The “Lost Plays”: The Web, Recklessness, and Abortion by Eric Fraisher Hayes (review)

Tao House is the serene Northern California retreat where O’Neill wrote his final and most memorable plays, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten. But in October 2020 it was the site of videotaped script-in-hand performances of three of his earliest works, from the so-called lost plays.

O’Neill wrote these three plays—The Web, Recklessness, and Abortion—just after his redemptive bout in the sanitarium with tuberculosis, when he found his true vocation as a playwright, but before he formally studied playwriting at Harvard with George Pierce Baker. They are miniatures, exercises to work out particular knots of conflict, almost like sculptors’ maquettes. Together these taut, heavily wrought little melodramas give a fascinating glimpse into the preoccupations that fueled O’Neill’s artistic trajectory.

Decades before he would turn to his richest material, his own family, the young O’Neill seems here to be drawing on the lives he encountered as a reporter for the New London Telegraph. He shows us a terrible prism of humanity in the seedy underworld of the crime beat. His sympathies are with the working class or underclass white women he finds smothered in the lower depths of a stratified society, lacking agency in their own lives. Their fates rest with callous men who use them. They are all trapped. They all struggle and try to seize a remote chance at happiness. But O’Neill seems to give human happiness very long odds, at least for the women of his time whose hopes for love and freedom contort into desperate, impossible longings before being violently stomped out.

Director Eric Fraisher Hayes eliminated all “fighting, kissing, and sitting” in the scripts to make some kind of shared stage experience safe for the actors. Most have roles in more than one of the plays, limiting the population of the bubble. All three plays are performed in front of a generalized textured set, a bit like a Home Depot display: a shingled-looking area stage right with a chandelier hanging imprecisely over it, a wide wooden lath section stage left, up a couple of steps with an exit, and a period staircase turning and exiting out the middle. There’s just enough there to let your imagination fill in the blanks.

In The Web, we meet Rose, a woman trapped in the life of prostitution, played just this side of the border of tender and tough by Emily Keyishian. She’s not at all sexualized: she’s a tired working-class young woman with a hacking tubercular cough who finds purpose in caring for her baby. But to her monstrously self-centered pimp, Steve, played by Charles Woodson Parker as a kind of Bluto wannabe in a t-shirt and vest with flat cap, the baby is just an impediment. A narrow path to Rose’s salvation appears in the form of a sympathetic antihero next-door neighbor, Tim Moran, played by Ryan Hayes. Moran is a wily and notorious escaped con, the man who looks the most like virtue in this rogue’s gallery that also includes a band of rotten flat-footed cops. In the end, the lousy system triumphs, and hope dies.

We sense O’Neill trying out his Shavian chops, as Rose and Tim each in turn, standing by their script stands, deliver a little essay on how the system made them into criminals (a “yegg”—professional robber—in Tim’s case) and keeps them from becoming anything better. The actors all inhabit O’Neill’s street patter convincingly, without veering into Guys and Dolls cartoonish-ness. It’s a challenge that runs throughout the productions: making the characters real and relatable humans with beating hearts, transcending both O’Neill’s period dialect as well as the two- dimensionality one might expect in what are to some extent compressed...