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Dramaturging the Dead: A Dramaturg’s Experience Excavating Eugene O’Neill’s Exorcism

“Art’s job is to enable people to slow down and be with—to be in the presence of—Others and different but human experience,” says playwright Edward St. Mast.1 Or, as David Mamet more reverently puts it: “We are all here to undergo a communion.”2 Every spring the MFA candidates in design at San Diego State University collaborate in a juried evaluation of their creative work. Each team is comprised of a set designer, lighting designer, costume designer, and, at the helm of the group, a director. In 2012 I was invited to participate as dramaturg, supplementing and enhancing the process, which culminated in a design presentation and performance of Eugene O’Neill’s Exorcism. This article chronicles our process and resulting jury discussion, and seeks to defend the choice to publicly restore a play O’Neill attempted to destroy. My analysis reads our presentation as a performance of O’Neill’s traumatic memory. As such, it connects our collaborative exploration with Joseph Roach’s theories on the performance of memory as well as theories of trauma proposed by Theresa J. May, Sophie Tamas, and Judith Herman. According to Roach: