For slightly more than a decade, in the 1970s and ’80s, I worked for several weeks every summer as a dramaturg at the National Playwrights Conference held at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., adjacent to New London. The O’Neill Center sponsored a great many other theater activities, all year round, but the Playwrights Conference was the crown jewel in its diadem—so much so that those invited to work there, and their colleagues who envied them, referred to it simply as “The O’Neill.” There were in those days relatively few places where new plays could be tested in a workshop context, before an extremely patient local audience. Now the setup is commonplace, and the O’Neill has lost some of its luster in the face of so much competition; but in those days it seemed purely magical. To spend two to four weeks enjoying the sunshine of an uncrowded beach, and the dappled greenery of a park full of ancient trees, while rehearsing new plays, trading ideas, and sharing meals with a crowd of gifted and enthusiastic colleagues was like an invitation to paradise.
The O’Neill was the brainchild of a passionate theater lover from a wealthy family with roots in the New London area, George C. White. It happened almost by coincidence, a story George was fond of retelling: Another wealthy family, the Hammonds, had left their shorefront property to the town of Waterford, which promptly created Waterford Beach Park. The Hammonds’ old and slightly decaying mansion still stood on the property, and the town originally intended for the fire department to tear it down as a demolition exercise. But then George got wind of the matter. He immediately associated the park’s opportunities with a New London resident of far wider influence than the Hammonds: Eugene O’Neill. O’Neill’s father, the hugely popular matinee idol James O’Neill, had bought a house on the unfashionable side of New London’s fashionable Ocean Avenue, for use as a summer retreat in an era when the lack of air conditioning, not yet invented, made most indoor theaters unbearably hot. Eugene O’Neill and his older brother, James Jr. (“Jamie”), spent much of their adolescence and young adulthood there. When the idea struck George, the area was full of O’Neill lore and anecdotage, some of it still vividly remembered by older residents, not always approvingly, as George discovered when he first set out, hat in hand, to raise funds for an organization dedicated to new and risk-taking plays in the spirit of O’Neill.
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There was much irony in his proposal. O’Neill had never led a happy life, and his New London years were a time of continuous torment. His father was both penurious and wayward; both his father and his older brother were alcoholics; his mother was not the only middle-class homemaker of the period who found an escape from her frustrations in morphine. The playwright himself, physically frailer than his brother and father, contracted TB and spent some months in a nearby sanitarium. Much of his unhappiness is recorded in two of his late masterpieces, Long Day’s Journey Into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten. The former takes place in the house on Ocean Avenue, which O’Neill’s father had christened Monte Cristo Cottage, in honor of the play that had become his star vehicle and guaranteed moneymaker. The playwright remembered it with such painful vividness that, when the O’Neill Center acquired the house (now a designated historic landmark) decades later, its first curators found in the parlor some of the furniture described in the opening stage directions of Long Day’s Journey.
Another irony came from the cold distance, in that socially stratified time, between the O’Neills and the Hammonds. Hammond, a wealthy industrialist, is derided in both plays, under the ponderous name of T. Stedman Harder. A rude story about the wily Irish tenant farmer who waters his pigs at the Hammonds’ ice pond is dramatized in A Moon for the Misbegotten and retold, with embroidery, in Long Day’s Journey. Mrs. Hammond was said to be the leader of the social set that made it a fashion to snub Ella Mary O’Neill, the wife of the “shanty-Irish” actor who had had the temerity to install his raffish family in a fashionable district.
In the early years of the Playwrights Conference, Mrs. Hammond’s angry ghost was said to stalk the halls of the mansion, and playwrights were warned not to fall asleep in the third floor library, a comfortable and appealing room that in life had apparently been a favorite haunt of hers. But ghosts and the memory of O’Neill’s own presence played only a small role in the magic of the place. One of George’s most audacious early moves, which proved to be one of his most successful, was inviting Lloyd Richards to become the artistic director of the Playwrights Conference. This turned out to be a wise move because Lloyd—in addition to his Broadway directing credentials, plus the infinite patience and gravitas he brought to the job—had a deeply rooted belief in a non-exclusionary version of community. If the theater was to be a big family, it had to be one in which all the ethnic groups, ages, and genders could mingle peaceably. And to a very large extent Lloyd succeeded in bringing this vision to life. Meals at the O’Neill were communal, and the schedule was arranged so that people working on the various shows would converge on the dining hall at the same time. Actors were contracted, at least in the early years, as “as-cast” company members, and casting often went without regard for the usual categories. One summer I served as dramaturg on a Jewish family play. The director was nonwhite; the Jewish parents were Dominic Chianese and Jo Henderson, both O’Neill regulars. The elder son, who was rediscovering his Jewish roots, was played by a distinctly blond and blue-eyed Lutheran from Ohio; his wife, who was encouraging the rediscovery, was played by Swoosie Kurtz. The actor playing the younger son was the only Jew in the cast.
This led to an amusing contretemps. The author, director, and I were huddled together, trying to sort out a hectic Friday night family dinner-party scene, with everyone running in and out and much overlapping dialogue, at the end of which the older son had to recite the traditional Sabbath blessing over wine. “I know it,” said the actor playing the younger son, “I’ll teach it to him.” So we went back to our work, paying next to no attention to their talk, and got the scene sorted out. The director gave everyone their blocking and business, and then we ran the scene, at the climax of which our resident Lutheran raised his prop wineglass aloft and intoned, “Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’mai raboh.” At which the playwright, the director and I shouted in unison to the younger brother, “That’s not the Kiddush, that’s the Kaddish!” (For the uninitiated, he had taught his colleague not the blessing over wine, but the memorial prayer for the dead.)
Mentioning the wineglass, which was a dime-store goblet spray-painted gray, reminds me of the unusual procedure by which Lloyd sought to avoid burdening a script with distracting production elements. The prominent scenic designer Peter Larkin had, at Lloyd’s request, created a series of steel-framed cubes and oblongs in varying sizes, which could be clamped together in an infinite variety of ways, and into which flat wooden pieces, painted silver-gray to match the steel frames, could be inserted at varying angles. These “modules” could be used, and were, to give virtually any play a scenic environment that provided only minimal distraction from what was in the script. Similarly, all props were spray-painted gray to maintain the neutral tone of this minimal approach: If a character came back from grocery shopping with a bagful of comestibles, the brown paper grocery bags were spray-painted gray; the cans and parcels inside them were gray cylinders and rectangles.
One summer, Amy Saltz directed and I dramaturged a play in which the heroine, studying art, is shocked by the presence of a nude male model in a life class. The model was played by the very handsome young actor Kevin Geer, who would happily have played the role in the nude but was obliged to don a gray swimsuit, which Amy immediately dubbed “modular nudity.” The swimsuit did nothing to hide his beautiful body.
That summer, the foreign observers at the Conference included two young Danish dramaturgs, a boy and a girl just out of theater school. As always, there was a critique the morning after the play’s second performance, at which Lloyd made his customary injunction not to comment on the performances or production, but only on the play. The Danish girl put her hand up. “I liked this play,” she said, in somewhat halting English. “I thought it was…as well formed…as Kevin Geer.” I think even Lloyd joined in the explosion of laughter that followed.
Many playwrights were uncomfortable with the critiques; I loved them. Anybody could speak—Lloyd and George never tired of reminding us that the O’Neill was situated in a public park, with rehearsals open to all, so that anyone passing by might stop in to observe—but it was understood that comments were meant to be helpful to the playwright, and in general such negative criticism as was voiced at the critiques was mild and delicately phrased. (There were, of course, exceptions, including a really thorny one that I will describe in a future column if the playwright involved gives me permission.) Except on rainy days, critiques were held in what was then called the Instant Theatre (now the Edith Oliver, named for one of my feistier colleagues, The New Yorker’s off-Broadway critic). It was literally two boards and a passion: a bare wooden deck, flanked on three sides by wood bleachers and on the fourth (upstage) side by a gorgeous 300-year-old copper beech tree, the low-hanging branches of which often found themselves involved in the action. Even when the weather was less than comfortable and the mosquitoes aggressive (the O’Neill sits adjacent to federally protected marshlands), it was an enchanted place. The insect repellent that the staff provided as you entered put no dent in its magic spell.
It was in this enchanting venue that once, paying a brief visit to the Conference after my dramaturging days had ended, I found myself prodded onto the stage as a sort of warmup act for a critique. The playwright, whose work I had come up specifically to see, was so terrified at the prospect of public criticism that he had locked himself in his dorm room and refused to come out. I was drafted to keep the crowd entertained with a general discussion of his work while the staff saw to it that he was coaxed out of hiding, dressed, and finally driven to the Conference grounds. He arrived visibly panicked and shaking violently, which was needless. The Conference members treated his densely layered and rather abstruse play with great respect, verging at times on cautious admiration. The director who had staged his script—whom I knew but never told the playwright had been a vociferous opponent of its acceptance by the selection committee—ended by inviting the author to come work with him at the regional theater he then ran. As painful experiences go, this one was relatively sunny. Like most of the negative stories surrounding O’Neill critiques, it was a case of the playwright’s fear magnifying the few negative comments.
Another better known playwright, also a fine actor, once told me that after his first O’Neill experience, he was so demoralized by the critique that he had never applied again until critiques were abolished after Lloyd’s retirement. I was stunned, having served as his dramaturg on the play in question. I pointed out to him that most of the comments on his play were wildly enthusiastic, that it had immediately been produced off-Broadway, and had been very well received. He cited the one extremely negative comment that he said had hurt him badly, and I was stunned again, for I remembered the comment. It had been made by a fellow playwright, a Christian fundamentalist from the Midwest, who wore her religion noisily on her sleeve, and whom everyone else at the Conference that summer thought of as a prize prig. “How could you let her comment bother you?” I said. “I don’t know,” he replied. “It just hurt. It still hurts.” Playwrights are sensitive—sometimes hypersensitive—souls.
Like the Conference itself, the critique system had evolved gradually. At first the O’Neill offered fully staged productions—not open for review, but with a panel of critics invited to come onstage after the performance and discuss the play they had just seen. This ended when a panel of critics—all white, as it happens—took strong exception to the play they had just seen, and its African-American author responded by taking even stronger exception to their views. The audience was apparently vastly entertained, but Lloyd and George knew well that this was no way of helping the playwright sort out what might be the imperfections in his play. In a subsequent year they tried setting up a private conference between the critics’ panel and the playwright, but this came to a speedy halt when one playwright—disabled, as it happens—rolled into the meeting in his wheelchair, and produced a gun. It turned out to be only a toy, but Lloyd and George elected not to tempt fate any further. So the critique became a public matter for all Conference attendees and any other brave souls interested enough to sit on hard wooden bleachers at 9 a.m. on a sunshiny morning in a park and discuss a play seen earlier that week. Lloyd always sat onstage to lead the discussion, with the playwright usually sitting next to him and the director and dramaturg on the playwright’s other side, so the playwright could feel at least sheltered if not defended. After Lloyd’s introduction, it was customary for the director and dramaturg to give brief opening statements; the playwright usually said nothing unless he or she chose to speak after audience comments had been heard. The comments ranged widely, from hazy generalizations to highly specific questions about parts of the action or situation that audience members hadn’t comprehended or hadn’t felt were relevant. I recall one play, set in the Southwest, in which the action came to a standstill while the characters watched an armadillo attempt to cross the road. At the critique this piece of writerly fancy was demolished by Edith Oliver’s wonderfully raspy voice, declaring, “I’d just like to say something about that goddam symbolic armadillo.” Even the playwright had to laugh.