Project MUSE®: Eugene O'Neill Review - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/551
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Eugene O'Neill Review.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 33 (2012) through current issue
Latest Articles: Eugene O'Neill ReviewTWOProject MUSE®Eugene O'Neill Review2161-43181040-9483Latest articles in Eugene O'Neill Review. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Prompt Script for Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Abbey Theatre 1985
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989371
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In Eugene O’Neill in Ireland, Edward L. Shaughnessy describes the conundrum of the lackluster reception of Long Day’s Journey Into Night at the Abbey Theatre in 1985. The production was helmed by famed Irish actor and director Patrick Laffan, who had performed Jamie Tyrone in 1967 at the Abbey (directed by Frank Dermody), which Shaughnessy suggests should have given him “an excellent understanding of the play’s dynamics.”1 Moreover, the 1985 production featured Siobhan McKenna, “one of Ireland’s premiere actresses,” as Mary Tyrone; Godfrey Quigley as James Tyrone; and Desmond Cave as Jamie Tyrone—with Cave’s performance winning praise (75). Nevertheless, Laffan’s production was widely panned in the Irish press.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/551/image/coversmallPrompt Script for Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Abbey Theatre 19852026-04-29text/htmlen-USPrompt Script for Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Abbey Theatre 19852026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®382662026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29Eugene O’Neill on the 1920s London Stages
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989372
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On May 15, 1919, Bernard Shaw delivered a speech at the Hampstead Town Hall entitled “The Present Predicament of the Theatre.” He began with comments about West End theater after the Great War: “I suppose those of you who contemplate the theatre as it exists in London to-day will admit that from a commercial aspect the prospect is extremely rosy. There are more people going than ever before, enormous sums are being made, and I presume being lost.”1 As Shaw observes, this was the beginning of a phenomenal decade for theater in London. The 1920s was when Noel Coward emerged and thrived, when actors such as Sybil Thorndike, Edith Evans, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, and Ralph Richardson achieved early successes.Yet
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/551/image/coversmallEugene O’Neill on the 1920s London Stages2026-04-29text/htmlen-USEugene O’Neill on the 1920s London Stages2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®988852026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29O’Neillian Echoes in Dennis Scott’s An Echo in the Bone (1974)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989373
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Commentators have frequently criticized Eugene O’Neill’s portrayals of Black characters and his handling of Black issues in plays such as The Emperor Jones (1920) and All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924). However, O’Neill has always had high-profile Black defenders of his work, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Nathan Irvin Huggins, Glenda E. Gill, Cornel West, and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.1 This article explores the intertextual tributes that Black Jamaican writer Dennis Scott pays to O’Neill in his seminal 1974 play An Echo in the Bone. The play, which is primarily set in a sugar shack behind the main characters’ house during a Nine-Night Ceremony in 1937, interrogates the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/551/image/coversmallO’Neillian Echoes in Dennis Scott’s An Echo in the Bone (1974)2026-04-29text/htmlen-USO’Neillian Echoes in Dennis Scott’s An Echo in the Bone (1974)2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®677522026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29An Interview with the Abnormally Normal Robert Falls
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989374
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In order to properly interview Eugene O’Neill medallion recipient Robert Falls (1954–), it was important to research information on his childhood, education, and career. I also sought creative insights from professional colleagues: producer Paul Libin and actor John Douglas Thompson. In doing so, I found myself marveling at the fact that Falls is greatly admired and fondly remembered. There were no reports about professional scandals, mental disorders, addiction issues, a history of temper tantrums, indulgent eccentricities, childhood traumas, abandonment issues, betrayals, violence, or any other disturbing personal circumstances that might explain his gifts for interpreting O’Neill’s darkest plays. When I remarked
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/551/image/coversmallAn Interview with the Abnormally Normal Robert Falls2026-04-29text/htmlen-USAn Interview with the Abnormally Normal Robert Falls2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®526172026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29“I Think of O’Neill as Kronos”: James Ijames on Eugene O’Neill
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989375
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Pulitzer Prize–winner James Ijames has been a fixture on Philadelphia stages for over a decade, but he rose to national attention when his 2017 play Kill Move Paradise garnered critical attention during its debut at Dr. Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre in New York City. The play confronts the frequency of police murders of unarmed Black men by focusing on the Limbo these newly deceased men find themselves in and how they support each other through what should be an unimaginable situation. Five years later, Ijames won the Pulitzer for Fat Ham, a sharp and witty take on Hamlet set at a family barbeque, which debuted at The Public Theater and was transferred to Broadway. As these two examples show, Ijames’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/551/image/coversmall“I Think of O’Neill as Kronos”: James Ijames on Eugene O’Neill2026-04-29text/htmlen-US“I Think of O’Neill as Kronos”: James Ijames on Eugene O’Neill2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®316232026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29Eugene O’Neill and the Ashcan Artists: The Influence of the New York Art Movement on the Plays by Zander Brietzke (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989376
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Eugene O’Neill and the Ashcan Artists is Zander Brietzke’s most recent monograph since his estimable, long-overdue study Magnum Opus: The Cycle Plays of Eugene O’Neill. In that book, Brietzke, a highly respected authority on O’Neill and American theater, challenged the previous body of scholarship on O’Neill’s “Cycle,” A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed. With his latest book, Brietzke spelunks into a period of O’Neill’s life that’s been only cursorily explored and only then as the near exclusive purview of set pieces for major biographies. For his investigation, Brietzke plunges into the nostalgie de la boue that defined the Ashcan painters’ singularly scrappy aesthetic, notably in the works of John Sloan
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/551/image/coversmallEugene O’Neill and the Ashcan Artists: The Influence of the New York Art Movement on the Plays by Zander Brietzke (review)2026-04-29text/htmlen-USEugene O’Neill and the Ashcan Artists: The Influence of the New York Art Movement on the Plays by Zander Brietzke (review)2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®154182026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life by Alisa Zhulina (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989377
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Modern drama begets a peculiar economic paradox. While many socially minded dramatists aim to elucidate modernity’s ills or discontents on stage, they nevertheless do so within a revenue-driven mode of production. This insight is at the center of Alisa Zhulina’s 2024 book, Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life. Written from the perspective of both a scholar and a practitioner, Theater of Capital examines the ways in which capitalism set the stage for marketable new developments in European fin-de-siècle drama. Offering more than just a new lens through which to read major theatrical texts of this era, Zhulina impressively harnesses the dramas of our past to demonstrate how we might better address
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/551/image/coversmallTheater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life by Alisa Zhulina (review)2026-04-29text/htmlen-USTheater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life by Alisa Zhulina (review)2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®121412026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29Irish Repertory Theatre: Celebrating Thirty-Five Years Off-Broadway by Maria Szasz (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989378
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Maria Szasz’s new book, Irish Repertory Theatre: Celebrating Thirty-Five Years Off-Broadway, attributes the success of the long-lived nonprofit theater company to the contributions of cofounders Charlotte Moore and Ciarán O’Reilly. These actor-managers united in 1988 to produce, perform, direct, and write Irish theater and present it to New York City’s Off-Broadway community. They played in several locations in the early years but found a permanent home in 1995. The Irish Rep, as it is fondly called, now resides at 132 West 22nd Street in the Chelsea district.The need for an Irish repertory theater in New York, as demonstrated by Szasz, seemed obvious long before 1988. The entwined histories of Ireland and the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/551/image/coversmallIrish Repertory Theatre: Celebrating Thirty-Five Years Off-Broadway by Maria Szasz (review)2026-04-29text/htmlen-USIrish Repertory Theatre: Celebrating Thirty-Five Years Off-Broadway by Maria Szasz (review)2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®130492026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29A Moon for the Misbegotten by Rebecca Frecknall (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989379
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During the summer of 2025, a high-profile production of Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten was mounted at the small Almeida Theatre in Islington, north London. It was directed by Rebecca Frecknall, who has emerged as a major force in British theater over recent years, thanks to her stellar, Olivier-winning productions of Cabaret (starring Jessie Buckley and Eddie Redmayne) and A Streetcar Named Desire (starring Paul Mescal, Anjana Vasan, and Patsy Ferran). Frecknall’s consummate skills as a director were evident in her production of O’Neill’s late, powerful, semiautobiographical work in which he reflects on the end of his brother Jamie’s life. The actors had been coached well in terms of how to handle key
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/551/image/coversmallA Moon for the Misbegotten by Rebecca Frecknall (review)2026-04-29text/htmlen-USA Moon for the Misbegotten by Rebecca Frecknall (review)2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®153112026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29A Moon for the Misbegotten by Evan Jones (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989380
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Nonprofessional community theater is a core part of art theater in the United States, the sort of theater that Eugene O’Neill helped champion through his work with the Provincetown Players (1916–22). Productions like the Schenectady Civic Players’ 2024 staging of A Moon for the Misbegotten exemplify how small, local companies not only feed the community’s need for accessible art, but also how O’Neill’s plays have immense emotional impact even when performed in nonprofessional settings.Produced by Jean Carney and directed by Evan Jones, this production highlighted the ways in which O’Neill’s final play is every bit a twentieth-century take on Greek tragedy without any overt directorial concept beyond staging the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/551/image/coversmallA Moon for the Misbegotten by Evan Jones (review)2026-04-29text/htmlen-USA Moon for the Misbegotten by Evan Jones (review)2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®110482026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29Hughie by Frédérique Michel (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989381
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On a West Side street in midtown Manhattan in 1928, between 3 and 4 a.m., a man walks into a small, rundown hotel. Erie Smith, “a small fry gambler and horse player, living hand to mouth on the fringe of the rackets,” searches for meaning after the death of his friend, Hughie, the former Night Clerk. Written by Eugene O’Neill in 1941 and premiered posthumously in 1964, Hughie is a one-act play about Erie having reached a devastating moment in his life and become deeply entangled in his own illusions. In the context of O’Neill’s canon, the appeal of this play is the depiction of a man’s need for approval. Audiences witness Erie’s sentimental unraveling and the painful awareness that his luck has become worse since
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/551/image/coversmallHughie by Frédérique Michel (review)2026-04-29text/htmlen-USHughie by Frédérique Michel (review)2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®80872026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29Birds of a Feather: Two One-Act Plays by David Edwards (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989382
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Susan Glaspell’s masterpiece Trifles can be found in countless anthologies of American drama, but it is rarely performed. Requiring an elaborate set and many props, it demands a lot from a theater company wishing to produce it. If seen these days, it is usually done by college groups, in which all the actors are in the same age range, which negates the tension between the brash, young county attorney and the older farm folks. The Out of the Box Theatre Company, which features actors over age fifty, advantageously put the years of its actors to good use in their production, and they got the better of the twenty-something prosecutor.Glaspell became one of Eugene O’Neill’s friends and was instrumental in arranging his
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/551/image/coversmallBirds of a Feather: Two One-Act Plays by David Edwards (review)2026-04-29text/htmlen-USBirds of a Feather: Two One-Act Plays by David Edwards (review)2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®93002026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29In the Zone by Andy Sowers (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989383
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More than a century ago, the Provincetown Players turned down Eugene O’Neill’s In the Zone for production, perhaps because the company disliked the apparent conventionality of the piece. The adventurous troupe preferred O’Neill’s other sea-themed Glencairn plays, which more fully engage with experimental naturalism, eschewing potboiler techniques for a poetic beauty and simplicity. With its melodramatic plot twists, In the Zone seemed better suited for the commercial stage. In fact, the spooky drama did find a more conventional home when the Washington Square Players opened it on Halloween of 1917, and the piece was subsequently performed on the vaudeville circuit. Its reputation as the most mainstream of O’Neill’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/551/image/coversmallIn the Zone by Andy Sowers (review)2026-04-29text/htmlen-USIn the Zone by Andy Sowers (review)2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®97472026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29O’Neill’s First and Last Act by Eric Fraisher Hayes and Cynthia Lagodzinski (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989384
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In January 2025, the Eugene O’Neill Foundation in Danville, California, produced a double bill of Hughie (1942) and A Wife for a Life: A Backstage Story (2024). Hughie is O’Neill’s play on friendship, death, and mourning, which has a long history of being programmed in conjunction with other works, including David Scott Milton’s Duet (1975) and Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958). A Wife for a Life: A Backstage Story is an adaptation of O’Neill’s first play, A Wife for a Life (1913), by Eric Fraisher Hayes, artistic director of the O’Neill Foundation. The premise of this adaptation is that Eugene O’Neill brings A Wife for a Life on the road with his father, James O’Neill, who is touring with Monte Cristo in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/551/image/coversmallO’Neill’s First and Last Act by Eric Fraisher Hayes and Cynthia Lagodzinski (review)2026-04-29text/htmlen-USO’Neill’s First and Last Act by Eric Fraisher Hayes and Cynthia Lagodzinski (review)2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®144512026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29Editor’s Foreword
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989385
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After five years as performance review editor, Bess Rowen is stepping down to take on new challenges. EOR 47.1 will be her last issue. During the two years we have worked together, I have been impressed with her indefatigability in tracking productions of O’Neill’s plays and finding topnotch reviewers. Those who have worked with her know that she curates reviews with perceptive and constructive feedback. Many times my reviews of O’Neill Festival productions have been met with “Stop splitting your infinitives, Westgate!” or “Do you think you could use more @%#@#% adjectives?!?”Kidding aside, I have valued Bess’s enthusiasm, camaraderie, and expertise during these two years. I’m not alone. When informed of her
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/551/image/coversmallEditor’s Foreword2026-04-29text/htmlen-USEditor’s Foreword2026-04-292026TWOProject MUSE®69372026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-29