EUGENE O’NEILL

(1888—1953)
 O’NEILL’S LIFE AND
BACKGROUND

• Born in NY City, 1888

• 16 years toured the

country with his family in
the production of
melodrama The Count of
Monte Cristo

• Pioneer of expressionistic
and naturalistic drama
 NATURALISM
 Literary concept that grew out of the concept of realism during the 19th c
 The realist: wanted to ’hold up a mirror to life’
 The naturalist: viewing life with scientific objectivity; forces of environment, heredity
and biological instinct combine to control man’s life; psychological urges as a part of man’s
driving force
 Determinism: the idea that man can do nothing for himself and is constantly at the
mercy of forces outside himself: e.g. Hairy Ape: physical image of the cage-man caught in
hostile universe; Desire under the Elms: man as the victim of his elemental drives; Mourning
Becomes Electra: characters driven by their sexual drives causing them to commit crimes
 Man is incapable of controlling his destiny and so becomes the victim of greater forces:
the tragedy lies in man’s awareness of the futility of struggling against a bad fate.
 EXPRESSIONISM
 A theatrical techique: the dramtist suggests symbolically certain inner feelings of
his characters or his subject matter
 A distrortion of reality in order to present intimations of certain psychological
states of mind
 Use of abstract symbols in portrying crude violence and emotional intensity:
the dramatist wants to convey his ideas through abstractions
 Little scenery
 In The Hairy Ape, the prison depicted as a small cage, Yank: a symbolic
representation of a type of man who cannot belong in this world; In Emperor Jones,
various apparitions symbolic of the basic fears found in all men
 O’NEILL AND THE THEATRE OF HIS TIME

 World War I to the onset of the Great Depression: the most dynaamic period in the history of the American stage
 Unprecedented growth and increased demand for theatrical entertainment; competition and openness to invention
 Professional theatre centralized in New York: Broadway
 From 1870s, the stock system was affected by 1) the long-run of new plays: in a competitive arenas, and 2) by the rise of the
travelling long-runs
 Entrepreneurial producers, booking agents, theatre owners organized monopolistic partnerships
 Plays that appealed to conventional tastes and were profitable took precedence over innovation, experimentation or literary merit
 In the 1920’s touring declined , theatrical monopolies weakened and the number of Broadway productions increased
 Discontent with Broadway commercialism mounted: independent producers struggled to preserve dramatic art
 In 1909 great New Theatre (director Ames mounted an ambitious repertoire; commercial producer Brady built the Playhouse for
modern plays; a number of non-profit, amateur theatres sprang up which figured importantly in O’Neill’s career: interested in modern
European drama, new, serious American drama and dramatic classics
 The Drama League of America and theatre journals to stimulate interest in modern drama
 Broadway : melodramas, farces, light romantic comedies, and staged musical comedies, revues, and operettas
 A few plays of dramatic merit (O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon)
 European masters of modern drama and novel neglected (Ibsen, Tolstoy, Gorki).
 Most popular modernist dramatists: Shaw, Galswarthy, S. Maugham, James Barrie..
 Adaptations of contemporary European dramas and boulevard comedies.
 19.c.American stage: scenic realism: solid 3-dimensional scenic units, actual objects and costumes
 In 1911-12: New Stagecraft design: simplified, stylized impressionist settings
 Acting: realistic or ’natural’ style
 New generation of critics ridiculing outtmoded traditions and conventions
 Between 1920 and 1931, O’Neill had 16 new plays produced in NY
 Slowed significantly after 1930s: retreat from Broadway.
 Not until the 1946, The Iceman Cometh would a new O’Neill play be mounted in NW
 Broadway weakened by Depression, Hollywood’s attack on its talent and audiences, organizational tensions
 Entered Princeton in 1906, but left shortly to work on a steamer at sea
 Obsession with the mystical attractiveness of the sea
 Stricken with turbeculosis turned to playwriting (1913)
 In 1914: studied the art of playwriting at Harvard University
 In 1916: Bound East for Cardiff at the Wharf Theatre
 In 1920: Broadway production of Beyond the Horizon: popular acclaim and the Pulitzer
 Wrote 47 plays, received 3 more Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936
 Set out to destroy all of his remaining manusripts
 3 completed plays uncovered: Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Hughie and A Touch of the Poet
 Died in 1956
 EARLY PLAYS (1913 -1924)
Structural influence of his father’s theatre of melodrama: built a scene
toward an explosive conclusion

 A Wife for a Life (1913): like vaudeville, autobiographical; theme:

woman as an intruder who destroys masculine ambition and
companionable male universe

 Thirst and Other One-Act Plays (1914): indicate future development,

all conclude with shocking violence
 Advance from melodrama:
 Bound East for Cardiff (1914): the first written of the S.S. Glencairn series; repeats
the supernatural theme of fog and the theme: dying sailor with his dream deferred
 Moon of the Caribbees (1918): first truly multicultural play; influence of black
culture upon whites; interest in ’total theatre’; old donkey-man as wise observer: a persona
who reappears in The Iceman Cometh; a sign of future experimentation

 Where the Cross Is Made (1918): evocation of mood to draw the audience into action: less
successful

 Chris Christophersen (1919): a germ of the character ’Anna’ in The Ole Devil (1920) and
Anna Christie (1921): change comes upon realization that sea is in her spirit and that the fog
which leaves her in suspension from reality purifies her.
 Theme: woman as hindrance to man’s self-expression
Bread and Butter (1914): offstage suicide of the husband forced by his wife
Before Breakfast (1916): the wife tricked the husband into marriage drives him to suicide
Ile (1917): wife has brought bad luck to whaling expedition to sea
Beyond the Horizon (1918): Ruth Mayo ruins the lives of two brothers as well as her own by
her selfish romanticism; intellectual and emotional revolution in Broadway theatre; sincerity of
O’Neill’s realism, the colloquialism of dialogue; action reaches mythic proportions
Servitude (1914) a satire: love means servitude
Now I ask You (1916) attempt at comedy, satire of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, melodrama, feminine
self-expression
The Straw (1919): celebrating faminine sacrifice
The First Man (1921): necessity of a wife’s duty
Political plays: not very successful, better at transforming his personal
experience

 The Movie Man (1914): the battle of the Mexican uprising

 The Sniper (1915), war play, pacifist questioning of the values

epitomized by WWI

 The Personal Equation (1915) political and autobiographical:

renouncing politics for familial duty

 The Dreamy Kid (1919): politics of race relations; treats black people
symphatetically, as victims of society
 The Emperor Jones (1921): success; expressionistic psychodrama; a reverse acount of
Afro-American history; draws audience into sensory and emotional participation

 The Hairy Ape (1921): major success; expressionistic play; the white human race in
microcosm: the damned imprisoned in an inferno, sleeping in a prison cage, dehumanized
by the shipowners and big business. To make an inarticulate character communicate ideas,
O’Neill resorts to expressionistic techniques, used masks for the first time; the repeated
image of the cage with Yank as the "beast“; "hairy ape" lost his sense of "belonging," and
tries to find his place in a hostile universe which rejects him until he finds his death in a
cage

 All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1923): miscegenation: disapproval as interracial

establishment was still an anathema to the theatrical establishment

 Welded (1923): misunderstanding in the union of two artists

 The Fountain (1922): experimentation; search for emotional fulfillment

 Desire Under the Elms (1924): established O’Neill as a dramatist of true genius; reached true
international status
 Transmutation of mythology into modern garb
 Ancient myths blended with modern psychology to examine American emotional and cultural
equivalents
 Duty and joy
 Appolonian and the Dionysian
 Dysfunctional family
 Greek myth and ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud
 Setting: American New England: mytho-religious tradition of Puritanism, dream of monetary success,
the pioneering spirit of breaking new land, and the world of gold in the far West.
 The cycle of the season is important for all characters: Ephraim rode out in an earlier spring to test
himself in the Midwest, only to discover that his Puritan heritage was too strong, and happiness is not to
be found in this world.
 THE MIDDLE PLAYS

 The Experimental Theatre, an off-Broadway company

 Historical extravaganzas: Marco Millions and Lazarus Laughed
 The Great God Brown: allegory
 Strange Interlude and Dynamo: studies of modern bourgeois America
 In this period the influence of major European thinkers and dramatists, mystical
philosophy from Asia, techniques from medieval and Elizabethan theatre and the
modern European novel
 Continued to expose his audiences to unusual ideas and forms from abroad, but
his emphasis on strong narratives and powerful feelings carried on an older
American tradition of melodrama
 Marco Millions: blend of history and romance, satire and tragedy: polar
vision: West vs East; matter vs spirit, death vs life, division vs unity, male, rational
vs spiritual, intuitive

 The Great God Brown: a masked drama; conflict between the sensitive,
artistic Dion Anthony and his rival Billy Brown, who employs and exploits Dion.
Dion’s inner battle is between: the creative pagan acceptance of life, fighting
eternal war with the masochistic, life-denying spirit of Christianity; suffering of
souls beneath the masks dramatizes the central theme of O’Neill’s work: the
anguish of human loneliness.
 Lazarus Laughed: unique divine comedy
 Intricate masking schemes: never produced on Broadway
 Follows the progress of the biblical Lazarus, (the only unmasked) from the days
after his restoration to life by Jesus through a fictional journey with followers to
imperial Rome, where he is executed by the decadent emperor Tiberius. His true
antagonist is the young, perverse Caligula, who symbolizes corrupt and fallen mankind.
 Lazarus' words, charisma, fate echo Christ's, but Lazarus' gospel of the ego's
unreality draws more upon Hinduism, Buddhism and Gnostic faiths of the early
Christian era; and his youthful personality and intoxicating effect resemble Nietzsche's
Zarathustra and Dionysus.
 The God he worships offers not salvation but the enlightened insight that humans,
like all material beings, participate in a process of eternal change
 Strange Interlude
Nietzschean theme, the will to power, in the form of emotional possessiveness

 Like Ibsen's Hedda Gabler,

 Nina Leeds seeks dominion over the men who love and surround her, including
her family friend Marsden, husband Sam, lover Ned, and son Gordon - named after her
fiance: Gordon, who died in World War I before consummating their love.

 Interlude both follows and critiques conventions of melodrama

 Language itself is questioned:"how we poor monkeys hide from ourselves behind

the sounds called words"

 Asides: a simplified version of the stream-of-consciousness technique of the

modern novel
 Dynamo: failed; theme: the "sickness of today" and the "death of the old God and the
failure of Science and Materialism to give any satisfying new One for the surviving primitive
religious instinct to find a meaning for life in.'’

 Days without End: split between two selves, one attracted tentatively to abandoned
Christian faith, the other toward Mephistophelean nihilism

 Morning Becomes Electra: tragedy and melodrama; five hours’ performance

Plot from Euripides, Sophocles and the Oresteia of Aeschylus: Lavinia avenges the murder
of her father Ezra by his wife Christine and her lover, Ezra's cousin Adam Brant. Central
theme: the stranglehold of past on present: the past is governed by one’s ancestors; O'Neill's
determinism: the family as a form of fate. The male family portraits suggest another theme:
the sins of the fathersThe fall of the house of Mannon: ghosts haunt the house, incestuous
love and death commingle in the plot. Ultimately, death conquers all. At the play's heart,
thematically and structurally, lies the corpse of Ezra Mannon, who himself killed his wife’s
love by his Puritanical Mannon belief that "life was a dying“.
 Middle plays contributed to the artistic growth of the modern American theatre.

 O'Neill's earnestness during this phase about theatre's religious mission

immeasurably influenced more secular successors

 O'Neill's bold and restless imagination has inspired subsequent generations of

American playwrights to experiment

 Exposed the large audiences of mainstream American theatre to the concerns

and techniques of European dramatists.

 Paved the way for the Ibsenesque moral realism of Miller, the Strindbergian
sexual battles of Tennessee Williams, the expressionistic allegories of early Edward
Albee, even the Absurdist - and mythic families of later Sam Shepard.
 LATE PLAYS

 A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed: 11-play cycle; possession and greed, he

believed, had destroyed the soul of America: the theme of his projected history Cycle.
America, he said, "instead of being the most successful country in
the world, is the greatest failure. It's the greatest failure because it was
given everything, more than any other country . . . Its main idea is that
everlasting game of trying to possess your own soul by the possession of
something outside of it.’’
A Touch of the Poet-1 completed play: family struggle: Simon is torn between wife and mother,
a struggle that eventually destroys him and changes them; transition from history to
autobiographical plays
 The Iceman Cometh
Title reflects the realistic-symbolic nature of the play: a tragicomedy
 This saloon is a dying place containing sleepy men filled with booze and pipe dreams, men
who are waiting for death to come. Death comes in the person of Hickey, the son of a preacher
who, Jesus-like, wishes to be their savior but becomes the "death" of them, just as he was the
death of his wife.
 Waiting and the atmosphere of death-reflections of the bedrock reality of human existence
 Failed at Broadway but in 1956 had the longest run of any O'Neill play ever
 Tragicomic representation of characters (other characters expect the salesman will make
make them laugh, but he is selling death: a pipe dream is what gives life to them and the truth
means death); tragedy despite jokes of all kinds, comic wordplay, comic types, comic physical
activities, cliched comic participants in the battle of the sexes: understanding compassion which
sees him as a victim of the ironies of life and of himself
 Hughie
One-act (1964): an epiloge to Iceman: contact between men must be made,
illusions must be shared, in order for life to continue.
 Erie Smith, a Broadway sport, "a teller of tales," and a usually silent night clerk
called Charles Hughes. The man that Erie talks about is the former night clerk,
Hughie, now dead.
 Depressive loneliness of men in hostile city
 Silence is death and is an enemy to Charles (he listens for and responds to
harsh sounds) and Erie (he keeps talking)
 The two men will get through the night: from isolation to union, from death to
life
 LONG DAY JOURNEY INTO NIGHT

 Broadway: 1956, public acclaim

 Autobiographical, blending comic and tragic, observing classical unities
 Most autobiographical and painful play
 Carlotta disregarded his request and gave the play to the world in 1956
 Large demands on audience: talk of members of a family for four hours, stuck in a
room, physically entrapped as the characters are trapped
 No exciting outward action, but 2 family events climactic: Mary Tyrone has returned
to her dope addiction, and Edmund Tyrone (O'Neill's portrait of himself as a young
man) learns that he has tuberculosis.
 Author directs our attention to what the characters are saying and what they are
feeling
 Main theme: past is the present
 Time measured by the extent each character's

withdrawal into self and need to reveal that self, or, in common terms: 3 acts

 Flow of time felt by increasing darkness and fog, punctuated by foghorn

(isolation)

 Isolation within isolation and isolation within a togetherness

 Moving forward revelations, but the circles of repetition still be felt, resulting
in a stalemate-frozen time
 Each character gives a heart-rending account of the past:

 James Tyrone tells about the poverty that made him a miser and caused him to latch on to the money-
making play which destroyed his considerable talent

 Edmund claims that “I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want
and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!„

 Jamie tells of his great dependence on his mother and he reveals that he hates his brother but still
loves him

 Mary Tyrone tells of her early days when she thought she'd be a nun or a concert pianist, but then she
met the dashing actor James Tyrone and her

life was changed forever

Life’s strange determinism: Each Tyrone informs us about a past for which each IS
and is NOT responsible:
"None of us can help the things life
has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done
they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you
and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever"
The Tyrones try to understand the past, that they listen to one another, that they
endure together, is the measure of their heroism
The plight of the family presented with directness and truth: loving-hating family,
close and far apart, together and alone, vulnerable and heroic, enmeshed in a tragic
net.
Universal quality: The Tyrones are Everyfamily; their experience is universal: The
love-hate within a family, the closeness-distance, the loneliness within a
togetherness, the guilt and need for forgiveness, the knowing and not knowing a
loved one, the bewilderment in the face of a mysterious determinism - this is the
human condition, so remarkably dramatized by O'Neill in America's finest play
 A Moon for the Misbegotten-last play, biographical, observes unities, family play, comic and tragic
 Setting: outdoor, in front of the farmhouse; noon to dawn
 Begins with laughter and moves to tragic lyricism and ends in the dawn of a new day: death is a strong focus
 Continuing the story of James Tyrone-his brother:
 Autumn, 1923
 Son reveals his love for his mother, dependance on her, guilt because he betrayed that love and need for a
mother substitute: When she gave up her dope, he gave up his drink, but when she was dying he began drinking
again, and this filled him with guilt because his mother saw that he had returned to drink. When she died, he
brought her body back to New York from California, where they were living together, and on the train carrying his
mother's coffin he slept every night with a blonde hooker. This act - prodded by dark Oedipal urges and by
"revenge" against his mother for leaving him - causes his deepest guilt. He needs his mother's forgiveness, but she
is dead. Josie becomes Jim’s mother an earth woman, strong and sensitive, the virgin playing a whore, lover and
mother acquires mythic proportions
 The ending sad but positive with O'Neill offering a final blessing to his brother and perhaps to himself as life
goes on: peaceful death: Jamie died in a sanatorium, prepared to die, at peace with himself; Josie offers these words
of benediction: "May you have your wish and die in your sleep soon, Jim, darling. May you rest forever in
forgiveness and peace." She then goes to the door of her house, ready to continue her life with father, returning us
to comedy in the large sense, an affirmation of life.
• Late plays: Stripped of the theatrical devices of his experimental plays,
the late plays are products of a realistic imagination working with sound
and silence and light and gesture and movement and setting to produce highly
emotive situations.
• These are essentially naked plays offering us "a drama of soul“, appealing
to our emotions, with O'Neill's dramatic art uncannily turning his compassion
and understanding to our compassion and understanding.

• Intense, sincere to express the frustrations of our life, the mystery of the
force behind, absurdity and sadness of our condition aware that the
darkly inexpressible cannot be expressed-stammering is the native
language of us fog people.
 RESOURCES

 O’Neill’s Life and Background from Cliff Notes, Emperor Jones

etc.
 O’Neill and the Theatre of his Time: Early, Middle and Late
Plays from The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill (chapters
3, 4, 5, 6)
 O’Neill’s Endgame from Bigsby, Modern American Drama
 Long Day Journey into Nght from Bloom, Harold, Long Day