her that season. The company premiered three new plays by Village writer Djuna Barnes, and the first, titled Three from the Earth, created a stir with its unique dramaturgical style. The bright spot of the season would be Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Aria da Capo on the second bill; New York Times critic Alexander Woollcott called it “the most beautiful and most interesting play in the English language now to be seen in New York.”¹

O’Neill was a busy man throughout the 1919–1920 season, but perhaps more in his business and personal life than in terms of playwriting. His son Shane was born in Provincetown the night before the Players’ production of The Dreamy Kid opened on October 31, 1919, though the play had been written a year before. Unlike Cook, O’Neill seemed to have no problem working with those commandeering what was later called the “Year of the Youth” at the Playhouse. Susan Jenkins, who was married to James Light at the time, later wrote that “Gene, Ida and the much-loved Fitzie got along beautifully with the young people.”² Though the war had ended in 1918, much was still changing in the country and, toward the end of the third bill of that season, Christine Ell threw a “Farewell to John Barleycorn” party in her restaurant above the Playhouse, marking the end of legal alcohol; Prohibition took hold nationally on January 16, 1920. On January 30 it was announced that O’Neill’s first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, would be presented at matinees at the Morosco Theatre. This announcement came after O’Neill had spent over a month in New York pushing producer John D. Williams, who had optioned the play, into setting a production date. When the Players found out that O’Neill’s first play was to appear on Broadway, Kenton wrote that “Broadway was ‘experimenting’ with Gene” and that the members attended the opening “en masse, not realizing that we were witnessing...