In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Editor’s Foreword
  • Alexander Pettit

This issue of the Eugene O’Neill Review, compiled from March to November, 2020 . . .

But which “issue,” or, really, issue in what sense? One in a series of periodical publications, obviously. Also a fraught topic, a birth, or an outlet? An emotional effusion or an earthier eructation, blunt and discomfiting? An emergence or, downstream, “the action of flowing, going, or coming out,” per the OED’s jingly entry? A discharge—an unseemly noun that, verbed, gestures nobly at duty and obligation?

A “chain of evidence.” “Fortune or luck in an undertaking.” A minting.

Both an emanation and “the end, termination, or close of something.”

A fluidity: a clefter of old rock.

All, might we agree? The times ask this of us. We have issues.

EOR 42.1 is not diluvial or unitarian or even particularly loud. Like its predecessors, it records a diversity of grapplings with a playwright equally disdainful of ossified systems and inartful assaults on them. The sober study of Eugene O’Neill is a prophylaxis against what one of Tom Stoppard’s characters calls “moral exhibitionism.”

But. But. This one feels different. Maplessly emergent. Re-runneled. Freer with its discontents. How could it not be, given the span of dates at . . . issue? I submitted the previous issue to our publisher in mid-April 2020, shortly after the theatres went dark. People in all but a few states were already sheltering at home. The numbers were horrifying, and Breonna Taylor was dead. I didn’t need to invite the zeitgeist into the journal. I just needed to welcome it when it arrived.

Throughout the spring, I gathered commitments from theatre-makers to share their responses to an O’Neill play that they had not previously or recently read. The last piece of this issue’s Practitioners’ Colloquium fell into [End Page v] place on May 4, when Octavio Solis signed on to revisit The Emperor Jones. Reading O’Neill’s “curiously dark tale of a toppled tinpot despot” would soon become more challenging as “George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, and the stark social/racial inequities laid before us by COVID-19” crowded into the nation’s consciousness. As a college student, Solis had “responded deeper” to The Emperor Jones than to The Iceman Cometh. This time, he writes, Jones “beg[an] to breathe again” as he filtered the play through his “present-day biases and ‘triggers.’” O’Neill gets props but not a pass. O’Neillians get a meditation on an artist’s maturing relationship with a play under stress but “breath[ing]” anew, if, Solis suggests, sometimes raspingly.

Also in the Practitioners’ Colloquium, Dana Schultes finds “Anna Christie” timely for its characters’ status as immigrants. Might “lightly adapt[ing] the text to allow the characters to be from Haiti or Ecuador” allow a contemporary audience better to appreciate this play, she asks? (I’m a “yea.”) But Schultes keeps the focus on an Anna “torn apart by society for simply trying to survive.” Her ideas about acting and directing that character testify to decades of work on both sides of the footlights. Yvette Nolan also selected “Anna Christie.” Nolan, whose channeling of the murdered Mi’kmaq activist Anna Mae Aquash informs her remarkable play Annie Mae’s Movement, entitles her present contribution “I Called Myself Anna Christie.” The bond feels real and tight. Her Anna is long on righteous misandry and splendid in her vanquishing of the play’s sodden, violent men. As a First Nations woman in Canada—where, we learn, Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls are identifed en masse by a familiar acronym—Nolan appreciates “how a lack of choice and opportunity puts women at risk.” O’Neill “seems to understand this.” But Nolan adds that Anna has to escape a misogynist trap that the playwright has helped set.

Michael Paller nudges the Practitioners’ Colloquium back toward the disinterested criticism that has tended to characterize the EOR throughout the years. Paller’s presentation of Beyond the Horizon as the work of a playwright “yet to learn how to develop the material he’s invented” emphasizes the resoluteness of O’Neill’s move into what he called “simon-pure...

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