Almost two years after its completion in May of 1926, Eugene O'Neill's Lazarus Laughed received its premiere production—not in New York. This “Play for an Imaginative Theatre,” clearly the most theatrically demanding of all of O'Neill's works, made its first appearance in California, at the Pasadena Community Playhouse, opening April 9, 1928. Not since the days when his earliest one-act plays were produced at the Wharf Theatre in Provincetown, Massachusetts, had an O'Neill play failed to result in a New York production.