Reviewing Eugene O'Neill

I recently joined the Eugene O'Neill Society, and yesterday my first issue of The Eugene O'Neill Review arrived in the mail.

The journal includes my own review of a production Irish Repertory Theatre did last year of O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet, starring Robert Cuccioli and Belle Aykroyd.

It's an honor to have my review included. This issue has some fascinating stuff, including an article about an unperformed adaptation of The Hairy Ape by Shirley Graham originally written for the Federal Theatre Project, and another article on the influence Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths had on O'Neill.

Many thanks to the journal's editor, Alexander Pettit, for putting together such a lovely publication, and to Bess Rowen for asking me to review Irish Rep's production for the issue. I hope to have more work published in the journal in the future.

Right now, though, my attention is on earlier dramatists, as I am giving a paper at the end of the month on Olympe de Gouges and Ira Aldridge for a conference by the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism.

I don't know if O'Neill was familiar with the work of de Gouges and Aldridge, but I imagine he would have liked their plays!

Shaw Conference in Spain... at last!

Back in 2020, I was supposed to attend a conference on Bernard Shaw in the town of Cáceres in Spain. Well, the conference got delayed two years, but I finally made it!

I arrived in Madrid on Tuesday and took the train out to Cáceres, a beautiful city with lots of medieval architecture. The conference began on Wednesday, with a plenary lecture by Audrey McNamara. She spoke about how Shaw represented "Woman as Nation" but not in the idealized manner of W.B. Yeats in such plays as Cathleen Ni Houlihan.

Edurne Goñi-Alsúa kicked off the first session, discussing "geolect" in Spanish translations of Pygmalion.  Guadalupe Nieto Caballero talked about the reception of Shaw in Spain, and I was fascinated to learn that a production of Shaw's play The Devil's Disciple was performed in the midst of the Spanish Civil War. Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín--who organized the conference--also spoke about his Online Shaw Concordance.

In the second session, I was glad to hear Peter Gahan discuss Shaw and the Germans. Shaw claimed that he mostly just knew Goethe and Schiller among German authors, though he was clearly familiar with a few others, as well. In Germany, Shaw's reputation during his lifetime was as a radical socialist, which informed the talk given by Virginia Costello on Shaw, Maxim Gorky and Emma Goldman. While Goldman became disillusioned with the Soviet Union after being transported there by the U.S. Army aboard the Buford, Shaw remained consistent in his support for the Russian Revolution.

Unfortunately, Jean Reynolds did not make it over for the conference, but she joined us over Zoom to officially launch her new book on Major Barbara and Pygmalion. She discussed how in Major Barbara Andrew Undershaft admires his predecessor in the arms trade, whom he refers to as his master. He quotes maxims of the business, but Reynolds said these maxims fall apart once you start to really think about them. She also brought up that when Andrew comes to his own home after being away for years, the butler Morrison doesn't know how to classify him. Should he announce him as a visitor or treat him as one of the family?

Wednesday night, we had a guided tour of Cáceres. We wondered at the old Moorish tower, the plaque on the ground marking the old Jewish quarter, and other amazing sights. The conference started up again on Thursday morning, with a plenary lecture by Brad Kent on Shaw and world literature. I learned that when Shaw accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature, he used the prize money to set up an organization to encourage translation of Swedish literature into English. The organization gives out a prize each year for the best translation. Kent also spoke on Shaw's relationship to Max Reinhardt, who directed some of Shaw's plays, including a production of Saint Joan that included Bertolt Brecht.

The third session of the conference contained some Zoom talks, as well as Vishnu Patil (live and in person) discussing Shaw in India. He noted that India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, attended talks given by Shaw, and the two later met formally in 1949, the year before Shaw's death. After a brief coffee break, we had a fourth session, which featured Justine Zapin discussing The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman, which she referred to as Shaw's last Irish play. She noted that in the play Shaw creates an Irish landscape in the minds of the audience without engaging in a mimetic representation of place in the physical theatre space.

After a book launch for Bernard Shaw and the Spanish-Speaking World, we had a fifth session in which Miguel Cisneros Perales discussed Spanish adaptations of Pygmalion and Óscar Giner spoke on links between Saint Joan and Calderón de la Barca’s Golden Age play The Constant Prince. Both plays present exceptional incarnations of the life force, he said. Giner also mentioned that Shaw's hero, P.B. Shelley, had partially translated Calderón's The Prodigious Magician, which remains perhaps the best English translation of that play. We also had some entertainment, with Brian Freeland performing his one-man show Bernard Shaw: Playing the Clown.

Today, I gave my own talk on Shaw and Sarah Bernhardt. There were also presentations by Luis Tosina Fernández, R.A.F. Ajith, and Soudabeh Ananisarab. It's been an exhausting conference, but one I was very glad to be able to attend!

Luna Park

I had the good fortune of seeing a reading of Hyeyoung Kim's new musical Luna Park earlier today. The reading was part of a fundraiser for the Astoria Performing Arts Center (APAC), but the piece deserves to get a full staging somewhere.

Michael Cooper wrote the lyrics for the musical, and Daniel F. Levin supplied the book. Some parts of the play are inspired by Maxim Gorky's reaction to seeing Luna Park opening at Coney Island for the first time in 1903, and the artists have included some of Gorky's original text.

The heart of the show, however, follows a trio who made the amusement park possible. Frederick Thompson was the creative force behind the park, while Elmer "Skip" Dundy provided the business sense, and the park itself was named for Dundy's sister, Luna. All three appear in the show, as does Thompson's wife Mabel, an actress he made famous by producing the Broadway show Polly of the Circus, starring her.

Luna Park sometimes plays loosely with history. Sadly, the Park's namesake passed away three years after it opened, but the musical has her live on and play a major role in its ups and downs, including the electrocution of the elephant Topsy, an event caught on camera by Thomas Edison's motion picture company.

I'm not sure what the next step for this musical will be, but I hope to see it again someday.

Thoughts on Gorky

Maxim Gorky, born Alexi Maximovich Peshkov in 1868, was one of those rare proletarian writers who actually came from the proletariat. While Count Lev Tolstoy, who would later develop a friendship with Gorky, would wear peasant shirts and sympathize with the poor, Gorky actually knew what it was like to be poor. His working-class father died of cholera in 1871, and two years later his mother left him to be brought up by his grandparents. After his mother died of tuberculosis in 1879, his grandfather sent the 11-year-old boy to work in a shoe store, the first in a series of menial jobs. Lacking any sort of formal schooling from that point on, the young boy gave himself his own education, reading whenever and wherever he could.

As a teenager, he encountered the short stories of Anton Chekhov, who would later have a profound impact on his life. After a botched Christmas Eve suicide attempt when he was nineteen (following the deaths of his grandparents), Gorky wandered about, periodically getting in trouble with the law for being a suspected subversive. In 1892, he published his first short story, and used Maxim Gorky (which means "bitter") as a pen name. He continued to have success with his writings. In 1898 he sent his two volumes of collected stories to Chekhov, beginning a life-long correspondence and friendship.

In 1900, Chekhov introduced Gorky to the Moscow Art Theatre and urged him to write a play. His first finished play, The Philistines, was heavily censored when it was performed in 1902. Later that year the Moscow Art Theatre premiered The Lower Depths, directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky, who also played the role of Satin. The play soon became an international success. The increasingly political Gorky turned over a good deal of his profits from the play to the Russian Social Democratic Party after meeting one of the party's rising stars, Vladimir Lenin.

Gorky had a falling out with the Moscow Art Theatre in 1904. The theatre's co-founder, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, heavily criticized Gorky's play Summerfolk. Though Gorky ended up extensively rewriting the play after the harsh critique, he took the script elsewhere, and it premiered in St. Petersburg. Gorky continued to get in trouble with the Czarist government for his political activities, and he wrote his 1905 play Children of the Sun while imprisoned. After a couple months, he was released following pleas from numerous Western authors.

The year 1905 also saw a failed upraising against the government, and Gorky fled the country the following year. He ended up in New York where he wrote the novel Mother, reportedly in a house on Staten Island. The novel would later be adapted into a play by Bertolt Brecht and an opera by Valery Zhelobinsky. Gorky wrote the play Vassa Zheleznova on the island of Capri in 1910. His relationship with Lenin was touch-and-go for a while, but when Lenin and his party made Pravda their official newspaper, Gorky contributed financially to the publication.

After the Czar announced in 1913 a general amnesty for non-violent political exiles, Gorky returned to Russia. During the 1917 revolution many people on the right and the left attacked Gorky. The author was still close enough with Lenin to intercede on behalf of numerous writers. He helped Viktor Shklovsky get a travel permit, but tried in vain to help Alexander Blok, securing permission for him to leave Russia for health reasons only after Blok had already died. In 1921, Gorky himself left Russia, ostensibly for his health, but he was clearly disillusioned with the revolution.

Joseph Stalin rose to power after Lenin's death and sought to get Gorky to return. After a couple of visits, Gorky returned to Russia for good in 1931, dying in 1936.