Six Photographs of an East Asian Theater Troupe Performing Eugene O’Neill’s Before Breakfast and The Hairy Ape, Possibly at the Tsukiji Little Theater in Tokyo

Japan or China, 1930. Six photographs of approximately 4 x 5 ½ inches and smaller, captioned verso in kanji, with some translated to English, reading “Before Breakfast” and “Hairy Ape”. Fine contrast; near fine.. Six photographs of a theater troupe in either Japan or China performing Eugene O’Neill’s Before Breakfast (1916) and The Hairy Ape (1922). O’Neill was an early realist and expressionist playwright whose plays focused on societal outcasts and unhappy families; he is now best remembered for his posthumous Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1956). O’Neill’s plays were widely popular in both Japan and China in the 1920s and 1930s;[1,2] given this and the shared alphabet, it is difficult to say which country these photographs are from. However, there are records of both A Hairy Ape and Before Breakfast being performed at one specific theater, Tokyo’s Tsukiji Sho Gekijo (Tsukiji Little Theater), in 1927.[3] The Tsukiji, established in 1924, was the first to bring O’Neill to Japan, and its opening marked a shift away from traditional Japanese theater.[2] Of interest to scholars of O’Neill’s reception and influence in east Asia.

[1] Haiping Liu, “Eugene O’Neill in China,” Theatre Survey 29, no. 1 (1988): 87–101.
[2] Horst Frenz and Tai Yul Kim, “Notes on Eugene O’Neill in Japan,” Modern Drama 3, no. 3 (1960): 306–313.
[3] Mariko Hori, “On Two Major Recent Productions of O’Neill in Japan,” Laconics 1 (2006), https://eoneill.com/library/laconics/1/1h.htm.