The Eugene O’Neill Festival is an annual celebration of dramatic theatre held in the San Francisco Bay Area. Each September multiple theatrical productions exploring a common theme are presented. Festivals feature a centerpiece production of an O’Neill play at Tao House, the Eugene O’Neill National Historic Site, in conjunction with Classic American dramas by the likes of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Edward Albee as well as concerts and lectures. In September 2019, the festival celebrated its 20th anniversary.

In 2008, Eric Fraisher Hayes joined the Eugene O’Neill Foundation, Tao House, which organizes the festival. His first artistic contribution to the festival came in fall of 2008 when he directed O’Neill’s rarely produced All God’s Chillun Got Wings in a tribute to the creative collaborations of Eugene O’Neill and actor, singer and activist Paul Robeson. Eric was instrumental in the expansion of the Eugene O’Neill Festival to its current month-long format which began in 2013. Tao House regularly sees sold out runs and is now the leading producer of the plays of Eugene O’Neill in the world.

In 2018, Eric’s adaptation of O’Neill’s one-act Hughie was performed at Tao House and went on to Waterford, Carlow and New Ross, Ireland as part of the One Festival, Two Countries, a partnership between Danville, CA and New Ross, Co. Wexford. New Ross, the host of the Eugene O’Neill International Festival of Theatre, has also featured EONF productions of Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2019) and Welded (2022). In the spirit of deepening the Irish-American connection, the 2022 international festival mounted a production of O’Neill’s Shell Shock featuring Irish and American actors under the direction of Eric Fraisher Hayes.

In response to the pandemic, the O’Neill Festival put a new emphasis on filming plays. In 2020, the Eugene O’Neill Festival went virtual with filmed performances of three early O’Neill plays: The Web, Recklessness, and Abortion. In 2021, the festival centerpiece was a feature length film of Beyond the Horizon. The film was supplemented by two live site-specific performances of the play on the Tao House grounds. Filmed versions of Welded and the three early plays, known as “The Lost Plays,” can be viewed on this website as well as a portion of Beyond the Horizon. The full BTH feature can be viewed at eugeneoneill.org.

The 2023 festival’s “Having Her Say” theme saw a return to two live productions with the addition of a series of thematically linked short films. The centerpiece production of O’Neill’s “Anna Christie” traveled from Tao House to Ireland the following month.