O'Neill in Stockholm

In 1939 the late Playwright Eugene O'Neill pushed aside the bulky, handwritten manuscripts of his projected nine-play study of the rise and fall of a New England family, and wrote the plays that made him once more the dominant figure of the American theater. In quick succession he ground out The Iceman Cometh, which is flourishing in its second year off-Broadway as a revival, the autobiographical Long Day's Journey Into Night, the season's outstanding drama, and A Moon for the Misbegotten, which will open on Broadway next month.*

Tearing Up Children. Shortly before his death in 1953, his tall, thin body wracked by the palsy of a nerve-muscle disorder, O'Neill made an agonizing decision: he would destroy the cycle's six unfinished plays so that no writer could draw conclusions from his beginnings. One manuscript was spared--A Touch of the Poet, which O'Neill thought was ready for the stage. "We tore them up, bit by bit," his wife later recalled. "He could tear just a few sheets at a time. It was like tearing up children."

Last week the world got its first inkling of what Dramatist O'Neill was up to in his sprawling series. Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theater, which gave the first performance last year of Long Day's Journey, gave the first performance of A Touch of the Poet, the play O'Neill had intended to start the cycle before he became fascinated by its characters and wrote two other plays exploring their ancestors. Generally, Sweden's critics applauded O'Neill's story of Cornelius Melody, a drunken, frustrated Irishman who runs an inn near Boston in 1828, and lives in a dream world of past glories. "As gigantic as Long Day's Journey Into Night," wrote one critic, "but not quite so imposing and important a play." Summed up one first-nighter: "Great theater!"

A Need to Dream. In A Touch of the Poet, O'Neill explores the theme he used in The Iceman Cometh--a man needs to dream--but he laces the bitter, dialectic dialogue between Melody and his family with rollicking humor and blazing theatrics. Melody keeps a thoroughbred mare to bolster his pride, yet forces his daughter to work as a waitress. When he swaggers out to challenge a rich Yankee who has insulted his family, he is beaten into the dust by servants, and his dream world shatters. His daughter, who has ridiculed his false life, is horrified at the change in her defeated father. "I can't bear it," she cries. "Won't you be yourself?"

Broadway Producer Robert Whitehead (Separate Tables, Waltz of the Toreadors) is planning to bring A Touch of the Poet to Manhattan next season to make the O'Neill revival livelier yet.

* In addition, New Girl in Town, a musical version of O'Neill's 1921 Anna Christie, will open on Hroadway in May.

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