Editor's Foreword

The dedicatee of this volume, Kurt Eisen (1958–2019), first appeared on the EOR's masthead in 2004, upon his assumption of the book review editorship. Kurt served in that capacity until 2015, and as a board member in 2016 and 2017. The next year, he began his all-too-brief tenure as general editor. After I became editor in 2019, Kurt returned to the board and became an invaluable advisor, supporter, inspiration, and friend. ("Mensch" is the word that Steven Bloom uses in the tribute that appears elsewhere in this volume.) From personal experience, I know the benefits that Kurt's impeccable sense of sound and cadence could confer on a needy sentence: he heard prose, and wrote it, like the discerning lover of music that he was. I learned from him that an editor's criticisms can be indulgent without cost to their utility, although I still don't know whether his description of me as "the master of the comically inapt metaphor" was meant to signal indulgence or exasperation. What I do know is that the man who said this was radically decent and vast of heart and mind. Long ago, John Dryden hit the right note: "Farewell too little and too lately known . . . ." Goodbye, Kurt. And thank you.

This issue marks debuts as well as departures. Brice Ezell, a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, kicks off his career as a publishing scholar with an argument for the Wyeth family in Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities as a "mediatized" neoliberal version of O'Neill's Tyrones. Joel Minor appears in the EOR for the first time with an informational piece on the newly opened Harley Hammerman Collection on Eugene O'Neill at Washington University. In a Lost & Found entry, Daniel Wetmore—another newcomer to the EOR—debuts as a poet. His subject is drawn from family history: his great-grandfather's confrontation with a drunken Eugene O'Neill who, probably in summer 1912, lurched up the Wetmore driveway in New London, hoping to visit with the old man's daughter. A rare photograph captures Portia Wetmore and Eugene O'Neill at the beach around that time.

Two other Lost & Found entries publish work by O'Neill's Provincetown Player comrade James Light, both for the first time. "The Parade of Masks," discovered by Robert Dowling while he was researching his 2014 biography of O'Neill, discusses O'Neill's interest in masks and "physical masks" from the Players' production of Strindberg's Spook Sonata through Strange Interlude. Dowling's introduction focuses on Light's illumination (if I may) of O'Neill's yearning to write novels. David Clare ably introduces Light's notes on the Provincetown Players' production of The Hairy Ape, compiled for the English theatre impresario Harold Marsh Harwood. Reading this piece alongside Ronald Wainscott's Staging O'Neill (1988) and Jackson Bryer and Robert Dowling's edition of The Contemporary Reviews (2014) should suggest some exciting topics for research.

For this issue, the Practitioners' Colloquium moves from the stage to the classroom. Theatre professor Beth Wynstra joined four of her colleagues from Babson College for a transdisciplinary discussion of Beyond the Horizon. Wynstra's transcription is jovial as well as instructive. Ever wonder how much in today's money Andy Mayo makes in Argentina? Short answer: a "crap-ton," as my teenage daughter might put it.

Elsewhere, an old book by Doris Falk gets a fresh look from Bess Rowen; David Palmer reviews Thierry Dubost's new monograph on O'Neill; Patrick Chura handles Max Shulman and J. Chris Westgate's edited collection on Progressive Era drama; and William Davies King, Jo Morello, Laura Shea, and yours truly review productions from hither and yon.

I'll sign off by noting two oddities from the fall 2019 theatre and television seasons. In Larissa FastHorse's The Thanksgiving Play, which ran at eight American theatres last fall, a high school drama teacher's decision to stage The Iceman Cometh with a cast of fifteen-year-olds prompts 300 parents to demand her dismissal. In season 3, episode 3 of The Magnificent Mrs...