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[title]So there I was at Circle in the Square Theatre last night, enjoying a performance of the Broadway bioplay Lombardi, which—as my partner in criminy David Cote suggested in his review—is more enjoyable than such snobs as we might have assumed. (To David's fine assessment I would only add my specific admiration for David Korins's problem-solving set and Keith Nobbs's winsome supporting performance.) I have always liked Circle in the Square, one of Broadway's most intimate houses and the only one set up for performances in the round. But I am also a bit of a fussbudget, and as I went downstairs for a routine restroom stop, my fish-eye was hooked by a large display in honor of Eugene O'Neill: a photograph of the seminal playwright at his Tao House residence, accompanied by an engraved plaque (see photo above).
What's wrong with this memorial, you may ask? Never mind the plaque's confident assertion that The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, A Moon for the Misbegotten and Hughie are O'Neill's "four greatest plays," a contestable notion at best. (Hughie?) And never mind, either, that 1948 Nobel Prize winner T.S. Eliot, a poet but also a playwright (Murder in the Cathedral, etc.), was arguably an American (born and raised in St. Louis and educated at Harvard). The much more embarrassing flub is the graven error, carved in boldface for emphasis, that ascribes to O'Neill not the Nobel Prize for Literature (which he won in 1936), but the Nobel Peace Prize—which raises certain questions. How long has this boner been erected on the wall at Circle in the Square? How soon, if ever, will it be corrected? And has anyone ever tried, really tried, to bring a first-rate production of Hughie to the Middle East?