O’Neill’s First and Last Act

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 1913. As James reads the script, the play comes to life with the actors playing Eugene and James doubling as Jack and the Older Man from O’Neill’s play, which becomes an entertaining commentary on writing, acting, and theater. In the Director’s Notes, Hayes described Hughie and A Wife for a Life: A Backstage Story as representing “men struggling to communicate with each other. Knowing they want to connect but not knowing how.” Dubbed O’Neill’s First and Last Act, the double bill mined O’Neill’s life and plays for an enjoyable evening of theater.The evening began with Hughie, as the Night Clerk (Kyle Goldman) manned his post behind a large counter center stage and leafed through a newspaper while the last theatergoers found seats—an insightful choice by director Cynthia Lagodzinski that established the isolation against which Erie Smith rages. A few chairs stage right and a hatstand stage left along with the sounds of garbage trucks, cars, and the elevated train (sound design by Rob Evans) evoked the rundown hotel in New York in 1928. David Ghilardi’s performance of Erie Smith indulged in freneticism, charming audiences with a flurry of anecdotes, jokes, and asides even if it had little effect on the Night Clerk. Despite Erie’s bragging about the racetrack and women, the torrent of words in Ghilardi’s performance suggested that Erie was desperately trying to fill the void left by Hughie’s death. Yet this breakneck pace came at the cost of nuances in the character and play. At times, stories went by so quickly audiences could not appreciate their complexity or perhaps missed them altogether—like Erie’s joke about the Night Clerk’s children: “Three, huh? Well, that’s what comes of being careless!” More than a laugh line, this joke anticipates Erie’s wistful story about Hughie’s children when he had dinner with his friend’s family, a moment that belies Erie’s boastful exterior and reveals his need for human connection.The best moments in Ghilardi’s performance came when he revealed Erie’s vulnerability in spite of how desperately he concealed it from the Night Clerk. An especially strong moment came when Erie describes having dinner with Hughie. Despite his cynicism about family, he recalls becoming engrossed in telling Hughie’s children about one racehorse: “This old turtle never wins a race,” he says, “but he was as foxy as ten guys, a natural born crook, the goddamnedest thief.” Responding to Erie’s blue language, Hughie’s wife whisked the children away, leaving Erie troubled by this rejection, which Ghilardi conveyed with a break in his voice and momentary silence before throwing himself into another story. Ghilardi was more captivating when describing Hughie’s funeral: “It was up to me to give Hughie a bigtime send-off, because I knew nobody else would,” he boasts, only to become overwhelmed by emotions, which he conveyed by turning away from the Night Clerk to drink from his flask. Unfortunately, Goldman’s Night Clerk remained rather one-note. Whatever tale Erie spun, Goldman responded by rolling his eyes and delivering his lines comically. The Night Clerk is certainly challenging because he remains silent for much of the play. But O’Neill offers glimpses into the character’s internal life in the stage directions, which Goldman admitted he did not read during the talk-back.After a brief intermission, the program shifted to A Wife for a Life: A Backstage Story, which had its world premiere at the Eugene O’Neill International Festival of Theatre in New Ross, Ireland, in 2024. The play began with James O’Neill (John Mannion) sitting at a desk, stage right, applying makeup for Monte Cristo and listening to Puccini’s “The Girl of the Golden West.” As the woodwinds and brass swelled, Mannion waved his hand dramatically, directing his own performance—a strong choice in conveying James’s over-the-top personality. Mannion clearly enjoyed these moments, bellowing criticism of his sons and strutting around the stage. Neither Hayes’s adaptation nor Mannion’s performance, however, reduced James to the ham-fisted actor of nineteenth-century melodrama. Mannion found depth and complexity in the character, including his response to Eugene’s claim that there was “nobility” in lifting “ourselves out of the gutter of our fears”: “Morbid filth. A poor imitation of your deranged and inebriated godless, poet heroes! Destined to be found dead in an opium den or at the end of a rope!”—an outburst that hints at his anxiety about Eugene’s suicide attempt a year earlier. Willem Long was compelling as the young Eugene O’Neill. At times, he embraced a kind of minimalism in his performance, looking downward or away during his father’s outbursts, suggesting what it might have been like to be the child of a matinee idol. At other times, Long revealed O’Neill’s passion, especially his determination to capture “real life” in his plays, “the inner-struggles. The guilt. The fear. The hypocrisy.” Kyle Goldman played Jamie for comic effect in one scene, which included a well-received joke about meeting at Elliott’s, a local Danville bar, after the show.Once Mannion started reading stage directions aloud, the action shifted from the dressing room to the Arizona desert, with Mannion removing a robe and ascot to reveal the burgundy shirt and suspenders of the Older Man and Long removing his dress coat to reveal the flannel shirt of Jack in O’Neill’s A Wife for a Life. In a letter to Mark Van Doren in 1944, O’Neill described A Wife for a Life as “not a play” and “not a vaudeville skit”—just “nothing.” The play is rather thin in summary. After striking gold in the desert with the Older Man, Jack reveals that he loves a woman named Yvette who is, unbeknown to Jack, the Older Man’s wife. Yvette then waits in New York City for sufficient time to pass for the Older Man to be declared legally dead before she will marry Jack. Nevertheless, the performances of Mannion and Long demonstrated that A Wife for a Life has rudimentary elements of O’Neill’s later plays. The Older Man’s monologue was surprisingly gripping as he wrestled with the false image of an unfaithful wife, his self-deception and the impulse for revenge, and his friendship with Jack. Mannion performed the monologue with constraint and gravity, revealing the internal conflicts of the Older Man: the role of Fate, the clash of personal desire and obligation to others, the need for companionship, and the value of forgiveness. These themes resonate throughout O’Neill’s plays, including Hughie.The real fun of A Wife for a Life: A Backstage Story came from the clash of theatrical traditions as represented by James and Eugene O’Neill. Although this clash begins during the backstage argument between father and son, it reaches its theatrical climax in the performance of A Wife for a Life. At a crucial moment, Jack champions the constancy of Yvette, which prompts the Older Man to yell, “You lie!” and draw his pistol. “I didn’t write that!” Eugene complains, shifting the action from the Arizona desert back to the dressing room, “I wrote he reaches for his gun. Not draws it.” The momentary confusion of this Christopher Durang–like transition from one play to another elicited laughter from audiences. But the argument that followed revealed the tensions between romanticism and realism or melodrama and modernism in Hayes’s adaptation. “Your audience will be expecting you to settle disputes with a gun in hand,” Mannion declared, “As the saying goes ‘Religion settled the East. And the West was won with a gun. And in between they have both.’ Lad, you must give them what they want.” Long was strong during the argument, conveying the playwright’s tragic vision of life with intensity. “The bravery is in facing all of this and recognizing that life is a dirty twisted thing lying in a puddle of its own vomit and if we face it . . . it won’t kill us. It’s the lying to ourselves that festers day by day until it kills us!”—a line that echoes Edmund’s pessimism from Long Day’s Journey Into Night.Abjuring strawman arguments, Hayes attempted to synthesize the perspectives of James and Eugene O’Neill, especially with the last lines of A Wife for a Life. Following the monologue in which the Older Man forgoes his revenge for the happiness of his friend and wife, he declares, “I—must keep wandering on. I cannot be the ghost at their feast.” Mannion gave tragic weight to a line that easily could be melodramatic. At this point, a lighting change indicated the play was back in James O’Neill’s dressing room. Nevertheless, James adds, “Greater love hath no man than this, that he giveth his wife for his friend!” “That’s not how my play ends,” Eugene complains once more—an intriguing moment that suggests that James inserted the line into his play since it is how A Wife for a Life ends. Unfazed, James chastises his son for trying to control everything about the play, a reference on Hayes’s part, no doubt, to O’Neill’s formidable stage directions through which he attempted to control the performance of his plays. “As a playwright, it will all start with you,” Mannion declared, snapping his fingers so that a spotlight appeared on both performers, “but the actor will always have the last say.” Another snap, blackout, and applause—a decidedly satisfying ending for O’Neill’s First and Last Act.