“The Curtain Is Lowered”

Abstract

On Easter Sunday in 1920, New York Times drama critic Alexander Woollcott published the review of Exorcism that would serve for the next 91 years as the main source of plot information for Eugene O’Neill’s one-act play. O’Neill would soon pull this directly autobiographical work from its run on a three-play bill at the Provincetown Playhouse and try to kill it completely by destroying all copies of the script. From the hints in Woollcott’s review and the opening stage directions recorded in O’Neill’s notebook, scholars have long speculated on what Exorcism might reveal about O’Neill’s desperate state in 1912 when, while rooming in New York at the rundown hotel-barroom known as Jimmy the Priest’s, he swallowed a stash of barbiturates and awaited his death. The play was thought forever lost until 2011 when Faith Yordan, widow of writer Philip Yordan, discovered a yellowed envelope among her late husband’s papers with a note from Agnes Boulton, O’Neill’s second wife, and confirmed that the document it contained was the missing script.¹ Purchased by the Beinecke Library, Exorcism had its first publication in the October 17, 2011, issue of The New Yorker under the heading, “Found Pages,” followed in February 2012 by an edition from Yale University Press.² For O’Neill scholars, this recovery of a famously lost play, based so closely on a crucial event in the playwright’s life, seems a kind of miraculous resurrection.