Almost two years after its completion in May of 1926, Eugene O'Neill's Lazarus Laughed received its premiere production—not in New York. This “Play for an Imaginative Theatre,” clearly the most theatrically demanding of all of O'Neill's works, made its first appearance in California, at the Pasadena Community Playhouse, opening April 9, 1928. Not since the days when his earliest one-act plays were produced at the Wharf Theatre in Provincetown, Massachusetts, had an O'Neill play failed to result in a New York production.

Barnardo' line “How now Horatio, you tremble and look pale,” delivered just after the ghost's exit in Act I, scene i of Hamlet, is at once a description of Horatio and a thematic statement about the effect of tragedy. By the end of the play, this phrase has come to signify the way amazing, horrifying, and profoundly tragic events affect the spectators: Hamlet addresses the “mutes or audience” to the “act” he, Laertes, Claudius and Gertrude have just performed as “you that look pale, and tremble at this chance” (V, ii, 334). When a character describes another in this way, the utterance constitutes a verbal cue: it tells the audience what is happening on the stage, or how the other characters are reacting to past or present events. A verbal cue can be thought of as a spoken stage direction, to use Raymond Williams' term, one which serves as a signal both to the actors and to the audience. Shakespeare repeatedly resorted to verbal cues in representing the ghosts, witches, and other supernatural visitations that figure prominently in Hamlet, Macbeth, and less prominently, in Richard III and Julius Caesar. Regardless of how they are represented on the stage, supernatural characters are essentially imaginative projections, who exist as much through the speeches and described reactions of others as through what they themselves say and do. Verbal cues thus serve as part of the characterization process; they help to define these creatures in terms of their effects on others. And as a theatrical strategy, the cues employ language to summon up visions in the mind of the spectator, creating images that no stagecraft, however spectacular, could equal.

Eugene O'Neill pushed his habitual experimentation with theatrical forms toward the establishment of a radically new esthetic in The Great God Brown (1925) and Lazarus Laughed (1926). He groped toward a poetic theatre with religious and ceremonial overtones that involved further visual and aural departures from the accepted norm of Broadway productions. In the first of these plays, O'Neill's mastery of visceral effects continues to cast a spell over spectators in occasional imaginative and skillful productions. But the second remains his least accessible; ever since its first production at the Pasadena Playhouse in April 1928, it has continued to mystify or repel both theatre people and litterateurs.

Although The Alchemist, one of the great comedies of the English Renaissance, has received considerable attention from critics, very few have been interested in examining the play as something that is realized in three-dimensional space. Jonson's language creates character and dramatic tension, as well as thematic and metaphoric resonances, with such fullness that the literary critic is tempted to read the play as literature only. Jonson, however, was not writing closet drama any more than Shakespeare, and it is important for understanding the play to try to envision the original staging—something which, I feel, has not been sufficiently done. William A. Armstrong's belief that Jonson was convinced “that the profoundest intimations come by the ear, not the eye” (p. 61) seems to me an oversimplification. The Alchemist reveals that the ear and eye are not necessarily opposed, nor even merely complementary. They are interconnected and interdependent. The stage sets up the metaphoric dimensions and dynamics of the play. This approach to The Alchemist concentrates its extraordinary busyness— a busyness which makes the play so difficult for first readers— into a relatively simple, but charged, set of defining tensions and movements.

At a press conference to publicize the opening of The Iceman Cometh in 1946, Eugene O'Neill was quoted as saying that he considered America “instead of the most successful country in the world,… its greatest failure…, the greatest failure because it was given everything, more than any other country. Through moving as rapidly as it has, it has never acquired any real roots. Its main idea is that everlasting game of trying to possess your own soul and the things outside of it, too.”

In the honor roll of nineteenth-century theatrical producers of Shakespeare, the name Frederick Balsir Chatterton has never been entered. Even in his own time he was often considered more of an entrepreneur or entertainer than a serious advocate of Shakespeare. Since then he has either been ignored or ridiculed by critics and historians, the lone exception being Odell, who gave Chatterton's productions their only serious attention. What historians remember instead is Chatterton's infamous maxim— “Shakespeare spelt ruin and Byron bankruptcy”—a saying he did not invent and did not totally believe.

Eugene O'Neill would certainly have agreed with Susanne Langer's suggestive description of drama in Feeling and Form:

Drama is a great form which…. express[es]…. the whole life of feeling—call it “felt life,” “subjectivity,” “direct experience,” or what you will—which finds its articulate expression in art, and, I believe—only in art…. It…. objectif[ies] our subjective being—the most intimate “Reality” that we know. This function, and not the recording of contemporary scenes, politics, or even moral attitudes, is what relates art to life (366).

Several years ago an article in this journal called attention to the Elizabeth Robins Collection then acquired by the Fales Library of New York University. In addition to her many other accomplishments, Robins was a gifted writer who kept extensive diaries and exchanged voluminous letters with her family, friends, and associates. All these, as well as her accounts, manuscripts, drafts, and scrapbooks, constitute a massive assemblage that had been barely sifted at the time of the article and that is still not fully catalogued. It comprises a treasure-trove for scholars of the history of the theatre, literature, and American and English history.

“Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.” With this statement and related discussion Carl Jung suggested that the decision to work as an artist is involuntary; however he did not actually explain the nature of being “seized.” Working with numerous artists, reading about many others, and examining the specific example of Robert Edmond Jones, I would suggest that the artist is both seized by and seizes the innate drive and that it is a process which occurs over time. An examination of Jones's childhood, education, and early production experience reveals the complex nature of his progression toward a career as a theatre artist.

Like his popularity in the United States, which has fluctuated sharply over the past sixty years or so, Eugene O'Neill's reception in China has had its twists and turns. He was widely read, translated, performed, critically reviewed and even creatively imitated in the 1930s, but this love affair was brought to an almost complete stop by China's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, which lasted eight years from 1937 to 1945. When the war was over, there were some attempts at reviving the interest, but with the changed political situation, these efforts were followed by an even longer silence and occasional harsh criticism.

“I don't think I'll have anything very interesting to tell you.”

When I met and interviewed Karl Ragnar Gierow in his office at the Royal Swedish Academy, Stockholm, February 27, 1973, he at first expressed skepticism about whether there was any Eugene O'Neill story to be told. But I had earlier paid several visits to the archives of the Royal Dramatic Theatre (Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern/ Dramaten); had closely researched the historic O'Neill world premieres (1956–62) while Gierow was Dramaten's General Intendant (Manager); and had been carefully coached by Stig Torsslow, the theatre's venerable Dramaturg, concerning Gierow's exploits in acquiring, translating, and producing four of O'Neill's posthumous plays. These comprised Long Day's Journey into Night (February 10, 1956); A Touch of the Poet (March 19, 1957); Hughie (September 18, 1958); and More Stately Mansions (November 9, 1962). I had come to my appointment with Gierow bearing some essential facts and with plenty of questions about Long Day's Journey and the playwright's widow, Carlotta Monterey O'Neill. Gierow was cordial, accommodating, and forthcoming with marvelous remembered details. I returned to Finland (where I was a Senior Fulbright-Hays Scholar) full of appreciation for Torsslow's avuncular counsel and Gierow's vivid recollections. I carried along voluminous notes from my longsought interview and copies of some O'Neill scripts from Dramaten for the Library of Åbo Akademi.

Margaret Webster (1905–1972), British-American producer-director perhaps best remembered for her production of Othello with Paul Robeson, was also a distinguished writer, lecturer and actress. It was in these several capacities that Webster was invited in 1961 by the United States Department of State to visit South Africa. Webster was to lecture on theatre, offer her one-woman recitals of Shakespeare and Shaw, and direct an “American classic” for the South African National Theatre Organization. In discussions with members of the State Department and the National Theatre Organization, the plays of several writers, including Williams, Miller, Wilder, Hellman and MacLeish, were considered but eventually eliminated for reasons of suitability, individual taste or because of recent productions in South Africa. Eventually, A Touch of the Poet was selected for production.

As the critics Horst Frenz and Susan Tuck have made abundantly clear, O'Neill's theatrical reputation on the European continent has often fared well. Witness thereof are the splendid productions that the dramatist's later dramas received at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. Although the major foreign productions of O'Neill have by now been documented, those of smaller European countries such as Belgium have remained rather obscure. And yet, I would argue that the Belgian premiere of Long Day's Journey into Night possesses a significant historical importance. It took place, in a French adaptation, in the provincial town of Charleroi in March 1970 as a venture of the “Théâtre de l'Ancre.’ This production, if not flawless, emphasized O'Neill's mastery of poetic stage realism, and thus offered new insights into the meaning of his tragic experiments.