Biography
Eugene O'Neill was America's first major playwright and
the first to fully explore serious themes as subject matter
for the theater. He hailed from a stage family that followed
his actor-father each year on the tour circuit. O'Neill began
to write seriously when living in Greenwich Village in New
York City and working with the Provincetown Players. His
early plays were notable for their crude and colloquial dialogue,
a far cry from the expected eloquence of the comedy of manners.
Experimenting further with stark realism, O'Neill wrote several
plays in which he traced a character's emotional decline
into a primitive self. O'Neill never enjoyed perfect health:
he struggled with alcoholism, nearly died of tuberculosis
as a young adult, and in the 1930s began to suffer from Parkinson's
disease. His output, however, was remarkable, with such works
as The Emperor Jones (1920), The Hairy Ape (1922), Desire
Under the Elms (1924), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931),
and The Iceman Cometh (1946). In addition, he won
four Pulitzer Prizes and the 1936 Nobel Prize in literature.
O'Neill's strongly autobiographical Long Day's Journey
into Night was first produced in 1956, three years after
his death.
Explorations
Long Day's Journey into Night (1940) is an autobiographical
work that has achieved importance as a commentary on something
larger than O'Neill's own unhappy personal life. The play
is often compared to works like Eliot's The
Waste Land as an expression both of modernist despair
and of the frustration of personal creativity and hope. O'Neill's
works are famous for their emotional intensity. In fact,
they can be so overwhelming that they can arouse suspicion
as well as admiration. Great tragedy can prostrate us --
but so of course can melodrama. What kind of play is this?
As we encounter O'Neill, we need to consider how and why
our own responses are evoked or manipulated. 1. Compare the ending of Long Day's Journey into Night to
the ending of The Waste Land. In the play, begin
with Mary's line "Something I miss terribly. It can't be
altogether lost," and read to the end; then consider the "What
the Thunder Said" closing section of Eliot's poem. How
would you describe the closing mood of each work? Thematically,
where have we arrived when we finish the play? When we
finish reading the poem? Do you feel that one of these
works has more authority than the other? Does one ask more
emphatically to be taken seriously by us as a commentary
on the modern condition? Why or why not?
2. Choose two characters in O'Neill's play and describe
them. How self-aware are they? What insights are they capable
of? What irrational drives or fears help to define them?
Do they have tragic dimensions or grandeur? This play takes
hours to stage; how do these characters sustain our attention?
3. Traditional descriptions of "tragedy" tell us that
the tragic hero or heroine is a noble figure, someone with
eloquence and importance, whose downfall seems consequential
and instructive about fate, the human condition, and the
larger orders which shape our destiny. Is Long Day's
Journey into Night a tragedy? Is it a melodrama? Does
it have a plot? How would you describe the ways in which
the play moves forward thematically, from the opening scene
to the end?
Other sites to consult:
Nobel
Foundation O'Neill page. Includes O'Neill's
autobiographical statement, his acceptance speech,
and link to the online text of Beyond the Horizon.
Production
Archive: The Alley Theatre. Includes photo
stills from a 1998 production of A Long Day's
Journey Into Night; an O'Neill timeline; and
history of the play's creation and production.
http://www.eoneill.com/: An electronic archive
of works by Eugene O’Neill.
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