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The cast and crew of the collection of short plays that will mark the next production from the Eugene O’Neill Foundation is preparing for a three-day run this week that aims to showcase stories of survival from the renowned playwright and one of his contemporaries.
The three plays are unified under the theme of “Tales from the Edge” but feature an array of obstacles, challenges and storylines that continue to be resonant in the present day – including addiction and other mental health struggles, crime and the complicated nature of close relationships.
The lineup consists of two early O’Neill works – “The Dreamy Kid” and “Exorcism”, both from 1919 – as well as the 1916 play “Cocaine” written by O’Neill’s contemporary, Pendleton King.
In addition to the unifying themes that the upcoming production is seeking to emphasize in the three one-act plays, the trio of works have a commonality in their origin stories, having all been produced by the Provincetown Players.
“They were all about trying to shake up the theater world,” said O’Neill Foundation artistic director Eric Fraisher Hayes, who is co-directing the upcoming production alongside Kimberly Ridgeway.
“They wrote these plays about 100 years ago because they thought everything was too commercial, and they wanted to tell more honest, realistic stories,” he continued. “I feel myself wanting to do the same thing. It’s really hard to find a story about people anymore.”
Hayes noted that while the works coming from the young writers involved with the Provincetown Players often sought to speak to broader social issues, what is effective about the three plays in the upcoming lineup is their use of personal stories to explore those broader issues.
“I chose ‘Tales from the Edge’ as my framing for these three plays, and I was really meditating on that notion of edge – points in people’s lives where they have to make a decision,” Hayes said. “I feel like it’s very human to recognize that at certain moments, you’ve got to make a choice about who you trust, who you’re going to look out for, whether it’s yourself or someone else.”
Those broader issues are resonant, but heavy ones.
One of the most anticipated plays, Hayes said, is “Exorcism,” a semi-autobiographical account of O’Neill’s own suicide attempt. Following its debut in 1920, O’Neill had sought to have all copies of the play destroyed. Nearly 100 years later the “lost play” was unearthed and made public after it was discovered that O’Neill’s second wife, Agnes Boulton, had kept what was potentially the only surviving copy.
While the play was lost for nearly a century, Hayes said that its legacy – both personally and professionally for O’Neill – had continued to live on, calling it a “precursor” to O’Neill’s later works, and pointing to the impact the semi-autobiographical events documented in the play had on its writer.
“Most of the play is a two-hander between the O’Neill figure and his buddy Jimmy, who is based on a real-life person who also reappears as a character in ‘The Ice Man’,” Hayes said. “Jimmy in real life saved O’Neill, and then a year later killed himself. It’s autobiographical on a really dire moment where he’s trying to end his life. It clearly was the source material for some of the relationships that appear in multiple plays later.”
“The Dreamy Kid” also includes O’Neill’s hallmarks of complicated relationships between characters and their internal and external struggles, Hayes said, but with an additional layer of underlying racial tension, with its focus on an all-Black cast during the Jim Crow era.
“There’s definitely this inference in there of ‘when something happens, there’s no way they’re going to give me the benefit of the doubt – they’re not going to give me a fair trial,'” Hayes said. “It’s also got this character that’s written as a very tough guy, but he’s got this incredible loyalty to his grandmother. He’s truly stuck between two worlds, and it reminds me of Hamlet having no good decisions, or Oedipus Rex.”
Of the three plays, Hayes said that themes of addiction and its role in a relationship showcased in King’s “Cocaine” are likely to be the easiest ones for present-day audiences to recognize.
“Those things have been so in the news the last couple of decades that I think it will be obviously recognizable that these are two people that are rationalizing their way into whatever they’ve got to do to get that next fix,” Hayes said. “I feel like that one will hit people very topically. The other two will have more of an air of the period they were in.”
While all three plays deal with grim circumstances and center on their characters’ personal struggles, Hayes said another unifying theme among them – and another precursor to O’Neill’s later work – is their conclusions, with characters all seeking to move forward on their respective journeys.
“He actually makes the characters go on and figure out how they’re going to keep going,” Hayes said. “He never says everything is OK. It’s always like ‘no, it’s still going to be really hard, but somehow I’m just going to keep going.’ So in some ways it’s very heroic. He doesn’t think that you’re going to get out of this alive, but he knows there’s a value in reaching for something, even if you don’t reach it.”
“Tales from the Edge” runs this Friday through Sunday (Jan. 9-11) at the Museum of the San Ramon Valley at 205 Railroad Ave. in Danville. Tickets for Sunday are sold out, with limited tickets remaining for the first two days.
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