Eugene O Neill

Will Ned Eisenberg be the next Eugene O'Neill? Or perhaps the next Tennessee Williams? Or the next Neil Simon? The jury is still out, but the future looks bright for Eisenberg, who plays Anthony Fanelli on the NBC series "The Fanelli Boys." Eisenberg's been receiving boffo notices for his play "You Gotta Sing for Your Supper," currently at the Beverly Hills Playhouse.

It's disconcerting to realize that Eugene O'Neill wrote his dreadful "A Touch of the Poet" after "Long Day's Journey Into Night." Like watching a former ace hurler refusing to retire and giving up countless home run balls, seeing "Poet" is to see O'Neill's genius in complete rigor mortis. Gaycq Manifold's Celtic Arts Center production transcends physical laws by making this truly dead play, about an arrogant, pipe-dreaming innkeeper and his headstrong daughter, a little more dead.

"The Glass Menagerie" by Tennesee Williams, Woodstock Summer Theater, New York, 1949 (Quintero's first stage work). "Dark of the Moon" by Howard Richardson and William Berney, Circle in the Square, New York City, 1950. "Summer and Smoke" by Tennessee Williams, Circle in the Square, 1952. "The Iceman Cometh" by Eugene O'Neill, Circle in the Square, 1956. "Long Day's Journey Into Night" by Eugene O'Neill, original Broadway production, 1956. "The Quare Fellow" by Brendan Behan, Circle in the Square, 1958.

Dear Gene: Pardon the familiarity, but have just finished reading your letters , and feel I know you. Today would have been your 100th birthday. Irving Berlin didn't take much pleasure in his 100th birthday party at Carnegie Hall a few months ago. It's just as well that you kicked off off when you did, in '53, with your best work not that far behind you. You certainly left a great exit line. "I knew it, I knew it! Born in a goddamn hotel room and dying in a hotel room!"

It's curtain time for the third act of Big Apple '88, a landmark year in the city's history as a center of the performing arts. The first act began May 11 with the tribute at Carnegie Hall on the 100th birthday of Irving Berlin, who still lives in his home on 50th Street above the East River. The second act, June 11 to July 11, was the New York International Festival of the Arts. The festival featured more than 350 events presented in more than 40 theaters and performance centers.

One sure prediction for 1988: We will be hearing a lot about Eugene O'Neill. It is his centennial year, and here are a few of the ways it will be observed: Jan. 18-20--Glenda Jackson stars in a three-part version of "Strange Interlude" for "American Playhouse" on PBS. March 22-May 21--Colleen Dewhurst and Jason Robards offer two O'Neill plays in repertory at Yale--"Ah, Wilderness" and "Long Day's Journey Into Night."

Playwright Eugene O'Neill will be the centerpiece of the next season of public television's "American Playhouse," with Glenda Jackson, Jack Lemmon and Matthew Modine set to star in works by and about the playwright, series executive producer Lindsay Law said Tuesday. The weekly drama series is due to begin its seventh season in January, 1988, the year that marks the centennial of O'Neill's birth.

"The Haunted One" is a ghost story--of sorts. The new stage drama, debuting tonight at Orange Coast College, tracks the private specters that shaped the public life and works of playwright Eugene O'Neill.

Thanks for printing Barbara Isenberg's illuminating article on the dubious playwriting "process" at the UCLA-Mark Taper Forum new-play workshop ("Theater-by-Committee: Everyone's an Author," Sept. 7). It is hard to know who to blame: the Mark Taper and UCLA for fostering this travesty of producing; director Mark Medoff for encouraging it; and last, but not least, the spineless playwright (Clifton Campbell) who was actually willing to put up with it. Hasn't this poor soul ever heard of the uncompromising positions taken by playwrights such as Bernard Shaw, Eugene O'Neill and even Herb Gardner: no changing of texts ?