 | |
Drama
Eugene O'Neill
 Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was the
son of James O'Neill, an Irish-born actor of considerable reputation on the
later nineteenth-century American stage, and Ella Quinlan O'Neill, who hailed
from a middle-class Irish Catholic family. Ella, born Mary Ellen, was raised
in Cleveland and educated at the convent of St. Mary in Indiana, where she
enrolled at age fifteen. About that time, she met the handsome James O'Neill,
who in 1872 at age twenty-six, was the leading actor at Cleveland's most distinguished
theater. Four years later, they met again in New York, when Ella saw O'Neill
in a play and, drawing upon their former acquaintance, asked to meet him backstage.
They were married the following year, initiating a spiral of events that led
both to familyl tragedies and the formation of America's only Nobel-Prize
winning dramatist.
Eugene O'Neill was born in a Broadway
Hotel on October 16, 1888. His brother James Jr. (Jamie) was born eight years
earlier, and his second brother Edmund was born in 1883, only to die from
measles a year and one-half later, creating in his mother a profound sorrow
and sense of guilt that plagued her the rest of her life. Overwhelmed by
feelings of guilt for leaving the infant in a nanny's care and anger at husband
for inducing her to accompany him on a brief tour, and suspicious that Jamie—jealous
of the attention his baby brother was receiving--had intentionally exposed
the baby to measles, Ella declined physically and emotionally. Much of this
history surfaces in what many regard as O'Neill's greatest play, the highly
autobiographical Long Day's Journey Into Night, which he presented
in 1945 to the publisher Bennett Cerf at Random House with the stipulation
that the typescript of the play be sealed in an envelope and not opened until
twenty-five years after his death. Moreover, he expressly stipulated that
he did not want the play ever to be produced. Some two years after O'Neill's
death in 1953, O'Neill's third wife Carlotta asked Random House to publish
the play and, when it declined to do so, she went to Yale University Press,
which published the play in 1956. It received its first production in Sweden
at Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theater, the site of several productions of
O'Neill's later plays, in February 1956.
After leaving Princeton University
in 1907 less than a year after beginning study there, Eugene O'Neill began
an odyssey that would inform many of his earliest, latest, and greatest plays.
He read voraciously, took on a series of regrettable jobs, and lived in New
York, where he wrote, drank, went to the theater, and spent many an evening
consorting with prostitutes in a district known as the Tenderloin. Some of
his earliest plays— the one-act play The Web (1913) and, later Anna
Christie (1921), to name just two—involve prostitutes, who also appear
in his later masterpiece, The Iceman Cometh (1946). He met and secretly
married his first wife Kathleen in 1909; a week later, he set sail for Honduras
to prospect for gold. His experiences on board led to numerous early one-act
plays set at sea, and his struggles through the Honduran jungles resurface
in Brutus Jones's similar struggles in The Emperor Jones.
Upon his return in 1910, O'Neill
announced his marriage and his father found him his first work in the professional
theater as an assistant stage manager, but the job was not for him, so O'Neill
once more set out to sea, this time to South America. He later returned to
New York, landing at a flophouse and drifting into alcoholism—and then setting
out to sea once more. But by 1912, he was back in New London, Connecticut
and his family home, poised to embark upon what biographers regard as one
of the most significant years of his life. In that year, for example, he
became a newspaper reporter and resolved to become a writer; he began to write
and publish poems as well. By the following year, he had completed several
plays, the majority of them one-acts.
In 1914, O'Neill decided to pursue
play writing more seriously, and enrolled in a seminar on play writing at
Harvard, and the following year he returned to Greenwich Village in New York,
writing and sharing the companionship of other writers and artists. There
he met Louise Bryant, then married to a Portland dentist, yet involved with
O'Neill's friend Jack Reed. By the spring of 1916, all three would travel
to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where George Cram Cook and his wife Susan
Glaspell were writing and staging small readings of plays they and their friends
had written. The Provincetown Players, as they would become, produced several
of O'Neill's early plays, and in 1920 moved to New York where O'Neill's The
Emperor Jones would make them a leading force in the American theater.
By 1926, O'Neill had set out on his own with All God's Chillun Got Wings
(1924) being the last of his plays produced by the Players.
O'Neill rose to become America's
first great dramatist. He wrote a series of major plays in the 1920 and 30s,
leading to his receipt of the Nobel prize in 1936. He continued to write
plays until his death in 1953, although by the early 1930s he had ceased taking
any active part in their theatrical production. At the time of his death,
O'Neill was working on, but never completed, a nine-play cycle tracing one
family's evolution in America from the time of their immigration in the nineteenth
century to the present. One of the plays—A Touch of the Poet--was
complete and first produced after O'Neill's death, and a second More Stately
Mansions was assembled from notes and a typescript he had completed.
At the dawn of the twentieth century,
Eugene O'Neill remains most celebrated playwright. In addition to winning
the Nobel Prize, he received the Pulitzer Prize four times: for Beyond
the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1921), Strange Interlude
(1928), and—posthumously—for Long Day's Journey Into Night, first produced
in 1956. Many drama critics then and now believe that even this distinguished
record of recognition is inadequate to assess O'Neill's enormous contribution
to the American drama.
|
Selected Bibliography of O'Neill's Plays
Bound East for Cardiff (1916)
Thirst (1916)
Fog (1917)
In the Zone (1917)
Long Voyage Home (1917)
The Rope (1918)
The Moon of the Caribees (1918)
The Dreamy Kid (1919)
Beyond the Horizon (1920)
The Emperor Jones (1920)
Anna Christie (1921)
The Hairy Ape (1922)
All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924)
Desire Under the Elms (1924)
The Fountain (1925)
The Great God Brown (1926)
Marco Millions (1928)
Strange Interlude (1928)
Lazarus Laughed (1928)
Dynamo (1929)
Mourning Becomes Electra (1931)
Ah, Wilderness! (1933)
Days Without End (1934)
The Iceman Cometh (1946)
A Moon for the Misbegotten (1947)
Long Day's Journey Into Night (1956)
A Touch of the Poet (1957)
Hughie (1958)
More Stately Mansions (1962)
|
Further Reading About O'Neill's Life
Black, Stephen A. Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999.
Gelb, Arthur, and Barbara Gelb. O'Neill. Enlarged Ed. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.
_________________________. O'Neill: Life with Monte Cristo. New York: Applause Books, 2000.
Sheaffer, Louis. O'Neill: Son and Artist. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.
____________. O'Neill: Son and Playwright. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968.
|
Further Reading About O'Neill's Work
Bigsby, C.W.E. Modern American Drama: 1945-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.
Bogard, Travis. Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill. New York: Oxford UP, 1972.
Brustein, Robert. The Theater of Revolt. Boston: Atlantic/Little-Brown, 1964.
Cargill, Oscar, et al, eds. O'Neill and His Plays. New York: New York UP, 1961.
Clark, Barrett H. Eugene O'Neill: The Man and His Plays. New York: Dover, 1947.
Pfister, Joel. Staging Depth: Eugene O'Neill and the Politics of Psychological Disorder. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1995.
Raleigh, John Henry. The Plays of Eugene O'Neill. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1965.
|
| |
|
