“Crazy Yourself!”: Eugene O’Neill’s Letters to Djuna Barnes (August 25, 1924, and Spring 1931)

ABSTRACT

An evaluation of the evolution of the relationship between Eugene O’Neill and Djuna Barnes based on two letters from O’Neill to Barnes (1924 and 1931). This article also touches on the little-known history of Barnes’s attempts to have two dramas, Ann Portuguise and Biography of Julie von Bartmann, produced by the Experimental Theatre, Inc. (O’Neill, Kenneth Macgowan, and Robert Edmond Jones). This group ran the Provincetown Playhouse after the demise of Jig Cook’s original Provincetown Players, with whom Barnes had previously staged three short plays.