Dr. David Clare is Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. His books include the monographs Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlookand Irish Anglican Literature and Drama, and the edited collections The Gate Theatre, Dublin: Inspiration and Craft and The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights, 1716–2016. His previous work on O’Neill includes an article on the playwright’s Irish-American identity in the Eugene O’Neill Review [EOR] 39.1; a “Lost & Found” piece on O’Neill director John Light in EOR 41.1; a “Used Books” piece on Travis Bogard’s classic study Contour in Time in EOR 43.1; and reviews of Irish and British productions of O’Neill’s work in EOR 40.1 and 45.2.

Commentators have frequently criticised Irish-American playwright Eugene O’Neill’s portrayals of Black characters and/or his handling of Black issues in plays such as The Emperor Jones (1920) and All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924). However, O’Neill has always had high-profile Black defenders of his work. Examples include W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Nathan Irvin Huggins, Glenda E. Gill, Cornell West, and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. This paper explores the intertextual tributes that Black Jamaican writer Dennis Scott pays to O’Neill in his seminal 1974 play An Echo in the Bone. Like O’Neill in The Emperor Jones, Scott’s play features scenes that attempt to depict “race memories” carried by the characters in their very “bones.” Scott’s play also includes an intertextual link to O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1922): specifically, the scene in both plays in which a young, wealthy, white woman is brought to view the “lower orders” (enslaved people in Scott’s play and stokers in O’Neill’s). By using The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape as intertexts, Scott is simultaneously paying tribute to his playwriting predecessor, while also effective revising what he sees as the less authentic or underdeveloped aspects of O’Neill’s attempts to depict Black experiences and perspectives. This paper will also explore the degree to which O’Neill – sometimes naively or problematically – connected Blackness and Irishness in his work, as Katie N. Johnson, Robert M. Dowling, and the present author, among several others, have previously discussed.