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This
work was originally designed to update the 1973 edition of Jordan Y.
Miller’s Eugene O’Neill and the
American Critic. But as our digging deepened, our circumference
widened. Professor Miller had directed his attention to the matter of American
O’Neilliana and O’Neillians. That was appropriate since his work
was an outgrowth of activities begun in the early 1950s when O’Neill was
almost exclusively the province of the American theater, and American
theater historians, critics and scholars. In the last half century,
however, the American theater has become much more a part of the global
theatrical community. And the many productions of O’Neill’s work
outside of the United States both in English-speaking countries and
elsewhere, as well as the large number of published translations of even
his minor plays, give ample testimony to O’Neill’s growing internationality.
As
a result, in taking up where Professor Miller stopped, 1973, and carrying
on through the end of 1999, we have tried also to range beyond the
English-speaking world in our survey of the O’Neill experience. We
should note that we have included a few items that pre-date 1973, items
that escaped the Miller bibliography (in 1973, remember, WorldCat, MLAIB,
and DAI were not online and instantly updated).
Miller’s
bibliography also included productions and reviews. But productions for
him meant usually first productions only. And of course first means also
normally (though not absolutely in O’Neill’s case) American. Here we
take a new direction. We have, first, widened American to mean
English-language productions and, second, included as many as we could
find. Then in a separate section we have tried to do the same for
productions in foreign languages. Of course many, possibly most, have
escaped our notice—those by community theaters, summer stock companies,
college and university theaters. And few newspapers that might review or,
at the least, notice their productions publish indexes or preserve their
fugitive lives in microfilm. But the conclusions capable (we hope)
of being drawn from the production information we have garnered should be indicative,
or, at the least, suggestive, of
the O’Neill condition in America and, we hope, the world in the last
quarter of the twentieth century.
A
word about reviews. A bibliography about a writer usually only contains
primary and secondary material. Reviews are tertiary. They can, however,
be illuminating, especially when they point towards interpretations. Here
they enter the area of criticism—not just of performance, but of text.
So we have listed some reviews, even at times with annotations.
Return
to "An
Annotated International Bibliography"
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