(Surprised): A Brief Account of a Production of O’Neill’s Exorcism

The story of a theatrical production goes something like this: The artistic director picks a piece. He’s excited about it. It speaks to him, and he thinks it will speak to his audience, too, in some way. Then—and this is key—hijinks ensue. We think we understand at first reading what a text is or can be. We learn much more in our process.

I found Exorcism in a Tucson bookstore. I hadn’t heard of its rediscovery or that it was being published by Yale University Press. O’Neill had been a favorite of mine since a youthful performance as Rougon in The Sniper (1915), and now, in a strange hardback volume with some oddly inappropriate Christmas artwork on the endpapers, I had discovered this lost play. I read it standing in the aisle and bought it twenty minutes later. I did not read the self-possessed caveats of Edward Albee. But I had my own. It was a “new” O’Neill play, and it had echoes of The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. As artistic director of Beowulf Alley Theatre, I wanted to do it at once. I liked O’Neill’s language—I always had—and this would be a premiere of sorts. However, I thought it would be almost impossible to stage in a meaningful way for a modern audience. The second scene seemed chaotic and unearned.

I was surprised as anyone could be that O’Neill and Jay Leno have the same agent. Through a labyrinthine series of phone calls, messages, and emails to Yale University Press, I finally managed to get contact information for International Creative Management, a worldwide power agency, which had control of the play’s performance rights. Again, after a plunge into the labyrinth, the drama division of ICM gave us license to produce the play as long as we did not publicize it as anything but a workshop production on our website, in the program, media, and so on. We were not to call it a premiere of any sort or a full production. ICM lived in hope that a professional, preferably New York–based company would pay to produce a twenty-five-minute play and pay handsomely for the opportunity. (Good luck!) We were grateful all the same.

I asked Nicole Scott to direct the play. The summer before she had directed for us a scaled-down (read: workshop) production of Hamlet and understood the parameters. She was excited about being involved in a lost play of O’Neill’s. Then she read it. I had asked a few actors to be involved. I really wanted the best cast possible. They showed a lot of interest. Until they read it.

Albee had laid it out in the book. This was a slight piece. The second scene had an odd dénouement without dramatic sense. Ned’s turn, leaving him happily bound toward “some rest cure institution,” seemed improbable. The actors, at the first read-through, concluded their reading with looks of confusion. Ned and Jimmy were decent parts. Malloy and the Major a little less so. It was going to be impossible to cast Nordstrum. There were only five lines, and one of them was “Sure, I like like haal for gat you along, Ned” (54). We engaged a great Chicago-based actor named Ken Beider to take on Jimmy and one of the best young actors of our city, Evan Engle, for Ned. David Swisher, a former artistic director in his own right, from the Bay Area, took on the Major, and Mark Klugheit, a retired actor from the Philadelphia area, took on Malloy. I would take Nordstrum myself, py jimminy.

At Beowulf Alley Theatre, which was founded in 2001 as a nonprofit company with a commitment to nurturing Tucson theater artists, we had created some years ago a little research and development division we called The Next Theatre. Under this aegis, we were able to produce the play in July 2012, with the idea that we could offer our audiences a look into...