O'Neill, Eugene Gladstone

O'Neill, Eugene Gladstone (1888–1953), American playwright, born in New York City, son of the actor James O'Neill. His education was fragmentary, including a year at Princeton, after which he signed on as a seaman on several voyages. He was working as a reporter on a newspaper in New London, Conn., when his health broke down, and during six months spent in a sanatorium he began writing his first play, The Web. In 1914–15 he studied under George Pierce Baker at Harvard, and in 1916 became connected with the Provincetown Players who, with the Greenwich Village Theatre, first presented many of his early plays. His first full-length play Beyond the Horizon (1920), produced on Broadway, was a starkly effective study of character set in rural New England. Awarded a Pulitzer Prize, it established him as a playwright of genuine talent and considerable skill, and was followed almost immediately by productions of the one-act Exorcism; Diff'rent, a grim bit of dramatic irony in two acts; and The Emperor Jones (seen in London in 1925), which uses a powerful Negro as its central figure to represent the violent urges of human nature: Paul Robeson gave an electrifying performance in London in the title-role. Anna Christie (1921; London, 1923) tells the story of a prostitute who is, presumably, ‘purified’ by the love of a man. In quick succession other O'Neill plays were brought to the stage—Gold (1921), The Straw (also 1921), drawing on his experiences in a sanatorium and an expression of the indomitable human spirit, and The First Man (1922)—each a failure with the public, yet each revealing new aspects of the author's preoccupations. The Hairy Ape (1922) stemmed, according to the author, from The Emperor Jones rather than from the work of the European Expressionists, which it in many ways resembles. In 1924 three new plays were produced—Welded, All God's Chillun Got Wings, and Desire under the Elms. The first, a compact and rather bloodless study in marriage, was a quick failure; the second (seen in London in 1926), dealing with racial intermarriage, verged on the sentimental, but was threatened with demonstrations by racialist factions; the last (seen in London in 1931) showed a new maturity, using a powerful tale of sexual passion, incest, and infanticide to comment on contemporary American society. The Fountain (1925) was short-lived. The Great God Brown (1926) remains one of the most tortuous and complicated of O'Neill's plays. Making use of elaborate masks, it studies the conflict between man's material and spiritual needs. Marco Millions (1928; London, 1938) was more serene, pleasantly ironic, and full of comedy and romantic colour, even though it too is a bitter satire on the aggressive business man who has lost touch with beauty and the eternal verities. Strange Interlude (1928; London, 1931), a play in nine acts, is a work of extraordinary power which, with the copious use of asides and soliloquies, seeks to expose the motives of human character. In this play and in others that followed, O'Neill seemed to be clarifying his ideas on the soul of man and the destiny of the human race to the detriment of his art as a playwright. Lazarus Laughed (1928), first produced by the Theatre Guild, tells the story of the resurrection of Lazarus and his ultimate triumph over death. In 1929 came Dynamo, planned as the first part of an uncompleted trilogy on man's efforts to find a lasting faith. It was unsuccessful, but is remembered for its exciting set design by Lee Simonson. Another trilogy, Mourning Becomes Electra (1931; London, 1937), is in many respects O'Neill's most successful work. It transposes the events of Aeschylus' Oresteia to a Puritanical family in New England, replacing the old acceptance of fate with a modern doctrine of psychological causation. A nostalgic comedy, Ah, Wilderness! (1933), and a somewhat barren and over-intellectualized play about faith, Days without End (1934; London, 1943), followed. Then for 12 years O'Neill retired from the theatre; he did an enormous amount of writing, including several plays that are parts of a series of nine interrelated plays, but refused to allow any of them to be staged. But in 1946 The Iceman Cometh (London, 1958), a vast play about a group of bar-room derelicts and their pipe-dreams, enjoyed a long run in New York and aroused a great deal of critical comment. Like A Moon for the Misbegotten (1947; London, 1960), it is partly expository drama and partly a disquisition on faith.

Some of O'Neill's plays were produced post-humously. Long Day's Journey into Night, written in 1941, was first seen in Stockholm in 1956; it was produced in New York the same year and in London in 1958. A largely autobiographical study, set during a single day, of a miserly actor father, his morphine-addicted wife, and their two sons, it has been several times revived, notably at the National Theatre in 1971, with Olivier. A Touch of the Poet, written in 1940, was produced in Stockholm in 1957 and New York in 1958 (London, 1988); it examines the painful conflict of an immigrant father and his American-born son. More Stately Mansions, written in 1938, was produced in Stockholm in 1962, in a translation which cut the playing time from 10 hours to five; the play was seen in New York in 1967 and at Greenwich in 1974.

O'Neill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936, and in 1959 the Coronet Theatre in New York was renamed in his honour. He was an introspective and troubled man, continually dogged by illness; all his talent and energy went into his work for the theatre, through which he attempted to examine the soul of modern man. Though his language is often clumsy, and some of his plays become melodramatic and absurd, he is a major dramatist whose best plays, offering strong parts for actors, continue to be revived in many countries.

The Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center, Waterford, Conn., founded in 1963, provides premises and resources for a variety of programmes and organizations, including the annual National Playwrights' Conference and the National Theatre of the Deaf.