Almost two years after its completion in May of 1926, Eugene O'Neill's Lazarus Laughed received its premiere production—not in New York. This “Play for an Imaginative Theatre,” clearly the most theatrically demanding of all of O'Neill's works, made its first appearance in California, at the Pasadena Community Playhouse, opening April 9, 1928. Not since the days when his earliest one-act plays were produced at the Wharf Theatre in Provincetown, Massachusetts, had an O'Neill play failed to result in a New York production.

Eugene O'Neill pushed his habitual experimentation with theatrical forms toward the establishment of a radically new esthetic in The Great God Brown (1925) and Lazarus Laughed (1926). He groped toward a poetic theatre with religious and ceremonial overtones that involved further visual and aural departures from the accepted norm of Broadway productions. In the first of these plays, O'Neill's mastery of visceral effects continues to cast a spell over spectators in occasional imaginative and skillful productions. But the second remains his least accessible; ever since its first production at the Pasadena Playhouse in April 1928, it has continued to mystify or repel both theatre people and litterateurs.

At a press conference to publicize the opening of The Iceman Cometh in 1946, Eugene O'Neill was quoted as saying that he considered America “instead of the most successful country in the world,… its greatest failure…, the greatest failure because it was given everything, more than any other country. Through moving as rapidly as it has, it has never acquired any real roots. Its main idea is that everlasting game of trying to possess your own soul and the things outside of it, too.”

Eugene O'Neill would certainly have agreed with Susanne Langer's suggestive description of drama in Feeling and Form:

Drama is a great form which…. express[es]…. the whole life of feeling—call it “felt life,” “subjectivity,” “direct experience,” or what you will—which finds its articulate expression in art, and, I believe—only in art…. It…. objectif[ies] our subjective being—the most intimate “Reality” that we know. This function, and not the recording of contemporary scenes, politics, or even moral attitudes, is what relates art to life (366).

Like his popularity in the United States, which has fluctuated sharply over the past sixty years or so, Eugene O'Neill's reception in China has had its twists and turns. He was widely read, translated, performed, critically reviewed and even creatively imitated in the 1930s, but this love affair was brought to an almost complete stop by China's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, which lasted eight years from 1937 to 1945. When the war was over, there were some attempts at reviving the interest, but with the changed political situation, these efforts were followed by an even longer silence and occasional harsh criticism.

“I don't think I'll have anything very interesting to tell you.”

When I met and interviewed Karl Ragnar Gierow in his office at the Royal Swedish Academy, Stockholm, February 27, 1973, he at first expressed skepticism about whether there was any Eugene O'Neill story to be told. But I had earlier paid several visits to the archives of the Royal Dramatic Theatre (Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern/ Dramaten); had closely researched the historic O'Neill world premieres (1956–62) while Gierow was Dramaten's General Intendant (Manager); and had been carefully coached by Stig Torsslow, the theatre's venerable Dramaturg, concerning Gierow's exploits in acquiring, translating, and producing four of O'Neill's posthumous plays. These comprised Long Day's Journey into Night (February 10, 1956); A Touch of the Poet (March 19, 1957); Hughie (September 18, 1958); and More Stately Mansions (November 9, 1962). I had come to my appointment with Gierow bearing some essential facts and with plenty of questions about Long Day's Journey and the playwright's widow, Carlotta Monterey O'Neill. Gierow was cordial, accommodating, and forthcoming with marvelous remembered details. I returned to Finland (where I was a Senior Fulbright-Hays Scholar) full of appreciation for Torsslow's avuncular counsel and Gierow's vivid recollections. I carried along voluminous notes from my longsought interview and copies of some O'Neill scripts from Dramaten for the Library of Åbo Akademi.

Margaret Webster (1905–1972), British-American producer-director perhaps best remembered for her production of Othello with Paul Robeson, was also a distinguished writer, lecturer and actress. It was in these several capacities that Webster was invited in 1961 by the United States Department of State to visit South Africa. Webster was to lecture on theatre, offer her one-woman recitals of Shakespeare and Shaw, and direct an “American classic” for the South African National Theatre Organization. In discussions with members of the State Department and the National Theatre Organization, the plays of several writers, including Williams, Miller, Wilder, Hellman and MacLeish, were considered but eventually eliminated for reasons of suitability, individual taste or because of recent productions in South Africa. Eventually, A Touch of the Poet was selected for production.

As the critics Horst Frenz and Susan Tuck have made abundantly clear, O'Neill's theatrical reputation on the European continent has often fared well. Witness thereof are the splendid productions that the dramatist's later dramas received at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. Although the major foreign productions of O'Neill have by now been documented, those of smaller European countries such as Belgium have remained rather obscure. And yet, I would argue that the Belgian premiere of Long Day's Journey into Night possesses a significant historical importance. It took place, in a French adaptation, in the provincial town of Charleroi in March 1970 as a venture of the “Théâtre de l'Ancre.’ This production, if not flawless, emphasized O'Neill's mastery of poetic stage realism, and thus offered new insights into the meaning of his tragic experiments.