COULD EUGENE O'NEILL'S REPUTATION GET FRAGILE?

“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 “Most critics were content to think of the dramatist as an outdated, over-the-hill, third-rate thinker who had been lucky to write a few decent plays.”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 Great White Way has not mounted an O’Neill play since Denzel Washington’s The Iceman Cometh closed in July of 2018, making it seven years and three months and counting. And there are apparently no plans to produce O’Neill in the next season either, based on the existing lists of upcoming shows. Such a drought isn’t totally unprecedented: Broadway took a six year-plus break from O’Neill between the day Desire Under the Elms closed in May of 2009 and Hughie opened in February of 2016. But it is highly unusual. To find another break that long one must go back to the 1940s, when O’Neill was alive. For most of the century, O’Neill has been staged every couple of years on Broadway.

Perhaps it may not be a coincidence that in September of 2020 a movie was released that portrayed Eugene O’Neill very harshly as a racist and what’s more as quite a monumental jerk. The film The Black Emperor of Broadway, based on an off-Broadway play of the same name, starred Shaun Parkes as the actor who originated the title role in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, Charles S. Gilpin. Gilpin resisted the demands of O’Neill, played with seething obnoxiousness by John Hensley, that he say the n-word several times in the course of the play, and apparently changed many of O’Neill’s lines before being fired and replaced by future star Paul Robeson, who played the part in the movie of Emperor Jones. The Black Emperor of Broadway is rough-hewn, if attractively shot, and went straight to streaming with almost zero critical attention. Rotten Tomatoes shows only two major critics who reviewed the film. Thus, while New York producers may be more familiar with the film than the general public, it is mentioned here less because of an argument of causation than because such a portrayal exists at all.

One doesn’t expect this little movie would have taken down the mighty O’Neill, who still after all has his name on a Broadway theater. But it happened to come out just as Broadway underwent a reckoning on racial issues that has meant a lot of programming changes and dovetails with the themes of the movie. In September 2020 Broadway was still closed from the pandemic. But when it reopened a year later, after the death of George Floyd, producers had dramatically increased the number of plays by African American playwrights. In the season before the pandemic, only two shows were by Black authors. In the first autumn after the pandemic, seven plays were by Black playwrights – more than half the number of plays on Broadway. The change came about in part because of a movement to increase the diversity on stages around the country, highlighted by a much reported-upon manifesto titled “We See You White American Theater,” which called for no less than 50 percent of theaters’ mainstage programming to be by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) authors. The manifesto’s introduction was signed by more than 200 signatories including Pulitzer Prize-winning authors and artistic directors of major regional theaters, as well as recognizable names like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Cynthia Erivo, Sterling K. Brown and Issa Rae.

The racial ratio of playwrights on Broadway did not stay as dramatically changed as it was in the Autumn of 2021, and of course a national backlash against “woke” programming has competed for influence with We See You White American Theater. But it is certainly possible that Eugene O’Neill productions have been deprioritized. Some would prefer to see fewer plays by dead white playwrights. When Branden Jacobs-Jenkins won the Tony for Best Revival of a Play for his masterpiece Appropriate, he addressed the prominence of such authors on Broadway. First acknowledging a dead Black playwright, Ossie Davis, saying “without Ossie Davis I wouldn’t be here,” he then took aim at Henrik Ibsen, who was nominated in the category for The Enemy of the People. “And for those of you worried about Henrik Ibsen, he’s been dead for over 100 years and he’s already won this twice.” O’Neill has been dead since 1953 and has also won the Tony for Best Revival twice.

I began reflecting on O’Neill’s absence from the stage the night I saw The Black Emperor of Broadway, but that film wasn’t the only reason. I had begun discussing with a friend how many O’Neill plays he had seen. I wanted to show him some of the O’Neill plays I had seen, and noticed when Googling productions of Eugene O’Neill plays around the world that almost none appear to have been produced the world over in the years since 2020’s revival of A Touch of the Poet at the Irish Repertory Theatre. This year, for example, the only production I found was in Athens, Greece, where a production of O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape was staged as part of the Eugene O’Neill Society’s annual conference. A Google search is not a bullet-proof method of investigation in such a matter, but no other productions could be found.

It is true that Long Day's Journey appeared on London's West End in 2024 with a major star -- Brian Cox of HBO's Succession -- in the lead. So perhaps the "drought" on Broadway has more to do with the post-pandemic economics of long and heavy plays, than with the politics of his reputation. But no Broadway transfer appears forthcoming, and such productions have been rare not just on Broadway but around the globe since 2020.  

My Google search for O'Neill productions got me thinking about the DVDs I’ve seen of O’Neill plays. Several of his shows are available on DVD in productions from the Broadway Theatre Archive, which produced dozens of plays for television in the 1970s. But many of those programs, most of which are not available to stream, are now selling online on DVD for between $50 and $100-plus counting shipping. There were a few exceptions, but to be frank I snatched most of them up. So it’s extremely rare now to find O’Neill’s plays even on DVD. No other good way exists right now to see Beyond the Horizon, the first of his four Pulitzer winners, or A Touch of the Poet, perhaps my personal favorite O'Neill play, or Mourning Becomes Electra, a rarely seen double-length drama about the Civil War. One can stream or buy cheap DVDs of the movies that have been made of some of his more popular plays, like Desire Under The Elms (1958) and Anna Christie (1930), but they are pretty old by now and many of them seem dated.

All this raises the question, perhaps prematurely, of whether Eugene O’Neill’s legacy could become fragile. The New York Times, for example, published a story this July about the precarious state of the finances at the world-renowned Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, which workshops plays and musicals every summer and has been responsible for launching the careers of dozens of playwrights, plays and musicals. The financial challenges at the O'Neill Center are almost certainly not due to weakening in O'Neill's reputation, but it adds to the picture of a shrinking cultural footprint for the theater icon.

On matters of race, O’Neill was both ahead of and behind his time. He wrote at least three plays starring Black actors in the 1920s, a very rare thing then. But when controversies arose about his depiction of an interracial romance between an aspiring Black lawyer and a white woman, in his cringe-inducingly titled play All God’s Chillun Got Wings, O’Neill told the NYT that he was not advocating for the union of the races. Not the sort of brave move that endears a playwright to posterity. If such problems are quietly overtaking his reputation, as perhaps evidenced by The Black Emperor of Broadway, it might be possible that the mighty O'Neill could eventually weaken. For now, the St. Ann's Warehouse has a chance of being a triumphant return to New York for O'Neill. We'll see how it fares in critical and audience reception. It could either mark a revival of interest in O’Neill or further evidence of an eventual eclipse.