NEWS, NOTES AND QUERIES

1. ROBARDS WOWS 'EM AT O'NEILL BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION. On Monday evening, October 19, 600 friends and admirers of O'Neill gathered at New York's Circle in the Square to celebrate his memory and legacy at the third annual birthday celebration arranged by the Theater Committee for Eugene O'Neill. The following information comes both from personal interviews and from Carol Lawson's report on the event in the New York Times ("Broadway Celebrates Eugene O'Neill's Birthday," October 20, 1981, p. C9).

Like the previous two celebrations, it was a smashing--and moving--success, thanks to the organizing genius of co-chairmen Barbara Gelb and George C. White and a dazzling roster of stars. Scenes from O'Neill's plays, staged by José Quintero, were read by Colleen Dewhurst, Jason Robards, Philip Bosco, Swoosie Kurtz and Richard Thomas. Joanne Woodward delivered O'Neill's last will and testament for his dog Blemie. Patricia Brooks, formerly of the New York City Opera, sang sea chanties. And Armina Marshall, co-founder of the Theatre Guild with her late husband, Lawrence Langner, reminisced about the Guild's long relationship with O'Neill--especially their difficulties with the law in 1947, when A Moon for the Misbegotten was closed by the Detroit police because of its language. "I went down to the police station, and the police chief said, 'You can use a sentence right up to the obscene word, and after that you can use a gesture.' I asked, 'What kind of gesture?' He said, 'An obscene gesture.'"

Barbara Gelb presented the Committee's second annual Birthday Medal ("for enriching the universal understanding" of O'Neill's work) to Mr. Quintero, who said he felt "deeply, deeply grateful. ... I have spent at least a third of my grown-up life living with Mr. O'Neill--not just my life in the theater, but my life outside, as well. ... He has made me look at my own past. Take Jamie in Long Day's Journey into Night, for instance. He was branded a failure early in his life. The same with me. I was disowned by my entire family when I decided to go into the theater. My father didn't write to me for seven years." He recalled his first encounter with The Iceman Cometh at Circle in the Square in 1956, when he "fell passionately in love with Mr. O'Neill" and directed a production of the play that established his own reputation and made a star of Jason Robards. The Birthday Medal was designed by Al Hirschfeld and features Hirschfeld's drawing of O'Neill on one side and a statement by the playwright on the reverse: "It is only the dream that keeps man fighting, willing to live." It couldn't have gone to a more appropriate recipient.

Jason Robards ended the program with Hickey's climactic monologue from the fourth act of Iceman. Many had heard him do it before--on stage, television and records--but this clearly soared above all his previous readings of the scene. Adele Heller, Producing Director of the Provincetown Playhouse, described it to the editor as riveting, stunning, fantastic: "I was just--I can't tell you--no performance I've ever seen has matched it or affected me so much. It got into the marrow."

There will be seven more O'Neill birthday tributes, culminating in a nationwide celebration in 1988, the year of the O'Neill centenary. One wonders how those yet to come can top this year's tribute. A tough act to follow! --Ed.

2. ROBARDS TO RETURN TO ICEMAN. The following news--an exciting result of the afore-mentioned celebration--appeared in Carol Lawson's "Broadway" column in the New York Times (October 23, 1981), p. C2:

Circle in the Square is talking to Jason Robards about a revival of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, which he starred in Off Broadway in 1956. He did the final soliloquy from the play triumphantly on Monday night at the O'Neill birthday celebration there. But before Iceman, Mr. Robards is likely to return to Broadway next season in Booth Is Back in Town, a new musical with book by Austin Pendleton, music by Arthur Rubinstein and lyrics by Gretchen Cryer.

3. OF TRUNK AND THE GIVER(S). When George White, Barbara Gelb and the other members of the Theater Committee for Eugene O'Neill visited Brooks Atkinson in November 1980 to present him with their first commemorative medal (see item 10 on p. 33 of the Spring 1981 issue), the Atkinsons revealed their plan to present Eugene O'Neill's custom-made Louis Vuitton trunk to the Monte Cristo Cottage. "Now, there," writes Cottage Curator Sally Pavetti, "was an offer no one could refuse." (Quoted in The O'Neill, July 1981, p. 1.) Would it were stuffed with new plays! But at least it still has the gold key, with O'Neill's name on it (misspelled!), that it sported when Carlotta had the trunk made.

4. ATA PLANS FOR O'NEILL CENTENARY.

A special committee of the American Theatre Association, under the general chair¬manship of Travis Bogard, is directing its attention toward plans for the centennial observances of the birth of Eugene O'Neill in 1988.

Four subcommittees are concerned with planning specific segments of the celebration, which should begin to move, depending on the availability of funding, in 1985-86, heading toward a culmination on O'Neill's birthday, October 16, 1988.

Subcommittee on Exhibitions: Chairman, Kenneth Spritz, Director of External Relations, Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH.

This committee is charged with developing two exhibitions, the first a major exhibition concentrating on O'Neill's impact on the art of the scene designer in the United States and abroad. Of museum quality, it will assemble original sketches for O'Neill's plays by important scenic artists.

The second exhibition, prepared in four "editions," and designed for easy, inexpensive touring, will carry, in photographs and xerox copies of letters and manuscripts, a visual redaction of O'Neill's life and the staging of his work. Audiences will be sought in theatres, student unions, libraries and small municipal galleries. One exhibit for each time zone will be developed.

Subcommittee on Education: Chairman, William Reardon, Department of Dramatic Art, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA.

This committee will develop plans for educational supplements to performances of O'Neill's work. It will prepare and offer for distribution packets on O'Neill's most important plays; make available, where possible and desired, dramaturgs to aid schools and resident companies in the production of O'Neill's less well-known plays; and prepare and tour a Chatauqua-style circuit of lecturers and panel discussions of O'Neill's work. Concentration will be directed toward high-school and junior college students.

Subcommittee on Production: Chairman, Ron Willis, University Theatre, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS.

This committee will undertake to encourage the production of the entire canon of O'Neill's plays in professional, semi-professional or non-professional productions. Using the matrix of the American College Theatre Festival and seeking the active collaboration of other groups, the committee will undertake to make audio or video tapes of the plays for library purposes.

Subcommittee on Special Events: Committee not yet appointed.

This committee will take as its charge the organization of aspects of a special national event, celebrating O'Neill, perhaps from the Kennedy Center. A second charge will be to develop an international symposium of scholars and critics to meet and discuss the dramatist in a world context. A publication of the discussion of the symposium will be sought.

The Central Committee will attempt to maintain liaison with other groups concerned with the O'Neill centennial, including the New York-based Theater Committee for Eugene O'Neill, the Provincetown Playhouse, the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Center and Monte Cristo Cottage, the Eugene O'Neill Foundation/Tao House, the Eugene O'Neill Society, ITI, and the Theatre Communications Group.

5. RECENT PUBLICATIONS: from O'Neill listings in 1980 MLA Bibliography.

Adler, Thomas P. "The Mirror as Stage Prop in Modern Drama." Comparative Drama 14(1980-81):355-73.

Chioles, John. "Aeschylus and O'Neill: A Phenomenological View." Comparative Drama 14:159-87.

Cosic, Ileana. "Judzin O'Nil: Velikan svoje epohe" ["Eugene O'Neill: Giant of His Era"]. Scena 16,i-iii:147-67.

Filip, Traian. "Relatii editoriale cu Romania." Manuscriptum 11,i:166-68.

Frenz, Horst. "Eugene O'Neill and China." Tamkang Review 10(1979):5-16.

Fuhrmann, Manfred. "Myth as a Recurrent Theme in Greek Tragedy and Twentieth-Century Drama," in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays, ed. Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1979), pp. 295-319.

Mayberry, Robert. "Sterile Wedding: The Comic Structure of O'Neill's Hughie." Massachusetts Studies in English 7,iii:10-19.

Prasad, Hari Mohan. "Nuances of Soliloquy in the Theatre of Eugene O'Neill." Commonwealth Quarterly 5,xvii:48-59.

Saqqaf, Abdulaziz Yassin. "The Nature of Conflict in The Hairy Ape." Journal of English (Sana'a Univ.) 1(1975):77-84.

Scheick, William J. "Two Letters by Eugene O'Neill." Resources for American Literary Study 8(1978):73-80.

Schvey, Henry I. "'The Past Is the Present, Isn't It?' Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night." Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters 10:84-99.

Wertheim, Albert. "Gaspard the Miser in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night." American Notes and Queries 18(1979):39-42.

Wiles, Timothy J. "Tammanyite, Progressive, and Anarchist: Political Communities in The Iceman Cometh." CLIO 9:179-96.

6. MLA RECORDS EON'S CONTRIBUTION TO O'NEILL STUDIES. Admittedly, tooting one's own cornet is vain and reprehensible. But it was heartening to the editors to note that, of the 61 works about O'Neill cited in the 1980 MLA International Bibliography, 38 had been published in the Newsletter. Actually, the credit and praise should go to the Newsletter's conscientious contributors, without whose dedication it would precipitously wither. Our congratulations and gratitude to them all.

7. ARTICLES SOUGHT FOR SPECIAL ISSUE. The editors have tried to elicit material for special issues before, but never with sufficient success to build more than a "Focus" section. Undaunted, we try again. In response to several subscribers' requests, we would like to assemble a special Newsletter issue devoted to the subject of "O'Neill's Women," both fictional and real. Accordingly, we solicit articles, long and short, on one or more women characters in O'Neill's plays, on women in his life, and on the general subjects of his debt to, treatment of, and attitudes toward women. If sufficient material on these and related subjects is forthcoming by April 1, 1982, we hope to make the Summer-Fall 1982 Newsletter our "O'Neill's Women" issue.

8. MORE RECENT PUBLICATIONS: works reviewed, abstracted or cited in this issue.

Ben-Zvi, Linda. "Exiles, The Great God Brown, and the Specter of Nietzsche." Modern Drama, XXIV (September 1981), 251-269. (James Joyce's influence on O'Neill, and Nietzsche's influence on them both.)

Egri, Peter. "European Origins and American Originality: The Adoption, Adaptation and Reinterpretation of Some European Models in Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh." Annales Universitatis Scientiarum Budapestinensis de Rolando Eotvos nominatae, XI (1980), 83-107. (O'Neill compared to Ibsen, Gorky, Chekhov and Conrad.)

Floyd, Virginia, ed. Eugene O'Neill at Work: Newly Released Ideas for Plays. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981. 448 pp. (A carefully annotated collection of the most important passages from the notebooks of O'Neill that, at the time of his death, "his widow gave ... to Yale University with instructions that they be kept from public viewing for twenty-five years." The book is a must for O'Neill devotees as it "presents, chronologically, every creative idea by O'Neill between 1918 and 1943, the year he ceased to write." Of course, only the ideas he recorded can be presented, but they constitute such a wealth of insights that the book jacket's hyperbole is thoroughly excusable!)

Harris, Andrew B., Jr. "A Tangible Confrontation; Welded." Theatre News (Fall 1981), pp. 9-10. (Producer's report of the Summer 1981 production.)

Lawson, Carol. "Broadway Celebrates Eugene O'Neill's Birthday." New York Times (October 20, 1981), p. C9.

Mordden, Ethan. The American Theater. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Phillips, David. "Eugene O'Neill's Fateful Maine Interlude." Down East (August 1981), pp. 84-87, 99-108. (Strange Interlude and Carlotta Monterey by the Belgrade Lakes in the summer of 1926.)

Rich, Frank. "A Short Day's Journey to Eugene O'Neill's Boyhood Home." New York Times (August 6, 1981), p. C15. (New London's Monte Cristo Cottage and the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in nearby Waterford.)

9. O'NEILL DISCUSSED IN NEW BOOK ON TRAGEDY. Normand Berlin's The Secret Cause: A Discussion of Tragedy, published in October by the University of Massachusetts Press (224 pp., hardcover $17.50), includes Desire Under the Elms along with Euripides' Hippolytus and Racine's Phaedra in a chapter on "Passion." In his study, whose O'Neill portion will be reviewed in a future issue, Mr. Berlin "attempts to isolate and discuss the enduring substance of tragedy--the 'secret cause' that James Joyce believed lies at the heart of tragic terror."

10. NEW BOOK ON O'NEILL TO ARRIVE NEXT SPRING. A note from Michael Manheim, Chairman of the Department of English at the University of Toledo:

"It may be of interest to readers of the Newsletter that my manuscript, 'Eugene O'Neill's New Language of Kinship,' is to be published by the Syracuse University Press in the spring of 1982. In it, I place major emphasis on O'Neill's last plays, finding in those plays a transcendence of purely autobiographical concerns. I explore the earlier works by means of motifs suggested in the lines and situations of Long Day's Journey into Night, showing how O'Neill disguised or distorted the compelling facts of his great confessional work throughout his career. And I show how in coming closer and closer in his plays to confrontation with the truths of his life, he was also forging a new understanding of the nature of close human relationships. O'Neill once said he heard in the plays of August Strindberg a 'new language of kinship.' My study traces the development of such a 'new language' in the plays of O'Neill."

11. RECENT DISSERTATIONS ON O'NEILL: citations from Dissertation Abstracts International in the 1980 MLA Bibliography.

Dakoske, Mary Beth. "Archetypal Images of the Family in Selected Modern Plays." DAI 41(1980):2598A.

Hsia, An Min. "The Tao and Eugene O'Neill." DAI 40(1979):4037A.

Jordan, John Wingate. "An Examination of Eugene O'Neill's Plays in the Light of C. G. Jung's Collected Works and Recorded Conversations." DAI 40:5056A.

Lichtman, Myla Ruth. "Mythic Plot and Character Development in Euripides' Hippolytus and Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms: A Jungian Analysis." DAI 40:1750A.

Swanson, Margaret Millen. "Irony in Selected Neo-Hellenic Plays." DAI 40:2995A.

Watkinson, Sharon Onevelo. "An Analysis of Characters in Selected Plays of Eugene O'Neill According to Erik H. Erikson's Identity Theory." DAI 41:464A.

12. O'NEILL FIRST EDITIONS FOR SALE. John Von Foeppel has four first editions of O'Neill plays--Days Without End, Ah, Wilderness!, The Iceman Cometh, and Long Day's Journey into Night--that he wishes to sell, singly or together, to any bidder (or bidders) offering an appropriate price. He reports that all four are in "absolute mint condition" with their original dust covers: "They have never been read." Inquiries and offers should be sent to Mr. Von Foeppel at 20 W. Lucerne Circle, Orlando, Florida 32801. A rare opportunity for O'Neill bibliophiles!

13. QUERY OF A BOOK-HUNTING EDITOR. When I was in London in the summer of 1975, I ordered, via Samuel French's Theatrical Bookshop, all the hardcover volumes of O'Neill plays published by Jonathan Cape. (It's more than a bit ironic that, to obtain a current set of O'Neill, one must acquire it from an English publisher.) When the package arrived, it contained 15 volumes of the expected 16--Strange Interlude, alas, having gone out of print. The series is handsome--blue-bound with silver lettering--and I've wished ever since to complete the set with that sixteenth volume. If anyone has a copy in top condition and would be willing to part with it, please write, describing its state and suggesting a price. --F.W.

14. O'NEILL DISCUSSED ON TAPE. The "Cassette Curriculum" series produced and sold by Everett/Edwards, Inc. includes fifteen taped lectures, approximately thirty minutes each, on plays by Eugene O'Neill. Five (#313-317) are delivered by Jordan Miller of the University of Rhode Island and Secretary of the Eugene O'Neill Society: The Hairy Ape, Emperor Jones, Mourning Becomes Electra, Iceman Cometh, and Long Day's Journey. The other ten (#2951-2960) are delivered by Howard Stein: "The Seven One-Act Sea Plays," All God's Chillun, Desire Under the Elms, Ah, Wilderness!, and Touch of the Poet, in addition to second lectures on the five plays discussed by Professor Miller. For a catalog and price list, write to Everett/Edwards, Inc., P. O. Box 1060, Deland, Florida 32720. Tel. 904-734-7458.

15. RECENT AND FORTHCOMING PRODUCTIONS.

Ah, Wilderness!, dir. Martin Benson. South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa, CA. Closed on October 18.

Ah, Wilderness!, dir. Michael Jameson. Marymount Manhattan Theater, New York City, November 11-14, 1981.

Anna Christie. New England Repertory Theatre, Worcester, MA, October 23 - November 15, 1981. (Reviewed in this issue.)

Anna Christie, dir. Cynthia Sherman. St. Nicholas Theater Co., Chicago, IL, November 18 - December 20, 1981.

Desire Under the Elms, dir. William Becvar. Tacoma Actors Guild, Tacoma, WA, February 4-27, 1982. (To be reviewed in next issue.)

Hughie, with Jason Robards and Jack Dodson. White Barn Theater, Westport, CT, October 16-18, 1981. Benefit performances for new academic wing, Greens Farms (CT) Academy.

Hughie, dir. Gino Giglio. South St. Theater, 424 West 42nd St., New York City, November 4 - December 6, 1981. In double bill with Strindberg's The Stronger.

Long Day's Journey into Night, dir. J. Michael Sparough, S. J. Experimental Theatre, Yale School of Drama, New Haven, CT, October 30 - November 7, 1981.

A Moon for the Misbegotten, dir. Frank Wittow. Academy Theatre, Atlanta, GA. (Tour of the southeast ended on October 31.)

A Moon for the Misbegotten, dir. F. Syer. Theatre Project Company, St. Louis, MO, at the University of Missouri, February 18-21, 1982.

A Moon for the Misbegotten, dir. John E. Fogle. Barton Square Playhouse, Salem, MA, n.d. ("Tentatively selected" as part of the repertory company's five-play first season at 8 Barton Square.)

Mourning Becomes Electra, dir. Alan Fletcher. American Conservatory Theatre, San Francisco, CA, March 2 - May 27, 1982.

Servitude, dir. Paul Voelker. Coppertop Theatre, U. of Wisconsin Center-Richland, November 14-16, 1981. (An illustrated report on the production will be featured in the next issue.)

A Touch of the Poet, dir. M. Booker. Intiman Theatre Company, Seattle, WA, September 8-26, 1981. (Reviewed in this issue.)

16. Paul Voelker has been searching the theatrical records to find whether the production of Servitude he directed at the University of Wisconsin Center-Richland on November 14-16 was the first ever. If you have information of any previous productions, please send it in for forwarding to Professor Voelker. A full and illustrated report on the November production, whether it be the first or not, will be featured in the next issue of the Newsletter.

17. HUGHIE ON CABLE TV. Since 27.3 percent of U. S. homes--that's 22 million--now have cable television reception, it's big news when an O'Neill play goes cable, as Hughie did recently on the Showtime Cable Service. Directed by Jose Quintero, with television direction by Terry Hughes, and starring Jason Robards and Jack Dodson in a recreation of their stage performances, the production received glowing notices. John J. O'Connor was particularly impressed by Robards' Erie Smith (New York Times, September 20, 1983, Section II, p. 37):

Erie demands a virtuosic performance and that is what the role gets from Mr. Robards. His bravado is defeated by his mirthless laugh. He whines, cajoles, implores with a mixture of fear and contempt. He is a once-disarming con man reduced to the last roll of the dice. Mr. Robards is almost chillingly on target. This record of his performance is invaluable.

Mr. Robards, interviewed by UPI's Kenneth R. Clark (Boston Globe, Sept. 3, 1981, p. 39), describes Hughie as a play about cages:

There's a lot of symbolism there. You see the two cages--the cage the clerk is in ... and Erie's cage, which is the elevator. If they both go in their cages, they die. There is no life. But Erie eventually gets this guy out and they begin a new life. He becomes the idea of Hughie again ... and they feed each other and make life bearable. It's a beautiful piece of writing ... it's an upper, that play, because they gain their dream again.

May an O'Neill fan also gain his dream--that this will be but the first of many O'Neill productions on the cultural cable networks.

18. ONE-MAN O'NEILL SHOW CAPTURES PLAYWRIGHT'S SPIRIT. Here Before You ... Eugene O'Neill, a one-act monodrama by playwright-sculptor David Wheeler, had its first performance at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum last May 23, with the author as O'Neill. More recently, Mr. Wheeler gave two performances of his work at Boston's Helen Schlien Gallery on October 31 and November 1. Eschewing indoor theatricality on Halloween, Associate Editor Brooks and I chose to attend the second performance. (Somehow, All Saints' Day seemed more appropriate.) The scene is the dining room of the Provincetown home of George Cram "Jig" Cook and Susan Glaspell in the summer of 1916. Anxiously awaiting the verdict of the Provincetown Players, who are in the kitchen deciding whether to perform Bound East for Cardiff, O'Neill passes the time by responding to the questions of an imagined interviewer. Through an hour of mordant wit and lacerating reminiscence, the viewer gains an intimate glimpse of the young playwright and the experiences he has amassed by his twenty-eighth year. So impressed were we by the play, that we will print it in full in the next issue of the Newsletter, at which time we will offer a fuller introduction to Mr. Wheeler and his idiosyncratic but insightful play. --F.W.

19. COLLEEN AS CARLOTTA IN 1982. Colleen Dewhurst plans a tour next year in Carlotta, a new one-woman play based on the life of Carlotta Monterey O'Neill, written by Barbara Gelb, co-author with Arthur Gelb of the celebrated biography, O'Neill. The play will be directed by José Quintero, the quintessential O'Neill director. Carol Lawson reported on the plan and the play in the New York Times (September 4, 1981), p. C2:

Miss Dewhurst expects to tour the college circuit, where she will perform Carlotta and hold seminars on O'Neill. Carlotta grew out of Mrs. Gelb's earlier play, O'Neill and Carlotta, which had a staged reading, with Jason Robards and Miss Dewhurst in the title roles, at the Public Theater in October 1979. Mrs. Gelb has received permission from the O'Neill estate to include excerpts from O'Neill's plays. She describes Carlotta as "a portrait of the playwright through the great love of his life."

The editor hopes to print information in the next issue on what the tour dates will be and where interested institutions can line up to request a visit. He hopes, indeed, to be near the front of the line!

20. A LAMENTABLE PARALLEL BETWEEN WILLIAMS AND O'NEILL. Critics and public have not been kind to the recent work of Tennessee Williams, who sees himself suffering the same fate that Eugene O'Neill did in his late years. In an interview with Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times ("Tennessee Williams: 'I Keep Writing. Sometimes I Am Pleased,'" August 13, 1981, p. C17), he commented on the connection: "I'm very conscious of my decline in popularity, but I don't permit it to stop me because I have the example of so many playwrights before me. I know the dreadful notices Ibsen got. And O'Neill--he had to die to make Moon successful."

21. GEORGE GAVE MARTHA A HICKEY. Helen McNeill, reviewing the 1981 National Theatre (London) production of Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in the Times Literary Supplement ("The Syntax of Sadism," September 4, 1981, p. 1006), compares the play's resolution with that in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. The comparison is of interest.

When Martha finally agrees to try to live a life without illusion and falteringly admits that she is afraid of what she can't call the big bad wolf of reality, Who's Afraid buys its resolution at a high thematic price. It is difficult to conceive that after the silver jubilee of their illusion George and Martha will be able to live happily without it forever after. This sentimental close comes from Albee's conscious response to O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, in which Hickey kills his off-stage wife Evelyn because he can't bear her support of his illusions. O'Neill's fourth act "Truth" requires Hickey's happy acceptance of a future in the electric chair and Parritt's suicide. Albee's murders are verbal, like his creations, externally killable and presumably externally renewable. George and Martha have no off-stage life but if, as Albee suddenly proposes, they have a future after this Walpurgisnacht, what will they talk about at breakfast? To conclude his play Albee has reverted to O'Neill's formula of inarticulate but endless talk, punctured by the naive poetry of sincerity.

22 THANK YOU, CHARLES KAISER! In his negative review of Ethan Mordden's The American Theater (New York: Oxford University Press) in the New York Times Book Review
(October 25, 1981, pp. 18, 20), Mr. Kaiser was gratifyingly positive in his defense
of O'Neill's language against a derogatory comment by Mordden:

while he reports that Eugene O'Neill was born at Broadway and 43rd Street, which is true, he also says that "no one, in life, ever talked like an O'Neill character," which is false. As the youngest of three sons, I challenge Mr. Mordden to distinguish between the words spoken by Jamie (Edmund's older brother in Long Day's Journey into Night) and those spoken by real older brothers, including my own, whom I have listened to "in life" since birth.

23. AND THE WINNER IS--. Congratulations to Susan Tuck for winning the second "Who Said It" contest (see Summer-Fall 1981 issue, p. 38). As the first--indeed, the only-- respondent to identify the quoted American writer as Thomas Wolfe, Ms. Tuck received a copy of The Mortgaged Heart, a collection of writings by Carson McCullers. Why so inappropriate an award? 'Twas left over from the first contest, which nobody won, when the words were by Ms. McCullers. Thomas Wolfe's comments, included in a February 1922 letter to Margaret Roberts, appear on p. 26 of The Letters of Thomas Wolfe, ed. Elizabeth Nowell (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1956). Next time, a new contest--and a more fitting reward!

24. Anent contests, the editor offers a one-year Newsletter subscription--or a one-year extension of a current subscription--to every contributor of a Eugene O'Neill cross-word puzzle whose submission is accepted for printing in a future issue. Lest the editor's expertise be too severely tested, please be sure to enclose the solution as well!

25. THE ANECDOTAL O'NEILL. According to Margaret Manning's survey of the contents of the new Oxford Book of American Literary Anecdotes, ed. Donald Hall, American writers tend to be prodigious topers. Of O'Neill: he "drank up everything. He asked that his tombstone be inscribed: THERE IS SOMETHING TO BE SAID FOR BEING DEAD." (Margaret Manning, "Low Moments in the Lives of the Literati," Boston Sunday Globe, September 20, 1981, p. B14.)

26. OOPS! A REPORT FROM THE SIC DEPARTMENT (Strangely Inaccurate Citations). In the September 1981 issue of Theatrebill, a program booklet used by a number of Boston-area theatres, Susan Bonchi's "Banned in Boston" column, an anecdotal history of Beantown theatre, jolted the O'Neillian eye with the following bit of ideal but anachronistic casting: "Boston audiences loved James O'Neill in The Count of Monte Cristo and Long Day's Journey into Night, his best-known roles."

27. A LETTER FROM T. J. D., November 9, 1981.

I read in the "New York Times" last week that a professor Virginia Floyd claims to have "completed a version" of "Malatesta Seeks Surcease," a show that O'Neill gave up on in 1941. He said he had "lost grip on it." As an old fan who trusts the late master's drama instincts, I tend to think that he knew what he was talking about. And that any professor who thinks his/her grip surpasses O'Neill's has likely lost--well, let's just say his/her grip on reality. So I look with "completed aversion" on the venture and am shocked that Yale is allegedly in cahoots on it. I hope no atrocities will be committed as a result of O'Neill's not destroying what he should have. God help his reputation if they are. We should let sleeping geniuses rest in peace and do the same for their discards. I know you won't print my letter. It's not positive enough. I also know that I am condemning in advance. But just wait and see.

[We are happy to refute your expectations, though we prefer names to initials. No journal would be worth printing if it were to restrict itself to eulogistic encomia. Indeed, you seem quite "positive" in your affection for O'Neill, and we will be happy to publish any future views you wish to contribute. But as for "Malatesta Seeks Surcease," we prefer to do just what you suggest--wait and see. --Ed.]

28. DATES TO REMEMBER--a review for overhasty skimmers of this issue's Eugene O'Neill Society Section. New York City will be abuzz with O'Neill activities during two days at the end of December. The skeletal facts follow. Fuller details are included in items 1-4 of the Society Section.

Monday, December 28, 12:00-1:15 p.m.: Special Session on "O'Neill and His Theatrical Children" (the devices of the split character and extended monologue in the plays of O'Neill and his successors). Participants: Vera Jiji, Michael Hinden, Albert Wertheim, Virginia Floyd, Romulus Linney and Nicholas Kepros. An MLA Convention event in Nassau A, New York Hilton.

Monday, December 28, 5:30-7:30 p.m.: Annual Meeting of the Eugene O'Neill Society, Acting President Winifred Frazer presiding, at the Museum of Broadcasting, 1 East 53rd Street.

Tuesday, December 29, 10:15-11:30 a.m.: Michael Manheim will read a paper on Chekhov and O'Neill during a special session on "Chekhov and Twentieth-Century Drama Outside Russia." An MLA Convention event in Room 529, New York Hilton.