STAGES & SCREENS

“In 1956, the year Long Day’s Journey into Night premiered, the reputation of America’s foremost dramatist was at an all-time low,” wrote scholar Ralph L. Corrigan Jr. in a paper on November 7, 1956. “Most critics were content to think of the dramatist as an outdated, over-the-hill, third-rate thinker who had been lucky to write a few decent plays.” Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey changed all that. The playwright has enjoyed a seemingly invincible reputation almost ever since that period of waning popularity. But might such a moment ever be in danger of returning? When a star-studded production of O'Neill's Anna Christie with Michelle Williams and Tom Sturridge opens at St. Ann's Warehouse on November 28, it will be the first time since 2020 that a major Off-Broadway production of O'Neill's has launched, and Broadway is currently in the longest drought for productions of plays by Eugene O’Neill in the more than 100 years since it started producing O’Neill. The...

In Madeline Miller’s novel Circe , the famous title witch has occasion to speak to her niece, Medea. Circe, who turns many of Odysseus’ men into pigs before he persuades her to change them back and she gets in bed with him, warns Medea that her husband Jason is waning in his feelings for her. Medea will not listen. “They will never take Jason from me,” Medea says in the novel. “I have my powers, and I will use them.” Circe, whom Miller turns from a villain to a feminist anti-hero by empathizing with her where males have not over centuries of representations, fears the worst will happen in Medea’s case. Miller can rehabilitate Circe, but she can’t quite rehabilitate Medea. The bloody conclusion of Medea’s story is well known to most people with a passing knowledge of Greek myth. She kills both of her children to get back at her ex-husband as he marries a new bride, kills that new bride and sets fire to the temple. A hard character to rehabilitate. But then, Miller didn’t have Sondra R...