Editor's Foreword

Published commentary on Carlotta Monterey O'Neill puts an unpleasant spin on the locution "critical reception." Critical, indeed: sometimes cruelly, sometimes resentfully or jealously, sometimes by fourth-estaters not schooled in or evidently inclined to documentary scrupulousness. Sometimes misogynistically, too—and I, for one, would have an easier time with all this had I not read similar scripts about capable women from Cleopatra to Clinton who paired with men of renown but failed to wow their acolytes.

Granted, Monterey has had her admirers, most notably, among her associates, Jose Quintero. In her edition of the Eugene O'Neill/Saxe Commins letters, Dorothy Commins manages a civil tone toward a woman who had treated her and her husband poorly; thus does she distinguish herself from more reactive but often less informed commentators. More recently, O'Neill's biographer Robert M. Dowling and the theatre historian William Davies King have nudged the discussion toward even-handedness. Brenda Murphy's fictionalized biography Becoming Carlotta, which King reviews herein, focuses and advances these efforts. Prominent among Murphy's achievements in that book is an exemplary refusal to judge the subject of her research. Murphy perhaps one-ups herself in this issue with "Carlotta Speaks," a dispassionately introduced and annotated mini-edition of the letters that Monterey wrote to her friend Gene Baker McComas between 1918 and 1952. Monterey's comments on friendship, money, love, marriage, travel, Eugene O'Neill, and, in her preferred spelling, "Life" will interest all O'Neillians, ipso facto. And perhaps the fact that this speaker has been more spoken-for than heard confers something like an obligation on us in this instance.

Murphy's entry joins meet company in these pages. As if sharing a previously undiscovered letter from Sean O'Casey to Eugene O'Neill weren't enough, Herman Daniel Farrell III also reproduces, translates, and introduces O'Neill's and Monterey's French wedding certificate. His liberal use of Monterey's unpublished diaries constitutes another instance of "letting-speak." The evidence he adduces of Monterey's excitement about her impending marriage will complement the earlier of the McComas letters and provide a tough contrast to the later ones, written by a woman terrified of her violent husband.

Dynamo was O'Neill's divorce play, and his elopement with Monterey kept him from attending rehearsals of that ill-fated outing. Ronald E. Quirk, one of the seven first-time contributors in this issue, discusses the play's troubled history en route to a fresh appreciation based on the work of the psychoanalysts John Bowlby and D. W. Winnicott. Joining Quirk in the articles section is William Davies King, who weighs in with a detailed and disturbing account of a 1909 statutory rape trial that evidently colored O'Neill's representation of his life in Long Day's Journey Into Night and elsewhere. Of particular relevance is O'Neill's own rape, defined thus per the 1909 trial, which his brother James had abetted in a brothel, the sort of establishment in which young May Burns was violated at about the same time.

The EOR's inaugural "Practitioners' Colloquium" comprises commentary on directing O'Neill from Ben Barnes (Mourning Becomes Electra); Miles Potter (Long Day's Journey); Fred Abrahamse and his production partner Marcel Meyer (Desire Under the Elms); and Eric Fraisher Hayes (Days Without End). Hayes will be familiar from his essay on directing Hughie in the previous issue of the EOR; his companions appear herein for the first time, although many readers will know them from their work. Another new feature—"Used Books"—premieres with a "re-review" of Normand Berlin's O'Neill's Shakespeare by the Shakespearean Catherine Loomis. That chestnut, Loomis suggests with due tact, is due for supersession.

Zander Brietzke, like King a former editor of this journal, begins his tenure as book-review editor with Martha C. Carpentier's review of Emeline Jouve's Susan Glaspell's Poetics and Politics of Realism, as well as King's review of Becoming Carlotta, noted above. Ryder Thornton's term as performance-review editor kicks off with contributions by Brietzke, Peter Zazzali, Miranda Wilson and A. Timothy Spaulding...