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O’Neill definitively completed A Touch of the Poet and composed a fourth and final draft for that expressed purpose in 1942. The status of More Stately Mansions is more problematic. Scholars have mostly concluded that O’Neill meant to destroy the play and only inadvertently sent the original typescript to Yale as part of his archive. Although O’Neill labeled the play “unfinished,” evidence from the typescript, supported by O’Neill’s Work Diary and Carlotta’s personal diary proves Martha Gilman Bower’s thesis that More Stately Mansions is fully revised and whole. O’Neill wrote in longhand and Carlotta typed an extremely lengthy drama during an intense and dynamic period of a little less than one year. In the 1980s, Bower collated O’Neill’s handwritten edits with Carlotta’s much-revised typescript to create a master text—one that Carlotta would have produced if she had typed the entire 279-page manuscript yet again. Yale University Press published Bower’s unexpurgated version of More Stately Mansions with A Touch of the Poet in 2004. The 568 pages of a single volume reveal the substantial remains of the Cycle.

Instead of trying to build the Cycle from its many fragments, Magnum Opus examines the center of the Cycle and evaluates not so much how O’Neill started with the project, but how he finished. Staged together for the first time, back to back, A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions could exhaust the subjects of greed and materialism and offer solutions for the times in which people live today. Sara Melody Harford’s trajectory invites an audience to confront her questions as its own: What is enough to survive and be happy? How much is enough? And, most important, when is enough enough? O’Neill repeatedly poses these questions for his audience to consider its position in a capitalist economy.

O’Neill’s wordiness invites a theatrical reinterpretation with bold gestures and design elements to replace inordinate amounts of text. The final chapter nods at O’Neill’s cycle of one-act sea plays early in his career, as well as to the fine film adaptation by John Ford in 1940, The Long Voyage Home, to suggest ways that such a production might be done. Martha Gilman Bower’s unexpurgated version provides the text for a new adaptation that unfolds around Sara. The six hours that it would take to perform A Touch of the Poet and a re-edited version of More Stately Mansions qualify as, in a term phrased by Jonathan Kalb, “marathon theater.” Like Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, the first part of O’Neill’s epic is better known than the second. But surely an audience deserves to see how Sara responds to the death of her father, a marriage proposal, children, the Harford mansion as her home, and a very jealous mother-in-law. Time draws nigh for the great work of the Cycle to begin.

This chapter debunks myths about the alleged destruction of the Cycle. When, for example, Carlotta O’Neill dramatized the burning of her husband’s work in an interview with the New York Times in 1956, she already had More Stately Mansions in her possession. Her clever allusions to Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler fooled the press and focused on the means of destruction and not the matter. The analogy between Eilert Løvborg’s brilliant manuscript on the future in Ibsen’s play, burned in Hedda’s stove, and O’Neill’s prophetic history plays, supposedly burned at the Shelton Hotel in Boston, props up credibility for the latter as lost masterworks. But of the proposed eleven-play Cycle, O’Neill did not finish the first four plays about Deborah and the Blessed Sisters. And he did not complete the last five plays about the four brothers, either. He wrote two plays, A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions, the heart of the whole thing. Unlike Løvborg’s manuscript, what O’Neill actually completed is not lost and still exists.

O’Neill spent considerable time and effort to draft an elaborate Harford family tree in July 1937. This schematic revealed what he had done to that point, as well as the future direction of the Cycle as it spanned almost 180 years of American history. A Touch of the Poet references the past and the four Cycle plays that O’Neill did not finish, going back in time to before the American Revolution. More Stately Mansions forecasts the future of the Cycle with its representations of the Harford sons as young boys: Ethan, Wolfe, Jonathan, and Honey. Each has his own dream, each his own sense of destiny and happiness, but each wants to make his parents happy and proud as well. In the final five plays that O’Neill ultimately abandoned, beginning with The Calms of Capricorn, each son meets an inglorious fate. O’Neill planned to have Honey, aged 100 years, wrap up the Cycle by saying that the greed of humanity would never end. O’Neill had already said as much, though, with the two completed middle plays.

Eugene O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions dealt with the conviction that America and American democracy had failed its ideals. A Touch of the Poet stood at the center of the cycle project, whose “spiritual undertheme” was the Irish immigrant's acquisitive impulses and uncertain status. In More Stately Mansions, democratic America comes face to face with itself. The political loyalties of Sara and Simon Harford suggest a look at American historiography. The character Simon indicates why O'Neill thought self-determinism was the key to understanding human action and historical development. Sara and Deborah are polarities, one focused and almost predatory, the other aloof, effete, genteel, far removed from the sordid world of business. The equating of “grinding daily slavery” to working for a business firm is only one of several references to slavery in O'Neill's plays dealing with the Jacksonian era and the Civil War.

O’Neill invoked the phrase “stripped stark naked” to describe the desired effect in The Iceman Cometh, but he actually used that same phrase, and several other similar iterations, in the immediately preceding Cycle plays, A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions. Although the Cycle plays seem to set up what happens in O’Neill’s “dive” play that followed, they function differently. Sara Melody Harford, the protagonist, sinks almost as low as the derelicts at Hope’s bar, but she does not stay sunk. Her husband, Simon, strips her naked, literally and figuratively, but she rejects the humiliation and transforms the violence into a purification rite. Sara sins against herself and her husband due to her passionate and greedy nature, but, unlike the characters in The Iceman Cometh, she redeems what she has done in the act of love. The Cycle dramatizes compulsive behavior; The Iceman Cometh showcases the art of denial.

Sara Melody Harford emerges as the protagonist of A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions when the two plays are considered in sequence as one event. Cornelius Melody may be the star of the former play, but his wake begins the latter. Simon Harford, Sara’s husband, appears to be the central character in More Stately Mansions, but he is only an offstage character in A Touch of the Poet. Only Sara appears as a principal in both plays, and she embodies O’Neill’s theme that greed and materialism destroyed the promise of America. Her story, not Con’s, and certainly not Simon’s, who, among other things, is decidedly not Irish, personifies the title of the proposed Cycle: “A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed.” An Irish immigrant and member of an oppressed class and ethnic group, Sara determines to rise and make it socially and economically in America through marriage to a rich Yankee. She also wants to wipe the sneer against her father from her prospective mother-in-law’s face.