Preface

Summary

I return to Tao House. It's outside of Danville, California, and open to the public in a limited way, free of charge. If you take the shuttle on the appointed day, you wind up a private road that is lined with newer, suburban houses, past an electrified gate, and onto a large ranch property. Soon you get a glimpse of a handsome house behind an enclos¬ing wall. Outside the courtyard door, a National Park Service ranger in full uniform tells you the story of how this Nobel Prize-winning author, Eugene O’Neill, moved to California in the last phase of his career and wrote his most famous plays right here. Some who are on the tour will not know much or anything about this playwright, just as I typically know little or nothing about the flora and fauna of the kind of park where I usually see such rangers. But of Eugene O’Neill I already knew a lot when I first passed through the front gate, as I had been obsessed with him as a teenager and then had, not coincidentally, made my way to becoming a professor of Dramatic Art and a specialist in American drama. I had guided students through those late plays many times, but I had never thought of them as California plays until I started teaching them in the late 1980s at the University of California Santa Barbara. My in-state students were mostly unaware of this once-renowned cultural icon who lived for about eight years in their state. I wanted to be a kind of ranger for them, highlighting this historically significant bit of regional fauna.

On my first visit to Tao House, I felt something more than curiosity about the res¬toration of the house, the exhibits, and the amusing anecdotes from the guides. I felt like I had already been on the site by reading the most famous of those late plays, Long Day's Journey Into Night, which is the kind of play you can explore forever and never completely know. In the house, I felt like I was home with it, such that I could walk through the play as a place I had always known and yet still longed to explore.