Hunted, Haunted, Home: Ninth International Conference on Eugene O’Neill—and Beyond

In June 2014 the O’Neill Society met for its Ninth International Conference on Eugene O’Neill in New London, Connecticut. With an evocative theme, “Hunted, Haunted, Home,” the event brought together scholars and theater artists, teachers and fans on the campus of Connecticut College to share research on O’Neill a little over 100 years after the last period of his life when New London could be called his home. My wife and I arrived in town at the exact same H. H. Richardson-designed 1887 train station used by Gene and his family when they came “home,” and with the guidance of Rob Richter we toured the streets of downtown New London, where the bars, clubs, and brothels had been. Many of the buildings are still standing, and you can picture where the trolley might have rolled into town and deposited Edmund and Jamie Tyrone, each with five dollars of their father’s money to spend, on an afternoon in August 1912. It would have been not far from the site of the bronze statue of the boy Eugene, sitting on a rock with a book on his lap, looking out to sea. That rock is not the rock on which he was sitting when the photograph that inspired the statue was taken, and the huge General Dynamics building across the harbor would not have blocked his view, but you can still get a drink at Gene’s preferred bar, Dutch’s Tavern on Green Street.

What aura (in the sense given by Walter Benjamin) adheres to the space of these real and imagined events, such that it draws us there? In these days when we can visit virtually any place on Earth with a laptop, a smartphone, or even an iWatch, what is the allure of actually being there? That famous phrase/title You Can’t Go Home Again describes the difficulty of returning to the place of one’s own formation, but in this case the conference participants were returning to the place of O’Neill’s formation, though that word connotes a process far less chaotic than what seems to have happened on Pequot Avenue in the first decade or so of the twentieth century.

The main reason conference participants went “Home” was to find each other there. Gathered in the halls of the college and other places were researchers and artists who are driven to understand what it means that O’Neill brings us so insistently there in his art, to his home. As we were conveyed in vans and buses through the labyrinthine streets of outer New London, past such imagined but real places as “the inn,” “the beach,” Shaughnessy’s farm, and the gravesites of O’Neill’s parents and brothers, it was as if we had discovered some backstage inner passage behind the playwright’s dramatic world. But wherever we wound up, even at Monte Cristo Cottage itself, the most remarkable thing to see was this crowd of people with cameras and notebooks, trying to capture some trace of “it,” that aura of the authentic O’Neill.

The presentations, selected and arranged by a program committee headed by our own J. Chris Westgate (of whom more later), brought us to the conference theme from many different angles. Robert Baker-White gave us a fascinating look at his rapidly developing book on the ecological in O’Neill (the root of “ecological” is, of course, the Greek word for house or home) in terms of the “exotic natural other” in his environments. After opening with an anecdote of her being in the room where O’Neill had died in 1953 when she was a student at Boston University many years later, Marnie Glazer also pursued an “eco-trajectory” in speaking of wildness and cultivation in three plays. Kurt Eisen offered fascinating information about the sort of residential hotel favored by many in the early twentieth century, including the O’Neills when they were not in New London. O’Neill’s deathbed curse of the hotel rooms in which he was born and would die represents...