Eugene O'Neill Research
I am very proud that my book about Long Day's Journey Into Night and Tao House and Eugene O'Neill and Carlotta Monterey O'Neill is out in a nicely designed volume by Anthem Press.
It was quite a saga getting this book published because I constructed it in the unusual way I saw fit, as a dual book that is one. If you open the book anywhere in the middle, you find that the left page (I call it the verso) consists of annotated diary entries by EO and CMO. They cover the 147 non-consecutive days when LDJN was written and typed in 1939-1941, also the months of Carlotta wrestling with the problem of how to get this play published and produced in 1956. The right page (recto) is the monograph in which I argue for the situatedness of the play in that time frame and location.
This is the deepest dive into O'Neill's iconic play, opening entirely new perspectives on this play. The book's dual structure makes it much better for a reader to have the physical book, not an e-book version. Structurally, the book is the house and the marriage in whiich the play could be created.
The book has received a fine review in the Eugene O'Neill Review by Professor Katie Johnson:
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/2/article/954296/pdf
And by Professor Rachel Shteir in The Wall Street Journal:
https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:f8cea496-3d24-4284-b1ba-9965b7a1995e
Much of my work in recent years has had to do with Eugene O'Neill's masterpiece Long Day's Journey Into Night and the house where it was written, Tao House, in Danville, California.
Carlotta Monterey was O'Neill's wife at the time he wrote the play, and she was (in my opinion) the genius behind the house where such a play could be written. So she is a major topic for me, as well.
The book I have written has the title Finding the Way to 'Long Day's Journey Into Night': Eugene O'Neill and Carlotta Monterey O'Neill at Tao House.
I had the honor to be a Travis Bogard Artist-in-Residence there in 2018, and I have gotten to know a lot of great people associated with the house, which is a National Historic Site, maintained by the National Park Service.
The Eugene O'Neill Foundation is the organization that spearheaded the effort to preserve the house, and they run many programs on the site, including an annual Eugene O'Neill Festival. They feature performances of plays--mostly plays by O'Neill--in the old barn on the property. I have seen many of those productions, and in recent years I have enjoyed working there as dramaturg on such plays as The Great God Brown, Hughie, Mourning Becomes Electra, and, of course, Long Day's Journey Into Night.
In conjunction with that research, I have written a play, called Into Night, which dramatizes how Long Day's Journey Into Night was created in 1939-1941, with, in a sense, the ghosts of Mary and James Tyrone haunting Eugene and Carlotta O'Neill during that creative period. Oh, and the "second girl," Cathleen, is also revenant! This play received a staged reading, directed by Eric Fraisher Hayes, at Tao House in June 2022 and then another staged reading at the 11th International Conference on Eugene O'Neill in Boston in July 2022. Terrific cast. Here is the program of that conference:
The staged reading was given a great review by Alex Pettit in the Eugene O'Neill Review, 45:1 (2024).
Below are other projects that have come of the Long Day's Journey fascination:
This is my most recent product of O'Neill research. It came out in April, and for some reason it is absolutely. impossible to find on amazon.com unless you put in the ISBN number. (Fury at Amazon! But this is the ISBN: 9780300211856) You can find the book readily at the Yale University Press website:
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300211856/iceman-cometh
A critical edition of O’Neill’s most complex and difficult play, designed for student readers and performers
This critical edition of Eugene O’Neill’s most complex and difficult play helps students and performers meet the work’s demanding cultural literacy. William Davies King provides an invaluable guide to the text, including an essay on historical and critical perspectives; extensive notes on the language used in the play, and its many musical and literary allusions; as well as numerous insightful illustrations. He also gives biographical details about the actual people the characters are based on, along with the performance history of the play, to help students and theatrical artists engage with this labyrinthine work.
Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953) won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama four times and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936.
This is a talk I gave at our Graduate Recruitment Conference in 2020. It's about situating scholarship.
With images to imitate the powerpoint that accompanied.