TLS: Wednesday, December 19, 1934

(Letterhead: CASA GENOTTA / SEA ISLAND / GEORGIA)

Leon Mirlas, Esq.,
Cordoba 962-60
Piso-40
Buenos Aires.

My dear Mr. Mirlas,

Thank you for your fine letter and for your kindness in sending me your critical essay and the original designs for the settings of "The Great God Brown"

Your critical essay I have read with the keenest appreciation. You have shown in it a sympathetic understanding of "The Hairy Ape" and "The Great God Brown" which is immensely gratifying to their author! But what is most satisfying is that you have revealed an insight into the spiritual overtones of these plays - (their most important value to me, naturally) - which I have, unfortunately, only too rarely discovered in even the most appreciative critical commentaries from Europe or the United States. So thank you again for the privilege of reading your essay! Please do me the favor of conveying my gratitude to Mr. Mirabelli for his courtesy in letting me have original designs. They are extraordinarily interesting and will have a favored place in my collection of original designs and photographs of productions from all over the world. I wish I could have seen them realized on the stage in your production.

I am sending you under separate cover copies of "Ah, Wilderness" and "Days Without End". The first is a simple comedy - a nostalgic sentimental recollection of the days of my youth, of the typical family life of that time in the typical town of our States - of the customs and morals of those days as contrasted with what exists to-day. "Days Without End" is an attempt to transform some of the values of the old miracle play, and the old Faustian - damned soul legend, into a psychological mask drama of modern life. It was a flat failure when produced in New York a year ago but has since then been successfully done in Ireland, Holland and Sweden. And is now scheduled for production in various other countries. In New York it was entirely misunderstood by the critics, as I expected it would be, for a play that even mentions any religion these days is doomed in advance - especially doomed if the religion happens to be Catholicism. They took the easy line of attack that I must have gone back to Catholicism and the play was Catholic propaganda - and then let their pseudo-sophisticated prejudices shriek anathemas. It was all very adolescent and hysterical. Of course, the simple fact is I chose Catholicism because it is the only Western religion which has the stature of a real Faith, because it is the religion of the old miracle plays and the Faustian legend which were the sources of my theme - and last and most simply because it happens to be the religion of my early training and therefore the one I know most about. As for propaganda, I need not tell you that my plays never have been, and never will be, interested in converting anyone to anything except the possibility of the drama as an art. In "Days Without End" it interested me, by way of a change, and as a compensation for a perhaps too one-sided attitude, to show the reverse side of the picture and reveal a modern man who is forced back to his old God and thereby regains his lost soul in what is truth for his particular ego not The Truth, for I have no The Truth to offer, but merely a play of human life and this man's truth in it.

Pardon the dissertation! I only explain at such length because I shall be interested to hear your reactions to this play and I want you to know what I was trying to do in it, whether I succeeded in the attempt or not. It was a most difficult play to write, to try to condense the various motives into one drama of ordinary length.

With all good wishes for the New Year,

Very sincerely,

Eugene O'Neill

December 19th 1934.