Representations of Eugene O’Neill: Fiction, Autobiography, and Adaptation

Sponsored by the Eugene O’Neill Society at the 40th Annual Comparative Drama Conference, Baltimore, MD, 2016

This year’s O’Neill Society panel at the Comparative Drama Conference (CDC) developed in response to the call put out by Davies King and Beth Wynstra for a special section of the O’Neill Review devoted to representations of Eugene O’Neill. We merged that topic with a proposal to the CDC from the previous year concerning recent books on O’Neill, a panel that had been cut due to lack of a slot. Then we heard that Tony Kushner was going to be the keynote speaker at the CDC in 2016. Kushner, whose “The Genius of O’Neill” was reprinted in the 2004 issue of the EOR, has written the libretto for an opera about O’Neill and Carlotta, A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck (2012), which he tells us is on the way to becoming a full-length opera to be called A Fire at the Shelton Hotel. He has been working on a screenplay about O’Neill and was active in the Society’s celebration that Jeff Kennedy organized in the summer of 2015 in Provincetown to commemorate the centennial of O’Neill’s first plays. Kushner happily agreed to join the panel, at which point the conference organizers, coordinated by Laura Snyder, turned the panel into a plenary session with the six participants included below. We are grateful to Tony Kushner for taking the time to stay over in Baltimore on Friday night to join us in the April 2 discussion, but unfortunately our recording of his portion of the discussion, which we had meant to transcribe for inclusion here, was faulty, so, as they say, “You had to be there.”

Fig. 1.

Roundtable Panel Discussion at CDC, Baltimore, April 1, 2016. (Back row, left to right) Beth Wynstra, Jackson Bryer, Tony Kushner, Jeffery Kennedy, Davies King. (Front) Chris Westgate, Robert Dowling. Photograph by Kurt Eisen.

Jackson Bryer began the session with a presentation on how O’Neill, the playwright of most austere reputation, came forward with an entirely new face in the 1950s when his plays were used as the basis of two Broadway musicals. Rob Dowling spoke about being consulted by the cast of the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which was just then in rehearsal, concerning the Irish background of the characters, especially the “second girl” Cathleen, the character who holds center stage in Ronan Noone’s The Second Girl. Jeff Kennedy recounted the extraordinary sixty-year history of the work of Arthur and Barbara Gelb to give an authoritative biographical portrayal of O’Neill, which will culminate with the release in fall 2016 of their final volume, titled By Women Possessed. Davies King spoke about an early photograph of O’Neill, perhaps the first to show him self-consciously posing as “author,” in terms of how it reflects O’Neill’s acting the role of the Stirnerian “egoist.” Beth Wynstra told us of her investigation of the question of how students come to understand the intersection of O’Neill’s life and writing. Last, Tony Kushner told us the history of his late- developing fascination with O’Neill and his long (and ongoing) struggle to write a screenplay centering on O’Neill’s suicide attempt in late 1911. One offshoot of that project is the one-act opera mentioned above, composed by Jeanine Tesori, which was developed from the frame narrative he had devised for the screenplay. Kushner also told us of his admiration of O’Neill for taking on topics that might seem risky from the standpoint of political correctness. We are grateful that Tony Kushner has followed so well in that tradition and, in that sense, represents O’Neill.