Editor’s Foreword

Abstract

Shouhua Qi’s 2019 essay on Chinese adaptations of Desire Under the Elms (EOR 40.1) reminded readers that Eugene O’Neill is popular in China—notwithstanding, I add, the playwright’s poor behavior there during his boozy junket of 1928. O’Neill’s eastern ascent began in the late 1970s, when “a climate materialized in China favorable for the reception of O’Neill and other modern Western writers,” Liu Haiping writes in his and Lowell Swortzell’s Eugene O’Neill in China: An International Centenary Celebration (Greenwood, 1992, xxx‒xxxi). In this issue’s Used Books entry, Shiyan Xu presents Haiping and Swortzell’s collection as a catalyst, noting that “over ten monographs on O’Neill by Chinese scholars” have appeared since its publication. Translations of monographs by Virginia Floyd and James A. Robinson and of biographies by Louis Sheaffer and Robert M. Dowling also followed the breakout collection into print. The work continues: a new monograph on Chinese translations on O’Neill plays has just been published by Zhejiang University Press, and a complete Chinese edition of O’Neill’s plays will appear in 2024 or 2025.The Eugene O’Neill Review is popular in China, too, now more than ever. According to JSTOR, the EOR’s primary online platform until 2023, China was responsible for more online hits in 2022 than any country except the United States. While JSTOR/EOR hits overall dropped by 16 percent from 2021 to 2022, due principally to the pandemic’s early ebb, hits from China increased by 36 percent. Xi’an Jiaotong–Liverpool University, Beihang University, and Guangdong University of Foreign Studies claimed spots 3 through 5 on JSTOR’s 2022 “Institutional Usage Report” for the EOR. Other Chinese universities placed prominently as well.Now, I’m no statistician and I admit that this whole “hits” thing registers fuzzily with me. But surely these numbers suggest that we ought to be paying more attention to China. Our decision to publish Xu’s contribution both in Chinese and in the author’s English translation attempts to honor and celebrate an intellectual bond among O’Neillians worldwide, and I’ll hope that this modest gesture signals a new commitment to learning from and sharing with our Chinese colleagues. I’m optimistic. Indeed, I’m pleased to announce that EOR 45.1 will include a debut essay about Chinese adaptations of Beyond the Horizon during the Second World War. And keep your eyes on our review sections… .Essays by three high-profile members of the Eugene O’Neill Society anchor the present issue. Bess Rowen argues that O’Neill’s stage directions serve throughout his corpus as indicators of “longing and belonging,” possessed of a unique generic functionality. It’s like encountering O’Neill liminally on stage and liminally in print, at the same time—disorienting and fascinating. In a bravado display of interdisciplinarity, Zander Brietzke draws out formal and perspectival correspondences between O’Neill’s late plays and the graphic art of his friend and contemporary John Sloan, who was associated with Robert Henri’s Ashcan School of painting. Director Eric Hayes returns with thoughts on the “pandemic pivot” that prompted him to start filming O’Neill’s plays, variously under the aegises of the Eugene O’Neill Foundation and the National Parks Service. Hayes’s filmed version of Beyond the Horizon fared well online (oh those “hits”!), and justly so. I trust readers will enjoy applying his observations to his most recent and equally compelling film, Welded, released in spring 2023.Katie N. Johnson’s extensive work on race in O’Neill animates her introduction to the Lost & Found entry on O’Neill’s “The Silver Bullet,” the early stirrings of The Emperor Jones. In incidental symmetry with the Used Books feature, we present two texts: a diplomatic text that (ipso facto) records editorial decisions that O’Neill made during his work, and a reading text that, shorn of orthographical arcana, preserves the version that O’Neill would carry into The Emperor Jones. To this abundance we add book reviews by Drew Eisenhauer, Christine Kinealy, and Emeline Jouve; and performance reviews by Katie N. Johnson (encore), Richard Hayes, Dan McGovern, Titian Lish, and David Palmer. The latter grouping indicates the passing of a milestone: for the first time since spring 2021 (EOR 42.1), all performance reviews concern live productions.This issue marks the end of my term as the EOR’s editor. For support, amity, and counsel, I thank my co-editors Zander Brietzke, Bess Rowen, and Ryder Thornton; the EOR’s editorial board and the board of the Eugene O’Neill Society; the fine folks at Penn State University Press; and incoming editor J. Chris Westgate, under whose editorship, I know, the journal will continue to flourish. “Belonging” in this instance has been neither difficult nor fraught.