Theater: "Fog Machine" Reading at The Drawing Board NYC

When Imago Theatre's Jerry Mouawad first approached me circa 2022 about creating a musical inspired by an Eugene O'Neill one-act in the public domain, I first looked at "Thirst," his short play about three survivors on a lifeboat: a businessman, a dancer, and a West Indian sailor. That script has its appeals but it also has major issues. (Our early talks with composer John Berendzen surfaced the possibility of me writing lyrics for the sharks to sing.) At some point, however, the conversation with Jerry switched tracks and we started entertaining the idea of voiceovers instead of songs and using "Fog" instead of "Thirst," all within a rehearsal setting.

I then took a deep dive into O'Neill: Ten "Lost" Plays, Eugene O'Neill and Oriental Thought: A Divided Vision, Six Short Plays of Eugene O'Neill, The Aesthetics of Failure: Dynamic Structure in the Plays of Eugene O'Neill, the Gelbs massive biography O'Neill, Beyond the Horizon, Desire Under the Elms & The Great God Brown, and Ile. In a matter of months, I'd put together a first draft of Fog Machine, which imagined a rehearsal of his early one-act "Fog" haunted by his upbeat, drunken spirit accessed by a bottle of scotch. At that time, however, I couldn't come up with an ending. Still, the following year, I submitted Fog Machine to The Drawing Board and director James Dean Palmer in hopes that something might come of it as Jerry and I had already embarked on a different project. In 2023, James and Myah Shein host a reading of "Fog," the play within the play.

Flash forward to 2024. I return to my script again, at least in terms of research. I read Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts and Eugene O'Neill - The Man and His Plays. I don't know how to finish Fog Machine exactly, although I do know that I want a poem at the end since one of the two lead roles is The Poet. Now it's 2025. The Drawing Board NYC expresses an interest in hosting a reading. Now I really need to come up with an ending. I go to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and look at O'Neill poem typed on onion skin paper and edited in ink. He wrote some villanelles. I write a villanelle for the ending. Then another one. I dig up an old poem on death. The end is more or less here. Or is it the beginning?

The reading is scheduled for the Monday before Thanksgiving. Will anybody come? The answer is, yes, a full house. A talented cast is set: Edward Hyland, Desiree Baxter, Amara James Aja, Paden Fallis, Mia Gentile, Tommy Walters, and Michelle Maryn Lee with Linda Manning reading the stage directions. The reading itself goes great. So now what happens?