Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

Two literary giants stride through the pages of this month’s American Theatre—coincidentally, but with some telling correspondencies. At first glance, Eugene O’Neill and Virginia Woolf seem like the oddest of odd couples—the rough-edged, egalitarian American, obsessed from his youth with exploring the radical possibilities of drama and ultimately credited with introducing the realism of Chekhov, Ibsen and Strindberg to the American repertoire; and the arch, aristocratic Britisher, devoted to the art of the novel and the essay, and associated not with realism but with the post-Freudian modernism of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. But as you read Thomas Connors’s expert cover story "Extreme O'Neill," surveying a half-dozen O’Neill productions on the program of a landmark Chicago festival emphasizing the playwright’s avant-garde pedigree, and senior editor Nicole Estvanik Taylor’s nuanced consideration of a wealth of recent and upcoming stagings of Woolf’s works, "Songs of Innovation and Experience," some surprising commonalities come to light.

It’s unlikely that O’Neill and Woolf ever met—surely that’s a literary juxtaposition that someone would have recorded for posterity—but they were virtual contemporaries. O’Neill was born in 1888 (in a hotel room just off Times Square), six years after Woolf’s birth; he outlived her by 12 years, a gap that would likely have narrowed had not Woolf taken her own life in the early, escalating years of a second world war she feared she could not endure. Both artists accomplished the bulk of their work in the creatively turbulent early decades of the 20th century. And (although O’Neill’s reputation is anchored to a single masterwork of relatively conventional dramaturgy) both were resolute experimentalists, intent on reshaping what they saw as moribund literary forms into living reflections of the world as they perceived it.

Those perceptions, made manifest on page and stage, were in both cases frequently dark, pessimistic and without the solace of spiritual consolation or transcendence. (“No, there’s no hope in this piece,” director Katie Mitchell remarks of her multimedia version of Woolf’s The Waves, which played at Lincoln Center in November.) Not incidentally, both Woolf and O’Neill suffered from acute depression, a malady that claimed the life of O’Neill’s older brother, hampered the playwright’s ability to work and contributed to the alcoholism that plagued him. But while the darkness in both artists’ bodies of work is acknowledged by the theatrical interpreters you’ll meet in these pages, it is the vigorous experimentation with form and profound elucidation of the need for human connection in both Woolf and O’Neill that has inspired a new array of contemporary incarnations of their works.

How contemporary do they get? Imagine Chicago’s antic Neo-Futurists applying their text-fracturing audacity to O’Neill’s Pulitzer-winning 1928 potboiler Strange Interlude, or auteur Robert Wilson recasting Woolf’s picaresque Orlando as a solo tour de force for a leading lady of Beijing opera. The theatre, you have to conclude, reveres its giants in tantalizing ways.