Far from a great play, but still a good deal better than some of O'Neill's other early one-acters such as The Movie Man, and we do see in Exorcism the germ of the later masterworks such as The Iceman Cometh. Also, the treatment of suicide – in this case, a failed suicide – is more realistic than in such an early one-acter as Abortion.

Exorcism played for two weeks in Provincetown before O'Neill on his own initiative withdrew the play from production and recalled all copies of it for destruction. Whether this was because the memory of his own attempted suicide some seven years earlier was still too raw, or whether it was because of a personal dissatisfaction with the play artistically, the play was long assumed to have been lost forever.

A single copy, however, survived in the hands of O'Neill's second wife, who retained some of O'Neill's papers after their divorce and later sent the typescript of Exorcism to screenwriter-producer Philip Yordan as a Christmas present in the 1940s. After Yordan's death in 2011, his widow discovered the typescript among his papers and provided it to Yale University, the principal custodian of O'Neill's papers.

Exorcism is definitely not a work in which an O'Neill novice would have an interest, but its rediscovery is of value in the context of O'Neill's great plays and a reading of it is of interest for a sake of "completeness" by O'Neill's admirers.

This hardcover edition, published by Yale University Press, is, however, "padded" by the combination of a clear text of the play with an appended facsimile of the typescript, as if Yale was embarrassed to be charging twenty dollars for a publication that otherwise would have consumed (exclusive of forward and introduction) little more than fifty pages, and even that with wide margins and large line-spacing.

Note: This 4**** rating is based not so much on the intrinsic literary value of the play itself but on its historic interest within the O'Neill canon and on the quality of the Yale Press edition. ( )

A posthumously published play by one of the best known American playwrights. This one is easy to read for O'Neill; it does include a couple of longish speeches, and the stage directions are typically overdone, but the dialogue is for the most part concise and moves along quickly. O'Neill requested this be destroyed at his death, but like most such requests, it was not honored. This one is worth hanging onto, though no where near the level of his best work. It is another of his memory plays, and appears to deal with his own attempts at suicide. The conclusion is a bit ambiguous, which is actually not a criticism in the current era; the characters are rather broadly drawn, and not particularly developed. Overall, it's an OK entry. ( )

O'Neill's lost-and-recently-found play isn't as bad as the Guardian made it sound or as good as the New Yorker in which it was printed, gushingly implied. It's a fictionalization of his own suicide attempt, which, even though he's long dead of the usual causes, I think deserves to be treated with respect; on the one hand, the flat demotic American speech is a drag, and whatever undefined magic it is that allows some drama written in that vein to transcend its apparently banal trappings (see: Death of a Salesman) is nowhere in evidence. On the other hand, the idea that O'Neill is just telling us straight out that the guy fails to kill himself and wakes up and all his demons are banished, huzzah! as the aforementioned Brit reviewer would have us believe, is just silly nonsense: he wakes up and says, well, I tried that, now here's my dad and my rich fiance telling me everything's forgiven and I have a second chance--might as well (gleam in eye) milk that for a while. In that sense the message of this play is "you can always kill yourself later on," which is desolate and subversive. ( )