William Davies King

Professor Emeritus

king@theaterdance.ucsb.edu

williamdaviesking.com

See William Davies King's CV

About

Specialization:

Theater history; American drama and theater; ancient theater; dramatic theory

Bio:

Retired in June 2025 after 38 years of teaching theater history and dramatic literature at UCSB. He will continue to be active in scholarship on American drama and theater, particularly the life and work of Eugene O’Neill. He will also continue working as a dramaturg from time to time and an occasional playwright. In Fall 2025, he will teach the freshman seminar he devised
fifteen years ago, INT 86HZ—Collectors and Collecting. Then, in Winter 2026, he will return to teach THTR 1—Play Analysis, a foundational course for majors in the department. His topics of interest range from melodrama to avant-garde performance, from the classic or canonical to the utterly obscure and subversive.

His most recent book is Finding the Way to Long Day's Journey Into Night: Eugene O’Neill and Carlotta Monterey O’Neill at Tao House, an intensive study of Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece in terms of the place and time in which it was written: Danville, California, and 1939-40. His dramatic adaptation of that study, Into Night, received staged readings at Tao House and at the International Conference on Eugene O’Neill in Boston.

His studies of Agnes Boulton and her marriage to Eugene O'Neill began with “A Wind Is Rising”: The Correspondence of Agnes Boulton and Eugene O’Neill (2000) and came to a head with Another Part of a Long Story: Literary Traces of Eugene O’Neill and Agnes Boulton, which came out in 2010 from the University of Michigan Press. His new edition of Boulton’s Part of a Long
Story was published by McFarland in 2012. He wrote the first-ever critical edition of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night for Yale University Press in 2014, followed by an enhanced e-book -- a multimedia edition -- in 2016. The latter won the 2017 PROSE award in Literature. His critical edition of The Iceman Cometh was published by Yale University Press in 2020. For six
years he was the editor of the Eugene O’Neill Review, a biannual journal published by Pennsylvania State University Press, and he has published many articles in that journal.

He was dramaturg of the production of Long Day's Journey Into Night at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, and items from his O'Neill collection formed an exhibit in the Geffen lobby. He has also worked as dramaturg to several O'Neill productions at Tao House, including The Great God Brown, Hughie, Mourning Becomes Electra, and Long Day's Journey Into Night. Previous books include: Henry Irving’s “Waterloo” (winner of the 1993 Callaway Prize) and Writing Wrongs: The Work of Wallace Shawn (1998).

He is also the author of Collections of Nothing (University of Chicago Press, 2008)—part memoir, part essay on the practice of collecting—and is at work on another book on the aesthetics, morality, and pathology of collecting and collage. He has also written two plays that emerged from his interest in collecting: Collections of Nothing More or Less and Collections of
Nothing Enough Is Enough. His collections were on exhibit at the UCSB Library through the entire period of the pandemic--largely unseen except in this video tour. He explored two versions of a Museum of Nothing in summer 2023, and he foresees that concept re-emerging as The Museum of Nothing Much. Nothing much, who knows when.

RECENT GRADUATE SEMINARS

The Real Story Told (about storytelling); The "Course" of Drama (about the heritage of plays); "Difficult American Drama"; Acting American; Teaching American; The Roots of Broadway; Greek Tragedy in Performance, Translation, and Adaptation; Dramatic Theory: The Iron Age to Frye and Beyond; Tragicomedy; Eugene O'Neill; Melodrama; Anton Chekhov; History of Avant-Garde Performance.

Projects:

In the works, something called The Museum of Nothing.

Publications: