(IN THIS ISSUE)

REVIEWS OF BOOKS AND PRODUCTIONS

1. EUGENE O'NEILL, COMPLETE PLAYS, ed. Travis Bogard. New York: The Library of America, 1988, 3 vols. $35 each, $100 for boxed set. Vol. I (1913-1920), 1,104 pp., ISBN 0-940450-48-8. Vol. II (1920-1931), 1,092 pp., ISBN 0-940450-49-6. Vol. III (1932-1943), 1,007 pp., ISBN 0-940450-50-X. ISBN for set: 0-940450-62-3.

EUGENE O'NEILL, SELECTED LETTERS, ed. Travis Bogard & Jackson R. Bryer. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988. 602 pp. $35, cloth. ISBN 0-300-04374-0.

[The following review, shorn of some of its gratuitous foliage, appeared in the "Books" section of the Chicago Tribune (pp. 1, 11) on centennial Sunday, October 16. Hence the celebratory references, which have been retained. -Ed.]

Today may not loom large on everyone's cultural calendar; but for some of us it caps a joyous, world-wide series of gatherings and festivals honoring playwright Eugene O'Neill, who was born exactly 100 years ago in a family hotel on Broadway. Inspiring the summer-long tribute were two facts: that O'Neill created almost single-handedly a serious theatrical tradition for America, and that he penned several of the greatest plays yet to appear in our land. And that the October 16 centennial should see the first complete edition of his plays and the fullest collection yet of his rich and illuminating letters: well, no commemorative cake could have more glorious icing!

There was enough sensation and scandal in O'Neill's own 65 years to insure him immediate notoriety, whatever his literary or theatrical gifts. Three marriages; two divorces, the first impelling a suicide attempt in a New York City dive from which a crony rescued him; an actor-father overfond of drink who had squandered his promise in search of easy success; a mother whose morphine addiction, when the young Eugene discovered it, triggered his renunciation of his Catholic heritage; a record of parental disregard that contributed to the eventual suicides of both of his sons and the disowning of his only daughter, Oona, after her marriage to Charlie Chaplin; and a roster of plays that periodically outraged the official defenders of conventional decency. (His plays were banned in many more places than Boston!)

O'Neill's life, it might be said, reads like an O'Neill play, as that entity is traditionally (thqugh falsely) regarded--dour, dismal and doomed. So why the celebration? And why the veneration we feel for a misbegotten man who, notoriety notwithstanding, spent his last decade (1944-1953) virtually forgotten, his plays unperformed, his hand stilled by a debilitating disease that made writing impossible?

Good questions, but easy enough to answer if one examines the four books published today. They more than corroborate the honors heaped on O'Neill in his lifetime--three Pulitzer Prizes and the 1936 Nobel Prize for Literature. (A fourth Pulitzer was awarded for Long Day's Journey Into Night when it was released in 1956.) The selected letters offer the deepest and most intimate picture yet of his inner life. And the three volumes of plays make it at last possible, without wide delving, to assess in full his theatrical achievement. And it is awesome.

The story of O'Neill's life has been well told in the past. Arthur and Barbara Gelb and Louis Sheaffer left no stone unturned and no gray area unexamined in their biographies. But the letters (560 of the more than 3,000 that Bogard and Bryer managed to uncover) flesh out the biographic bones, soften the popular image considerably, and add an up-close authenticity that no third-person account can equal.

Here are letters to his parents, to childhood sweethearts, to his wives and children and fellow writers and artistic associates--a number of them excerpted in previous books but never printed in full until now. And the portrait that emerges is of a shy but dedicated, opinionated but gentle and compassionate man who wore his celebrity with some embarrassment, almost abandoned his "hopeless hope" in human progress at the outbreak of the Second World War, and won his first sustained experience of love and security (despite periodic rifts) in his third marriage, to former actress Carlotta Monterey.

The first letter, to a cousin in 1901, like many that follow it, shows that the standard picture of O'Neill as congenital brooder, like the standard picture of his plays, is false. (A lover of dogs and football, who resents the bitter taste of "coff medicine," is not that different from the rest of us!) The last, to Carlotta in 1952, is a moving tribute to the woman who had endured for a quarter century "my rotten nerves, my lack of stability, my cussedness in general.... I am old and would be sick of life, were it not that you, Sweetheart, are here, as deep and understanding in your love as ever."

In between, there are few if any pages that do not glow with memorable remarks revealing the ambitions, joys and regrets of an extraordinary man and the ups and downs of an extraordinary career. Take the letter to a New London beloved, Beatrice Ashe, in 1916, just two years after he had determined to be a playwright. "Bee! Bee! If you want to become an artist you must come out of your shell. There is so much to see, so much to experience.... There is so much moral excess baggage you will have to throw overboard before you can gain the comprehension which is indispensable to true art. How can comprehension be born without a multitudinous experience? You must come out and scratch and bite, and love and hate, and play and sing and fly, and earn your place in the sun. You will have to starve and weep and know great sorrows and great joys and great sacrifices. You will have to thrill with the eternal ecstasy of a self-surrender which scorns compromises and counts no cost.... Only by standing on the grave-mound of the Past will you see the vision of the future clear before you, alluring in its possibilities."

The passage, even in my abridgment, reveals that O'Neill had more than a "touch of the poet" from very early. And the fact that it was written just three days before the first performance ever of an O'Neill play (Bound East for Cardiff in Provincetown on July 28) suggests the tremendous importance to the writer of that untraditional play and the tradition-flouting career which it initiated. Such passages abound in this collection, which has been divided into eight chronological sections, each with an illuminating introduction, and concludes with a comprehensive index of persons addressed and names, titles and places referred to in the letters.

Of course O'Neill's genius was theatrical even more than epistolary; and the three handsome, sturdy and beautifully bound Library of America volumes reveal that genius as it has never been seen before. Again, the organization is chronological. Volume I contains all the early plays through The Emperor Jones in 1920; Volume II extends from Diff'rent (1920) to Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), and Volume III from Ah, Wilderness! (1932) to A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943), ending with a bonus that brings the total to 50; the touching 1916 short story "Tomorrow," the only short story O'Neill published and a revealing companion piece to The Iceman Cometh. Travis Bogard concludes each volume with a richly detailed, 22-page chronology of O'Neill's life and career, notes on the texts and the first American production of each play, and a few explanatory notes. But the scholarly apparatus is happily unobtrusive: this is a clean, beautifully printed reading edition.

Never before have Chris Christophersen and its rewrite as Anna Christie been available for comparison in the same volume. No previous collection has included The Personal Equation and the complete More Stately Mansions, both unpublished until 1988. (The text of the latter is taken from an edition by Martha Bower that has just been published by Oxford University Press.) And the totality reveals a breadth of concerns and a multiplicity of innovative devices to express them that are unequaled in the American theatre. The force of race and temperament (The Emperor Jones and Beyond the Horizon), the stultifying effects of New England puritanism (Desire Under the Elms and Mourning Becomes Electra), the threats to life and spirit of materialism and industrialism (The Hairy Ape and More Stately Mansions), the illusions and "pipe dreams" that can shelter or constrict (A Touch of the Poet and The Iceman Cometh), the peace that only human companionship can provide (Hughie and A Moon for the Misbegotten), and--supreme of all--the ties of love and hate that bind together the members of a family--O'Neill's own boyhood family--in that richest and deepest of American plays, Long Day's Journey Into Night. Even lesser efforts, like Welded and Days Without End, throw revealing light on the superior works around them and on O'Neill's attitudes toward, respectively, marriage and the Catholic faith he never completely abandoned.

One measure of O'Neill's supremacy is the fact that, while Long Day's Journey is the greatest American tragedy, Ah, Wilderness! may well be the greatest American comedy. However serious his message or mission, he knew that drama must first entertain if it is to do anything else. And entertain us he consistently does.

An artist's birthday, though, is not the time to tote up hits and duds. Besides, each reader should have the right to compile his or her own lists. What's important is that today, at last, we have all the candidates, and a rich feast of memorable letters, within eight comfortable covers. I really should not have called them icing on the cake. These monuments will outlast any commemorative confectionery, and will insure that Eugene O'Neill's second century will be even more triumphant than his first.

-- Frederick C. Wilkins

 

2. SEA PLAYS (In the Zone, The Long Voyage Home and Ile), directed by Edward Golden. Rand Theater, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, October 20-29, 1988.

As its contribution to the O'Neill centennial, the Department of Theater at the University of Massachusetts used its broad, high stage and excellent technical resources to capture most evocatively the nautical aura of O'Neill's early one-acts. Stage-wide scaffolding suggested the open deck of a ship, complete with ropes, bulkheads and skylights, before a sky-blue cyclorama occasionally daubed with clouds and smoke. The stage level, accessible from above by steep stairs at both sides, was divided into three parts, one for each of the chosen plays. At our right, the triple-decker bunks of the seamen's forecastle for In the Zone; to the far left, the cramped bar, under the deck and stairs, and the wooden tables and stools of The Long Voyage Home, which completed the evening's first half; and at center, a raised platform, "unlocalized" until after intermission, when the obligatory organ and other props turned it into the captain's cabin for Ile. Joan Peters' sets and Spencer S. Brown's lighting--especially the menacing, diagonal shafts of light from above in Ile--succeeded, not only in concentrating our attention on the succeeding playing areas, but also in providing a unity among the evening's diverse parts. Not a small feat, considering the variety of locales--a British tramp steamer, a London dockside pub, and a nineteenth-century American whaler. And the unity of setting underscored the unity of theme: whenever they live, or wherever they journey, the "children of the sea" are gripped by a tenacious force whose talons they cannot escape.

An opening tableau, showing sailors on deck and below, assisted greatly in establishing the aforementioned atmosphere. We heard sea sounds, ship sounds, sea chanteys accompanied by accordion, and a voice-over montage of words from various places in O'Neill's works that suggested the variety of responses the sea arouses in different sensibilities. Edmund Tyrone's recollections of oneness with the cosmos, and Paddy's lament for the passing of the sailing ship days: these were met by a repeated refrain, "It's a hell of a life, the sea." This aural, visual and vocal prelude captured, perhaps even better than the plays that followed, what Normand Berlin, the production's dramaturg, called in his program essay ("O'Neill and the Sea") a theme that O'Neill inherited from Melville--"the ambiguity of the sea and the ambiguity of human nature."

In the Zone is tough to bring off without Moon of the Caribbees, where Smitty's nature and past are more clearly established; but the performance caught well the snowball effect of suspicion and innuendo that is the play's core. O'Neill tended to deride In the Zone, because it does not directly confront the "behind life forces" that he saw as his creative raison d'être. But it is a marvelous study in mass hysteria and, ultimately, mass guilt. And a successful production tricks the audience into sharing that guilt by laughing in the early stages and realizing subsequently that such laughter betokens vicarious complicity in the actions of the on-stage malefactors. By that measure, Golden's was an extremely effective production, even if the crew's multifarious accents seemed terribly studied, and even if (my one quarrel with the direction) the face of Smitty, when he was manacled to one of the bunks, was unseen by the audience during Driscoll's recital of his letters. Spared the horror of his expression, we were spared the full brunt of the guilt we shared. Otherwise, the cast performed admirably and made the shipboard activity seem like seasoned routine. Scott Davison, as Davis, made clear how much his character relished his special knowledge about the supposed saboteur, and how much he resented having to share the glory with Scotty; and Michael Flood, though a bit too neat and hale for someone as dissipated and dispirited as Smitty, showed the pitiable agony (when we could see him) of the Glencairn's resident outsider.

The Long Voyage Home brimmed with life, albeit low life, as the sailors, touching in their seldom-worn shore duds, were enmeshed in a seamy world with whose duplicity they were ill-equipped to deal. Dudley Stone, gold chain glittering on his red plaid vest, more than lived up to his name as Fat Joe; Kate and Freda (Amanda Percival and Jennifer Lavenhar) were the tattiest of pallid tarts; and Jonathan Jude Duquette as Olson, ill at ease in his straw boater and formal attire, was a pathetically easy prey for Lavenhar's Freda, whose moment of regret for her role in his victimization suggested that there is at least a touch of human feeling even in the verminous sleaze of dockside doxydom.

The evening's high point was Ile, because the student cast was here joined by two faculty members--Harry Mahnken and Christine Adair--as Captain and Mrs. Keeney. Mahnken, a fine Ephraim Cabot in the same playhouse a few years back, was equally as effective as O'Neill's mini-Ahab, gaunt and stern and rough-voiced until his monomaniacal pride was temporarily weakened by his wife's pleas, and then all business again as the sound of the ship's bow cracking through ice preceded word that whaling could resume. Ms. Adair, with a red-fringed shawl over her black skirt, caught the dismay of a woman trapped in a "prison cell of a room," and offered the arguments for turning toward home with full clarity and logic. But neither as pleader nor as off-key organist did she convey to the full the irremediable madness that envelops Mrs. Keeney by the end of the text. Still, the two did reveal, movingly, the love that unites this mismatched couple and that relates them tellingly to the similarly mismatched senior Tyrones.

All in all, the production, with its skillful blend of sights and sounds and confrontations, disclosed the evocative richness that was O'Neill's from his earliest days as a dramatist. It was this that made it an especially valuable contribution to the celebration of his centennial.

-- Frederick C. Wilkins

 

3. BEYOND THE HORIZON, directed by Frank Bessell. The Berkshire Public Theatre, Pittsfield, MA, September 29 - November 5, 1988, with a special matinee performance on centennial Sunday, October 16.

Thanks to the centennial and to dedicated regional groups like the Berkshire Public Theatre, O'Neill's seldom performed early works are beginning to emerge from near-oblivion. In all my years as a peripatetic O'Neillian, I'd never, except in a fine television performance years back, managed to see a production of his first Pulitzer Prize winner until now. Why has Beyond the Horizon suffered such neglect? Its length, perhaps: three hours in this production, including two 15-minute intermissions. But longer late O'Neill plays pop up everywhere. Or possibly its oppressive heft: once the brothers Mayo and their inamorata have made their first-act choices, they're caught in a deterministic web that provides no escape for them and little relief for us. Or it might be the sheer technical challenge of the alternating indoor and outdoor scenes that are no problem for a reader but can be daunting to a company with limited budgetary and mechanical resources. It can't be the roles, which are rich and deep--unless the inclusion of "two weary horses" in the first act and a talking two-year-old in the second are seen as insurmountable obstacles!

The Berkshire Public Theatre production, skillfully directed by Frank Bessell and atmospherically enhanced by music of Aaron Copland, proved that none of these problems are problems, and that the play has more than enough vitality and substance to deserve regular production. The three hours may not have flown by, but audience involvement was sustained throughout. The performance had humor--particularly in the acerbic barbs of Mrs. Atkins (Irene McDonnell)--that offered periodic breaks in the deepening gloom. The horses were, naturally, omitted (could O'Neill really have expected them?!); Mary Mayo was played by a child of six or seven (Leah Lotto) sufficiently diminutive and demure to dispel disbelief; and set designer Bud Clark easily solved the scenic challenge by showing the farmhouse interior and the area outside it simultaneously.

Before a rear curtain suffused with a pinkish sunset glow at the start, the stage was divided into a room at our left (the Mayo sitting room, which grew more disheveled as scene succeeded scene) and a farmland area at the right, bordered by a rough rail fence at the front and a silhouette of low hills below the sunset at the rear. Later, Clark used varied lighting to suggest different locales in the outdoor scenes; and the constant presence of the exterior proved valuable to the drama. For instance, in the second scene, when Andrew left the ongoing family confab in the house, we could see him pacing and brooding in the field beyond the fence. In short, director and set designer not only solved a tricky dilemma, but turned it into an asset.

Aided by a uniformly excellent cast, Bessell, who is the BPT's Artistic Director, told O'Neill's story without undermining any of its richness of character complexity and ambiguity. It would be easy, for example, to blame the three principals' subsequent deterioration on Ruth, since it is her first-scene declaration of love for Robert that sets the deterministic ball rolling. And if the declaration is insincere--just the manipulative coquetry of a femme almost literally fatale--then the blame would be deserved. But Eliza Bond played the first scene so sincerely that Ruth emerged as no more culpable than either of her beaux. The young Ruth may not know her mind or heart, but she believes what she says. (Of course, years later, numbed into near deadness by Robert's failure as farmer and mate and by the loss of her child, she says that it was Andy whom she had always loved. But that remark smacks more of retributive bitterness than of candor.) This is not melodrama but naturalistic tragedy, and the latter presupposes that all parties are essentially guiltless. Ms. Bond may have lost a good deal of our sympathy when she treated her husband so harshly, but she never lost the three-dimensionality of her challenging role.

Noel Hanger as Robert and Barney Moran as Andrew shared Ms. Bond's success in limning the changes in their characters' natures through the course of the years. Hanger was believably idealistic at the start, believably morose in his later days, and especially touching in his deep love for his daughter and in the reconciliation Robert effects in the last scene. No one could make some of Robert's circumlocutions sound like real speech (e.g., "something I had not taken into consideration previously"!); but Hanger delivered the lines clearly and, in passages like those including the title phrase, passionately. And Moran's Andrew aged credibly, retaining a touch of his early vitality and good nature even after life far from his natural milieu had taken its toll. (I'd forgotten how likable Andy remains--a quality that Moran's charm of mien and variety of vocal tones succeeded in emphasizing.) The elder Mayos (Amy Judd and Glen Barrett) revealed the two strains in their sons' natures--she, moody like Robert; he, volatile like Andrew--though the severity of the father's outburst against Andy in the second scene was no more believable in performance than I'd found it in the script. Bruce T. MacDonald had the right salty swagger for Captain Scott; and Irene McDonnell, as mentioned before, brought more than enough querulousness to the role of Ruth's invalid mother.

Frank Bessell deserves hearty plaudits for eschewing easy answers to the hard questions O'Neill poses, for playing the text in full rather than emasculating it for easy consumption, and for showing that the 1920 Pulitzer committee was right. Beyond the Horizon may not be the most pleasant of O'Neill's plays, but it is definitely seaworthy still. I hope many more companies will follow the Berkshire Public Theatre's pioneering lead in returning it to the regular repertory.

-- Frederick C. Wilkins

 

4 LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, directed by Tom Haas. Indiana Repertory Theater, Indianapolis, IN, September 21 - October 16, 1988.

Joining the many theaters around the country celebrating the O'Neill centennial, the Indiana Repertory Theater, under the direction of IRT's Artistic Director Tom Haas, mounted O'Neill's masterpiece, Long Day's Journey Into Night. In a program note, Haas wrote with passion of his previous experiences with the play and the impact that the tortured Tyrones have had on his own personal life. These feelings are undoubtedly shared by the countless audiences that have been spellbound by the play since its premiere over thirty years ago; but unfortunately Haas's passion seemed to have stopped at his program note. The production was a competent, if uninspired treatment of the play, and a particular disappointment following on the heels of the IRT's superb rendering of Mourning Becomes Electra two years ago. Haas staged both productions, but the highly creative, exhilarating energy he supplied Mourning Becomes Electra was almost completely missing from Long Day's Journey Into Night. Perhaps the many problems posed by the unwieldy Electra inspired Haas; but with Long Day's Journey, he was too reverent and too careful. The tragic turbulence of the play flattened into tedious melodrama, and O'Neill's stunning revelations about the price of the past and the loneliness of the present resultantly faded.

Compounding Haas's caution were inadequacies in his cast. Solid performances were delivered by Michael Lipton as Tyrone and Robert Burns as Jamie, both of whom had a firm grasp of their characterizations and a sense of the play's poetry and tragic dimension. Lipton, a splendid Marmon in Electra, effortlessly portrayed Tyrone, the former matinee idol, and managed as well to combine Tyrone's love for his family with the odious miserliness that is the unhappiest remnant of the hardships of his poverty-stricken youth. Burns played well with Lipton and effectively captured the flavor of O'Neill's "Broadway bum" without sacrificing any of the character's complexity or pathos. But, ultimately, both Lipton and Burns were defeated by the inadequacies of the rest of the cast and Haas's colorless direction. Bella Jarrett's Mary was a one-dimensional harpy, vocally monotonous and lacking the emotional complexity of Mary's heart-rending dilemma. Worse yet was Christian Baskous' Edmund which, although well cast on the physical side, was utterly lacking in any of the emotional or intellectual requisites of his character. The production collapsed into the void left by the ineffectual rendering of these two significant roles.

There were also problems on the visual side. Despite excellent costumes by Bobbi Owen and a fine recreation of Monte Cristo Cottage by Bill Clarke, Denny Clark's misguided lighting undermined the entire production. Inexplicably, several scenes, such as Edmund's speech about his life at sea in the final act, were played in almost total darkness. Whether Clark intended to employ only motivated light in the scene is unclear; but with just a dim bulb in the hallway and a small table lamp in the room, Edmund's silhouette was only barely visible. The audience quickly lost interest in the scene as it gave up hope that enough light would be offered to see it. Clark's attempts to cast striking shadows in the dimly lit room failed also, and become intrusive and distracting.

Although the one-hundredth anniversary of O'Neill's birth has happily brought forth a widespread national revival of his plays, it was undoubtedly inevitable that many of the productions would be, in some way, inadequate. Unfortunately, the IRT's Long Day's Journey Into Night must be counted among these.

-- A. James Fisher

 

5. THE ICEMAN COMETH, directed by Jerry Turner. Oregon Shakespearean Festival, Ashland, OR, July 29 - October 29, 1988.

The Ashland Festival Iceman came close enough to being excellent for its flaws to aggravate more than they might in a mediocre performance. I lay some of the credit and most of the blame at the door of the director, Jerry Turner, who seemed to see the play as a realistic melodrama interlarded with entertaining comic moments and a distracting subplot.

At least two actors were as good in their roles as one could expect to see: Richard Elmore as Larry and Paul Vincent O'Connor (replacing Denis Arndt) as Hickey. Mr. Elmore spoke with a flawless ear for O'Neill's idiom, and with the hint of a lilt that perfectly conveyed Larry's particular kind of Irishness. He always made connection with whomever he addressed, and sometimes seemed single-handedly responsible for the success of the ensemble playing. This Larry might have understood, finally, the depths of Parritt's story, had it been given, and might have directed the audience to recognition.

Mr. O'Connor played Hickey's scenes without problems but also without obvious distinction until Act Four. He had no chance to show much of the character because most of the lines revealing Hickey's hostility toward his old pals in the bar had been cut. (This was a simpler Hickey than O'Neill's. But if one accepted the director's premise, that the Iceman is merely a realistic melodrama, then this Hickey made sense.) In the narrative of Act Four, O'Connor created the best imaginable context for the murder and for its telling. He told Hickey's story quietly and calmly, as if the salesman was consciously thinking about himself and Evelyn and the murder for the first time and blundering his way to the climax. Whatever heights and depths the performance reached were largely owing to Mr. O'Connor's quiet thoughtfulness in the fourth act.

The production as a whole had many good moments, particularly in the first and last acts. The comedy in Act One was very well done. Philip Davidson as Mosher was particularly sharp, with flawless timing and an assured touch with the language. From the beginning the audience responded strongly to the comedy, laughing at the right times in Acts One and Two. But in the intermission after Act Two, I heard several people asking how many more acts there were and when it would end. The remarks testified to lost direction and momentum. Between the beginning and end heavy cuts caused the play to wander--that and self-serving antics by the actor playing Harry Hope. (Someone said that Hope seemed to be one of the boarders rather than the owner, which I thought apt.) The ensemble of bums needed a basso continuo that wasn't there. Less annoying and less deliberate problems came with other actors to whom the slang had no meaning and the language no rhythm, or whose ethnic and regional accents came and went; but none of these was really distracting except in the actor overplaying Willie. Two exceptionally fine performances merit commendation: Douglas Markkanen as Jimmy and J. P. Phillips as Joe.

The thing most particularly lost from the middle acts was the growth of insight and self-awareness in Parritt, whose story (in O'Neill's version) gradually supersedes Hickey's. Larry Paulsen played the part as if he were trying out for Jamie Tyrone--and he might make a good Jamie. But he was badly miscast as the 18-year-old Parritt. He seemed from the start a mature, street-wise man in his thirties, so much stronger than Larry and the others that he intimidated them by his anger, rather than irritating them through adolescent nagging and guilt. In one scene he faced down Rocky! Through faintly epicene mannerisms Mr. Paulsen suggested an explanation for Parritt's aversion to tarts I have never thought of, but made it impossible to imagine he had recently fallen for one. This Parritt needed nothing from Larry and gave no hint of O'Neill's tragic depths as he moved toward his doom.

The setting by John Dexter, which made good use of the stage area and was appropriately seedy, gave the first indication of the director's decision about the Parritt story: there was no window out of which Larry could listen at the end. Costumes by Jeannie Davidson, lights by James Sale, and period music by Todd Barton were all well done. I hope that in the future Ashland will try more O'Neill. They clearly have the resources to do him well.

-- Stephen A. Black

(IN THIS ISSUE)