Performing O'Neill: Conversations with Actors and Directors

Performing O'Neill: Conversations with Actors and Directors

Yvonne Shafer
New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000
First edition, with dust jacket

In Performing O'Neill, Yvonne Shafer talks with the most important actors and directors who interpreted O'Neill in the 20th century: Jason Robards, Jane Alexander, Fritz Weaver, James Earl Jones, Theresa Wright, Gloria Foster, Ted Mann, and Arvin Brown, to name just a few. Actors like Robards talk about their first encounters with the master and their interpretations of roles like Hickey in "The Iceman Cometh" and James Tyrone in "Long Day's Journey Into Night." Directors talk about the challenges they face in bringing O'Neill's dark and compelling vision of American life to the stage and making it relevant for audiences in the 21st century. The work is a lively collection of interviews in the Paris Review tradition constructed by one of the foremost O'Neill scholars writing today.