Thus, this volume includes not only O’Neill’s key, experimental, early one-acts—along with a couple of other important plays by contemporary female dramatists—but also contextualizing essays about the dramas first put on by the Provincetown Players, the company whose primary goal was, like O’Neill’s, no less than the transformation of American theater. Significantly, these same one-act plays received critically acclaimed productions in the 1990s and 2000s by the internationally renowned experimental theater company the Wooster Group, whose home in the SoHo section of New York City is a quick bike ride away from the Provincetown Players’ old, still-standing theater in Greenwich Village. Although the Wooster Group’s radical approach to O’Neill’s funky performance texts was not something that “the first great American playwright”—nor even the decidedly non-commercial theater of the Provincetown Players—could have possibly imagined way back when, the Wooster Group’s recent success with innovative productions of a swath of O’Neill’s early work (originally written and produced during and shortly after World War I) reinforces the fact that there’s something boldly theatrical about these plays, especially when they’re re-energized by a company that’s as committed to breaking new theatrical ground today as the Provincetown Players were back in 1920.
In addition to touching upon early productions of O’Neill’s one-acts, Experimental O’Neill’s contextualizing chapters, by a diverse array of international performance scholars and artists, focus on more recent presentations of his plays by the Wooster Group while also viewing early O’Neill within other contexts, such as—in Lowell Fiet’s wide-ranging essay—the Caribbean, the setting of The Emperor Jones, as well as the African diaspora, the historical avant-garde, and US imperialism. Another essay, by Noelia Hernando-Real, emphasizes the centrality of women in the Provincetown Players, which to this day is primarily associated with the early, male-dominated work of O’Neill. Focusing on the many antiwar plays written by the Provincetown Players’ female dramatists (and others), while also providing an insightful introduction to the theater company, Hernando-Real demonstrates that these works (two of which appear in this volume) were as progressive in their critique of masculinity and war as they were aesthetically innovative.
Like several of the Players’ female dramatists, the Wooster Group has also effectively responded to some of the problems found in O’Neill’s texts, such as the playwright’s sometimes awkward handling of gender and race, although through performative strategies rather than dramatic writing. For example, the Wooster Group production of The Emperor Jones featured a white actress, Kate Valk, playing a multi-layered Emperor while wearing a colorful costume from Kabuki theater (a Japanese performance form) and blackface makeup. An Obie-Award winning actress and Wooster Group founding member, Valk was widely praised for her startlingly innovative and powerful performance as the male Emperor. In an interview conducted for this book, she discusses the role while offering fresh insights into the Wooster Group’s work on other early plays by O’Neill, all of which appear in Experimental O’Neill.
The volume also includes a review essay by Richard Murphet—who views the Wooster Group’s The Hairy Ape as an effective theatrical take on post-9/11 life in the West—as well as a careful reading of the play by Anthony Dawahare, who draws connections between its experimental aesthetics and political engagement while suggesting, like Murphet, that The Hairy Ape is presciently relevant over ninety years after it first appeared. Another chapter, by Les Hunter, offers a unique perspective on the collaborative production, under the title Early Plays, by the Wooster Group and New York City Players of O’Neills short “sea plays” from the nineteen-tens. After historically situating the one-act sea plays and O’Neill, Hunter explains how the Early Plays’ director Richard Maxwell emphasized within the acting a sort of post-Brechtian lack of affect that helped to foreground the plays’ unusual language which, ironically, could possibly have pleased O’Neill, who repeatedly said later in life that he would rather have people read his plays as literature than see them performed by actors whose emotive craft, O’Neill believed, could detract spectators from clearly hearing his written words. Additionally, the book contains an introduction to groundbreaking aspects of O’Neill’s early work, experimental performance, and the Wooster Group’s take on O’Neill.
While the contextualizing chapters will enable readers to gain fresh insights into experimental theater practice and the continuing relevance of early O’Neill—particularly for the twenty-first century—the Wooster Group’s productions covered here begin with his plays, as do many of the essays. Thus, this volume—unique among books on O’Neill, experimental theater, or American drama—contains, in addition to the critical chapters, the plays themselves, so that readers, including artists, scholars, and the general public, can easily refer to relevant chapters while reading a particular play, or vice versa.
The included early plays that were produced by both the Provincetown Players (from 1916-1922) and the Wooster Group (from 1993-2012) are two long one-acts, The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape, as well as a group of shorter, one-act “sea plays” often referred to as the S.S. Glencairn Plays (or Early Plays in the Wooster Group/NYC Players collaboration), since the Glencairn is the name of the ship where most of the characters work. Please note, however, that O’Neill wrote the “sea plays” separately and in a different order than they appear in the Glencairn series, and that he himself had never intended to group the plays together. When produced as the S.S. Glencairn Plays the series includes, in the following order, The Moon of the Caribbees, Bound East for Cardiff, The Long Voyage Home, and In the Zone (a work that the Early Plays production omitted).
Rounding out Experimental O’Neill are two innovative, female-authored antiwar plays first produced by the Provincetown Players in the nineteen-tens—The Game, by Louise Bryant, and Aria da Capo, by Edna St. Vincent Millay—both of which Hernando-Real examines in her essay. In fact, since close to half of the Players’ produced texts were written by the company’s female dramatists, the inclusion of Bryant’s and Millay’s engaging one-acts helps give voice to the sorts of perspectives and characters that, although absent from O’Neill’s early work, were quite present on the boards of the Players’ Playwrights’ Theatre.
—R.M.
Chapter 1: Introduction
Experimentation, The Wooster Group, and Early O’Neill
Rick Mitchell
The very roots of modern drama—which in the US is dated from Eugene O’Neill’s early plays—came from the avant garde.
—Christopher Innes, Avant-Garde Theatre: 1892-19921
The Wooster Group restores fire, outrage, scandale, and the sensation of something new.
—Peter Sellars, Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group2
Not unlike the early work of another theatrical giant of the twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht, whose first play—the poetic one-act Baal (1918)—some now consider to be more original and timely than his great full-length dramas, some of O’Neill’s early plays could be more effective today than his later masterworks. Ironically, the over-identification of O’Neill with his late dramas of psychological realism can cause him to be viewed as Brecht’s antithesis in spite of his early plays utilizing expressionism, theatricality, and protagonists-shaped-by-history that adumbrate Brecht’s epic theater. Due in large part to their innovative form, several of O’Neill’s early one-acts—hammered out within the progressive crucible of the art-theater of the Provincetown Players, which produced the works between 1916 and 1922—are still aesthetically and politically relevant, especially when produced in ways that de-ossify and recontextualize the texts, thereby enabling their inherent theatrical potential, encrusted and altered by time, to break through during performance.
In this introductory chapter, I’ll be discussing some of the plays’ innovations and the Wooster Group, the experimental theater company which produced, many decades