O’Neill and Gilpin fight from rehearsal to Broadway run and, eventually, to the London tour. At stake for O’Neill? His artistic vision. For Gilpin? His entire career and family. To Eugene O’Neill, a word is just a word. For Charles Gilpin, those six letters have the power to unravel everything that he has ever worked for.

Adrienne Earle Pender gives us the influential and momentous N play, that dramatizes the struggle between playwright Eugene O’Neill and actor Charles Sidney Gilpin over the inclusion of the “N” word in the script for O’Neill’s first box office hit, The Emperor Jones, in 1920.