“The Theatre We Worked For”: The Letters of Eugene O’Neill to Kenneth Macgowan ed. by Jackson R. Bryer (review)

Reviews 289 Planchon’s “provincial plays”: La Remise (The Return, 1962), Bleus, blancs, rouges (Blues, Whites, and Reds, 1967), L’Infâme (The Villain, 1969), Le Cochon noir (The Black Pig, 1973), and Gilles de Rais (1976). These production analyses reveal certain preoccupations of Planchon: his emphasis on events over character or speech; his fascina­ tion with dreams, madness, and children; and his use of the stage as a forum for posing questions, but not for providing answers. His plays often explore the relationship between ideology and behavior, but he tries to remain descriptive rather than prescriptive. According to Daoust, Planchon is most obsessed by the theme of history’s repercussions in the lives of ordinary people who are quite unaware of their own roles in the making of history. There are a few loose ends in the book that may puzzle the reader. In her discussion of the after-effects of the events of May 1968 in France, Daoust casually states (p. 11) that “after ten years of work at Villeur­ banne, only eight per cent of his public was working class.” Elsewhere, describing audiences’ reactions to La Mise en pièces du ‘Cid’ in 1969 (p. 135), she says that “the Villeurbanne public, eighty-five per cent of whom came from unions and organizations, and most of whom were inexperienced theatre-goers, if not working-class spectators, enjoyed the show thoroughly.” Statistics like these, presented without documentation, are not necessarily inconsistent, but the discrepancy is enough to raise questions. On page 83 Daoust notes that the “Théâtre de la Cité had to cope for the first time in this production with the unities of French classical drama,” and the reader cannot help wondering why the unities should be something with which one must “cope.” Daoust’s examples (pp. 20-23) of “collective creation” (defined on p. 244 as “a production created as a group effort by the entire company”) do not suggest any­ thing more than the kind of ensemble effort to interpret an existing text that most good directors will try to elicit from company members. Daoust’s reference to Bottines et collets montés (Ankle-boots and Starched Collars, 1950), “a farce set in 1900,” is tantalizingly incomplete; one searches her book in vain for that work’s authorship, which ultimately must be gleaned from another source: it was a collage of turn-of-the-century texts, including ones by Courteline, Feydeau, and André Frédérique. Besides its informative text and Chronology of Planchon’s theatrical activity since 1950, Roger Planchon, Director and Playwright offers extensive Notes, a Select Bibliography, a somewhat supererogatory Glossary, a good Index, and thirty-one very fine black and white photographs. FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ University of Missouri-Kansas City "The Theatre We Worked For”: The Letters of Eugene O’Neill to Kenneth Macgowan. Edited by Jackson R. Bryer, with introductory essays by Travis Bogard. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982. Pp. xiii + 274. $25.00. The bulk of O’Neill’s letters to Kenneth Macgowan were written dur­ ing the period that he, Macgowan, and Robert Edmund Jones constituted 290 Comparative Drama a “triumvirate” of playwright, producer/director, and designer dedicated to reforming the American theatre. Working together first at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York, where Macgowan succeeded George Cram (“Jig”) Cook as artistic director in 1922, then at the Greenwich Village Theatre, to which the three shifted partly in rebellion against the “artistes” of the Cook tradition, these men sought to mix their dreams about a theatre devoted purely to art with a pragmatism about what might be achieved with limited resources. That the companies involved produced the many, varied plays they did suggests that the mixture worked, at least in part. The letters indicate that Macgowan from the start recog­ nized the need to produce good plays (O’Neill’s included) which had some measure of popular appeal, and O’Neill discovered early that his idealism about artistic purity would not alone provide the comforts he and his family needed. But the letters (mostly written from his homes on Cape Cod and in Bermuda) reflect O’Neill’s increasing dissatisfaction with limitations Macgowan was...