On Friday, October 6, 2023, Washington University Libraries will be hosting a one-day symposium to officially open the Harley Hammerman Collection on Eugene O’Neill. This will also constitute the first day of the Conference for Irish Studies Midwest Regional Conference (ACIS).

All Friday events are free and open to the public, registration requested. Click here for a map of the Danforth Campus. If you have already registered for the ACIS Conference, you do not need to register again. ACIS Conference Check-in & Registration will be held from 8 am–4:30 pm at John M. Olin Library.

This event is co-sponsored by University Libraries, Performing Arts Department, Center for the Literary Arts, and The Eugene O'Neill Foundation, Tao House.

Schedule of Events

Olin Library, Room 142: 

9:30–10:45 am: Ronán Noone (Boston University), playwright

The Joy is in the Struggle

While Long Day's Journey into Night is going on in the living room - what is happening in the kitchen? Thirst is the play that takes place in the kitchen of Monte Cristo Cottage during that fateful day in August, 1912. By using an upstairs/downstairs perspective, it opens a conversation with Eugene O’Neill’s classic family drama. Ronán Noone (Boston University), author of Thirst, will discuss the process of creating the play while illustrating how the themes of deracination and immigration are considered essential to our understanding of O'Neill's work.

10:45–11 am: Break 

Olin Library, Room 142: 

11 am–12:15 pm: Symposium Plenary Lecture, Beth Wynstra (Babson College), author of Vows, Veils, and Masks: the Performance of Marriage in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill  

Between the Covers: Roles, Performance, and Eugene O’Neill in Early 20^th Century Women’s Magazines

Illusion making. Conditioned spousal behavior. Double standards. Strategic infidelity. Such are fundamental elements in Eugene O’Neill’s plays focused on marriage. Yet these elements have significance off the stage as well. In prominent and high-circulating publications geared to women such as Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Vogue, and Ladies Home Journal, 20th century wives and hopeful brides were encouraged, through articles, advice columns, and advertisements, to be dynamic performers who mask honest feelings and abide by set roles. The very women who brought O’Neill’s characters to life felt the pressures of these culturally constructed expectations around marriage. Actors like Alla Nazimova, Louise Closser Hale, and Claudette Colbert navigated in worlds that judged them harshly for deviating from matrimonial rules they did not create. While past scholars have seen and labeled the wife characters in O’Neill’s plays as “shrewish,” “vindictive,” and even as “cannibals,” an analysis of these characters that takes into account crucial cultural context reveals something else altogether. In this presentation, I offer new possibilities for studying marriages and wife characters in literary and dramatic texts. These new possibilities include a recognition, and, hopefully, a rectifying of past patriarchal approaches that can reduce a complex individual to a simple role. 

12:15–1:45 pm: Lunch break 

Olin Library, Room 142: 

1:45–3 pm: Symposium Plenary Lecture, Katie Johnson (Miami University), author of Racing the Great White Way: Black Performance, Eugene O’Neill, and the Transformation of Broadway 

Following the Archive

How can an archive influence how we think about theatre and performance? What is the relationship between the archive and performance (or, what Diana Taylor calls ‘the repertoire’)? What does it mean to follow the archive when writing about theatre and cultural production? And what can archival errors reveal to us? This presentation will discuss how research in archives like the Hammerman Collection reshaped the contours of my most recent book, Racing the Great White Way: Black Performance, Eugene O’Neill, and the Transformation of Broadway. In following the archive, I reveal lost histories, fresh stories, and a different way of thinking about O’Neill’s contributions in breaking color lines on the Great White Way.

3–3:30 pm: Break

John M. Olin Library: 

3:30–4:45 pm: “The Assembled Playwright: Harley Hammerman’s Eugene O’Neill Collection” exhibition tour and viewing with curator Joel Minor and collector Harley Hammerman.

Umrath Lounge: 

5–6 pm: Reception (Drinks and hors d’oeuvres provided) 

6 pm – Formal Opening of the Hammerman Collection of Olin Library  

• Words of Welcome: Mimi Calter, Vice Provost and University Librarian 

• Introduction of Harley Hammerman: Henry Schvey, Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature 

• Remarks by Harley Hammerman 

6:45 pm – Pre-performance introductory remarks by Beth Wynstra

7 pm – Performance: The First Man, a play by Eugene O’Neill, directed by Eric Fraisher Hayes of the Eugene O’Neill Foundation, Tao House, Danville, CA; Dramaturgy by Beth Wynstra. Talk back with the director and cast after the performance, moderated by Henry Schvey. 

Speakers:

Katie N. Johnson is Professor of English and an Affiliate of Global and Intercultural Studies at Miami University, with a keen interest in performance, film, theatre, gender, and race studies. An avid researcher and (self-confessed archive geek), Johnson has received 2 NEH grants for her academic projects. In 2018, Johnson received the Outstanding Article Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education for “An Algerian in Paris: Habib Benglia’s Emperor Jones. She is the author of Sisters in Sin: Brothel Drama in America (Cambridge, 2006), Sex for Sale: Six Progressive-Era Brothel Drama Plays (University of Iowa Press, 2015), and Racing the Great White Way: Black Performance, Eugene O’Neill, and the Transformation of Broadway (University of Michigan Press, 2023). Johnson is embarking on a new research project tentatively called From Coast to Coast: Racing Transatlantic Performance. Johnson is the President of the Eugene O’Neill Society.

Ronán Noone has written eleven full-length plays which have played in theaters across the United States, including four off-Broadway productions.  Thirst is his twelfth play.  His play The Atheist played at the Huntington Theatre Company, Boston, Center Square Theatre, NY (featuring Chris Pine) and the Williamstown Theatre Festival. It was also co-produced by The Culture Project and Ted Mann’s Circle in the Square productions (featuring Campbell Scott) in New York. Other recent international productions have taken place in England, Spain, Canada, India, Scotland, the Philippines and Ireland. His most recent play The Smuggler won the best playwright award at the 1^st Irish Festival, NY and played at the Irish Repertory Theatre, NY in 2023.  His full length and one act plays are published by TRW Publishing, Samuel French, Smith and Kraus, Baker Plays, and Dramatists Play Service.  His play The Second Girl had productions at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, WV, The Huntington Theatre, Boston (Campbell Scott, directing). It was published by the Eugene O’Neill review, fall, 2016. He is an Assistant Professor (adj) at Boston University’s MFA Playwriting program.  ronannoone.com

Beth Wynstra is Associate Professor of English at Babson College where she is the founding Artistic Director of The Empty Space Theater. She holds a Ph.D. in Theater Studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara and a certificate in Directing from the Yale School of Drama. Beth published Vows, Veils, and Masks: The Performance of Marriage in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill (University of Iowa Press) in 2023. She has written extensively on the life and plays of Eugene O’Neill and serves on the board of the Eugene O’Neill International Society. In 2023, Beth won the Scholarship Award at Babson College.