By Erika Kuehl | Staff Writer
With the dawn of another season of shows ahead, Baylor Theatre has been diligently preparing for the return of the production that caused a schoolwide scandal in 1962.
Jojo Jones, interim chair of theatre arts and associate professor of lighting design, said the staged reading of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” which will come on Sept. 15 and 17 to Hooper-Schaefer Fine Arts Center, caused an uproar decades ago.
“[Sixty one] years ago, it was this really big controversy on Baylor campus,” Jones said. “The president basically stopped production of it, which led to about half of the theater faculty at the time quitting. It was a huge scandal. We are doing a staged reading of it for the [61st] anniversary. It’s a really powerful play, and I’m really excited to work on that.”
The theater brochure describes the play as an unflinching depiction of love, betrayal and addiction for one family. It examines the fragility of dysfunctional family bonds and the fallout of intergenerational trauma.
John-Michael Marrs, associate professor of theatre arts and director of the show, said Paul Baker, who was head of Baylor Theatre at the time, was called into the president’s office at the time. After being told to cut the production altogether, Baker was given an ultimatum: to remove the references to addiction, dark themes and explicit language, or to leave the university.
“He did refuse and then proceeded to leave Baylor and take a lot of the theater faculty and staff when they went to Trinity University,” Marrs said.
This year, the staged reading will feature professional actors from the Actors’ Equity Association.
“They’ll get to kind of mentor the students while they’re here,” Marrs said. “So that’s probably the thing I’m most looking forward to. I love the educational side of all this.”
Marrs said the show will mainly be focused on dialogue, rather than an elaborate set. He said he wants “the words of the play to specifically take center stage.”
“It’ll probably be pretty minimal staging,” Marrs said. “I’m really interested in, you know, with a bare stage, everything on it becomes important. So we’re being really selective about, like, which chairs to choose for each character. Is it indicative of their personality or their nature? Lighting and sound I’m sure will provide a lot of the ambiance and nuance, but the pretty minimal staging allows the words to take focus.”
Marrs described the play as a way to talk about complex material and ask if the story is a cautionary tale or an endorsement of a particular lifestyle.
“I think it’s neat to unpack this together, to talk about it in conversation,” Marrs said. “To talk about also if it’s a cautionary tale — you know, not all depictions of life are endorsements of that life.”
Marrs said few things in society are “truly communal,” but dialogue and conversation between art and individuals are valuable to the community.
“It’s a little bit like meeting people where they are and coming in dialogue — meeting in the middle as opposed to expecting someone to come to the art and understand and make all the concessions,” Marrs said.
