Exorcising O’Neill

This week in the magazine, Eugene O’Neill’s play “Exorcism” is published for the first time. The play was recently acquired by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale, and will be brought out in the spring by Yale University Press. “Over the years, the story of O’Neill’s own, botched suicide attempt, at age twenty-four, was told in many ways,” John Lahr writes in an introduction to the play, which “marks the tipping point—the moment in O’Neill’s tortured life when he gave up the romance of death for the romance of art.” In this video, Tommy Schrider gives a dramatic reading of a speech by O’Neill’s alter ego, Ned Malloy.