Exorcism—the Play O’Neill Tried to Destroy
EDWARD ALBEE
In the middle 1950s, while I was still safely in my twenties, I wrote my first play. It was called The Zoo Story; it involved a meeting in New York City’s Central Park of two men, one of whom had come there to read on a Sunday afternoon. By the end of the play one of the men was dead, the action of the play concerning itself much more with the why of the event than the event itself.
The play had its world premiere in West Berlin, Germany, at the Werkstatt of the Schiller Theater on September 28, 1959—in German!—on a double bill with Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. (How fortunate can a young playwright be!)
The U.S. premiere was (in English!) on the same double bill at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York City’s Greenwich Village on January 12, 1960. The evening was well reviewed and The Zoo Story ran for nearly three years.
I had quit my job delivering telegrams for Western Union when I went to Berlin for the premiere, and I have spent the years since—mostly in the United States—writing plays and essays, teaching, and directing.
As I mentioned above, The Zoo Story was my first play—and there it sits in all definings: Edward Albee’s first play. And I think of it that way. The only possible complication here is that I wrote three or four plays before I wrote The Zoo Story—before I wrote my first play—before I wrote my Opus 1.
We all do this, of course; we commit student work—sometimes a lot of it—before we have accomplished something we feel is professional or good enough to be singled out as worthy of inclusion in a corpus.
Felix Mendelssohn, the composer, as an example, wrote fourteen string quartets—including one, the final one, I think, which contains a fugue worthy of J. S. Bach—which he listed as student work—pre-opus. Painters do it; poets do it; we all do it. We finally decide “Okay, this is good enough to list it among the pieces I’m willing to take credit for.” (Or the blame for.)
In the case of The Zoo Story, it was a lot better than the stuff I wrote before it, rather as if my talent—such as it was—had matured enough to have it examined seriously. We separate our student work from our theoretically mature work, and we’re usually right.
What do we do, however, about a playwright who decides to destroy his work, especially—as in Eugene O’Neill’s case—when the usual career designations (student; professional) are not helpful?
His play Exorcism, the subject here, is not a very important milestone in his development as a dramatist, and I suspect his drive to do away with it has less to do with its subject—O’Neill’s own attempted suicide—than it does with his dissatisfaction with the play’s structure and resolution—especially the fact of the play’s anti-dramatic second and final scene, which takes the play nowhere and has little to do with dramatic logic. And we all know that if the facts get in the way of dramatic logic they are expendable.
What is fascinating about Exorcism is how much it does have to do with The Iceman Cometh, his long and ungainly and deeply involving memory play about his youthful life and hard times, more or less on the streets. Exorcism could be a scene from The Iceman Cometh—indeed, would make it a better play.
While The Iceman Cometh lacks the clarity and focus of O’Neill’s masterpiece—Long Day’s Journey into Night—it stands out as a worthy confrere, as one of the two plays he wrote which deal honestly and fully with the author as subject matter. They are O’Neill’s two most revealing plays and are the most moving.
O’Neill has always seemed several playwrights to me—all instructive and skillful but the work made, most of it, out of whole cloth you wouldn’t call finest wool. It is with The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night that O’Neill dealt most perceptively with his demons, and it is for this reason that Exorcism is worth examining as an essential part of that fabric.
NEW YORK CITY, 2011