Editor’s Foreword

After five years as performance review editor, Bess Rowen is stepping down to take on new challenges. EOR 47.1 will be her last issue. During the two years we have worked together, I have been impressed with her indefatigability in tracking productions of O’Neill’s plays and finding topnotch reviewers. Those who have worked with her know that she curates reviews with perceptive and constructive feedback. Many times my reviews of O’Neill Festival productions have been met with “Stop splitting your infinitives, Westgate!” or “Do you think you could use more @%#@#% adjectives?!?”Kidding aside, I have valued Bess’s enthusiasm, camaraderie, and expertise during these two years. I’m not alone. When informed of her departure, Alexander Pettit had the following to say: “Working with Bess Rowen was prominent among the many pleasures of my term as editor of the Eugene O’Neill Review. Bess’s energy, good sense, amiability, and professional reach have been on display in every issue of the EOR published during her tenure.” We all thank you and wish you well, Bess!Of course, Bess helped me find the next performance review editor. Please join me in welcoming Melissa Sturges, who holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park, and will take over in 2026.This issue of EOR examines the international legacy of O’Neill’s plays, beginning with Elizabeth Ricketts-Jones’s Lost & Found article about the 1985 Abbey Theatre production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Since Edward L. Shaughnessy’s Eugene O’Neill in Ireland (1988), it is well known that this production generated a collective meh among Irish critics despite the involvement of well-respected Irish theatermakers. Ricketts-Jones pinpoints a potential explanation for this response with her examination of the prompt script, which reveals cuts that minimize or eliminate references to James Tyrone’s childhood poverty as an Irish immigrant—in effect downplaying Irish and Irish American topics of land ownership, eviction, and dispossession crucial to the play.Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel redirects our attention to 1920s London in order to chart the history of O’Neill’s plays on the English stage. As London theater recovered from World War I, Ritschel demonstrates, innovative producers and directors such as Norman MacDermott, Peter Godfrey, and others staged O’Neill’s plays from In the Zone to All God’s Chillun Got Wings in suburban repertory theaters, experimental playhouses, and even the West End. David Clare takes us to Jamaica by examining the ways that Dennis Scott’s An Echo in the Bone simultaneously pays homage to O’Neill plays like The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape and revises the Irish American playwright’s representation of Black experiences and perspectives in terms of staging race memories.This issue includes two installments of Practitioner’s Colloquium. First, Sheila Hickey Garvey interviews Robert Falls, the award-winning artistic director of the Goodman Theatre. Their conversation about the challenges and insights of producing O’Neill’s plays, including Desire Under the Elms, The Iceman Cometh, and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, is engaging and illuminating. Bess Rowen continues our interview series with contemporary playwrights about the influence and legacy of O’Neill with her conversation with James Ijames. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fat Ham in 2022, Ijames describes his long-standing and fruitful engagement with O’Neill as a playwright.Robert M. Dowling reviews Zander Brietzke’s Eugene O’Neill and the Aschan Artists: The Influence of the New York Art Movement on the Plays, which makes a compelling case for Aschan artists like George Bellows, John Sloan, and Robert Henri helping O’Neill develop his aesthetic as a fledgling playwright. Melissa Sturges reviews Alisa Zhulina’s Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life, a study of turn-of-the-century European dramatists’ engagement with the fraught economics of theater and theatrical production that has implications for O’Neill and his American contemporaries. Sheila Hickey Garvey commends Maria Szasz’s Irish Repertory Theatre: Celebrating Thirty-Five Years Off-Broadway, a book that outlines the contributions of the Irish Repertory Theatre to Irish and Irish American theater.David Clare and Dan Venning review productions of A Moon for the Misbegotten, in London and Schenectady, respectively. Jen L. Gerould covers Hughie in Santa Monica while James Armstrong reviews a site-specific production of In the Zone in New York City. Jeff S. Dailey reviews Birds of a Feather, a double bill of Susan Glaspell’s Trifles and Robert Karmon’s The Greenhouse in New York City. The issue concludes with my review of O’Neill’s First and Last Act, a double bill of Hughie and A Wife for a Life: A Backstory Story, which Eric Fraisher Hayes adapts from O’Neill’s first play.As always, my thanks for your interest in Eugene O’Neill’s life and plays.