Editor: Harley Hammerman Volume 0

St. Louis, Missouri 1999-2005

(CONTENTS)

Eugene O’Neill, 1888-1953:

A Descriptive Chronology of His Plays,
Theatrical Career, and Dramatic Theories

Charles A. Carpenter

The following is from Professor Carpenter’s Modern British, Irish, and American Drama: A Descriptive
Chronology, 1865-1965. Included here are entries relevant to the emergence of serious drama in America as
well as those that deal directly with O’Neill.

1883 February The romantic actor James O’Neill plays Edmond Dantès for the first
time in a revival of Charles Fechter’s version of The Count of Monte Cristo. His promising
career will collapse into more than 6,000 repetitions of this sure-fire role, as his dramatic
re-creation laments in his son Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

1888 October Eugene Gladstone O’Neill is born on October 16 in a Broadway hotel

room.

1891 May After a brief tryout in July 1890 induces theatre managers to refuse to
produce James A. Herne’s daring and impressive problem play, Margaret Fleming, Herne
rents a hall in Boston, adapts the space for an intimate performance, advertises to the
intelligentsia, and (according to William Dean Howells, who promoted the play) becomes
“the talk of the whole city wherever cultivated people met.” Howells had told Herne that
his drama has “the same searching moral vitality as Ibsen’s best work,” and predicted an
“epoch-making effect for it.” Almost as objectionable to conservative playgoers as Ghosts,
the drama involves a nursing mother, who suffers from glaucoma, and her philandering but
still loving husband, who has impregnated the nursemaid’s sister. When the woman dies in
childbirth, his wife learns about the affair—which exacerbates her glaucoma and causes
blindness. Hearing the sick baby cry, she impulsively “unbuttons her dress to give (it)
nourishment,” a scandalous stage event at the time (and long after). Even more disturbing,
in the first version the baby dies, she abandons her own baby and home, and when she
accidentally confronts her husband at the home of the nursemaid (who has kept her baby),
even though he is penitent she drives him away. Herne changes the ending for revivals
(July 1892 and April 1894) to make the play more palatable—the baby does not die; the
woman does not flee; she forgives her husband and is pleased when he looks in on both
children—but it never becomes popular. Because it was not published until 1930 and was
later revived only in Chicago, the play had no discernible impact on the rebirth of serious
American drama two decades after its initial production.

1896 August A group of men who owned theatres across America, most notably Charles
Frohman, teams up with booking agents to form the Theatrical Syndicate, which by 1900
gains control of a great number of American theatres, including all but three in New York
City. In an era of sometimes multiple tryouts for new plays before risking a New York
production and, afterwards, prolific touring from city to city to exploit successful plays,
access to farflung venues is crucial to financial solvency for theatre companies, so that
they virtually have to submit to the Syndicate’s self-serving policies. A repressive force
opposed by David Belasco and Herne, among others, the Syndicate tries to insure high
profits by mandating morally conventional actions with gratifying endings, and stressing
spectacle and popular appeal. Their most remunerative playwrights are Bronson Howard
and Clyde Fitch.

1897 February Herne’s essay “Art for Truth’s Sake in the Drama” (Arena), recognized
as a veritable manifesto of the higher drama in America, declares that drama’s mission is
“to interest and to instruct” rather than simply to amuse. “It should not preach objectively,
but it should teach subjectively.” If a dramatist “has a truth to manifest and he can present
it without giving offence and still retain its power, he should so present it, but if he must
choose between giving offence and receding from his position, he should stand by his
principle and state his truth fearlessly.” This kind of drama “stands for the higher
development and thus the individual liberty of the human race.”

December The respected New York Times drama critic Edward A. Dithmar sums up the
American dramatic situation by saying “We have no body of plays we can point to with
pride.” The few creditable works—Augustus Thomas’s Alabama, Belasco’s The Heart of
Maryland, Howard’s Young Mrs. Winthrop and The Henrietta, and William Gillette’s
Secret Service—“are exceptions, and they tell a story of many years of unproductiveness.”

1899 November In New York the Carnegie Lyceum, a lecture/concert hall run by
Franklin H. Sargent, begins a subscription season of single performances of “new”
European dramas (in English translations) with an 1881 play by José Echegaray, El gran
Galeoto. It is followed in January 1900 by Ibsen’s The Master Builder (its American
premiere), in March by Alexander Ostrovsky’s The Storm (1860) and Gerhart
Hauptmann’s The Sunken Bell (1896), and in April by two one-acts, Edward Martyn’s The
Heather Field (May 1899) and François Coppée’s A Troubadour (Le Passant, 1869). The
venture gains little critical attention and soon expires, but serves its purpose for interested
playgoers.

1903 September A trial matinee of Shaw’s Candida in New York, mounted at their own
expense by Arnold Daly and a young actor, gains such a positive reception that additional
performances are arranged so that the play is finally given over a hundred times. Shaw’s
short play about Napoleon, The Man of Destiny (1897), sometimes supplements the
evening.

1904 July In the influential symposium “A National Art Theatre for America”
published in Arena, the ultra-popular Syndicate playwright Clyde Fitch surprisingly
advocates dramatic realism in his essay “The Play and the Public.” He declares his belief
in “the particular value . . . in a modern play of reflecting absolutely and truthfully the life
and environment about us; every class, every kind, every emotion, every motive, every
occupation, every business, every idleness!” Moreover, “if you inculcate an idea in your
play, so much the better for your play and for you—and for your audience.” Two of his
plays that follow this statement, The Truth (1907) and The City (1909), include daring
realistic ingredients combined with their well-made plots and are heralded as among the
best examples of American social realism so far produced.

1905 January Arnold Daly, following his success with Shaw plays in September 1903
and a year later, gives You Never Can Tell its American premiere and scores another
success. With revivals of his previous Shaw offerings starting in September and the
premieres of John Bull’s Other Island and Mrs Warren’s Profession in October, Daly
helps makes the year a notable one for the growing acceptance of Shaw in America, which
newspapers attribute to a “Shaw cult.”

June After vainly opposing the Theatrical Syndicate since 1898, Harrison Grey Fiske, a
prosperous theatre manager, and his wife Minnie Maddern Fiske, a noted actress, join
forces with David Belasco, who was fighting the Syndicate in court, and the Shubert
brothers, a trio of shrewd businessmen, in an ultimately successful attempt to break the
near-monopoly of the Syndicate. After many fluctuations in power, including various
truces and treaties between the competitors that dissolved sooner or later, the two
aspirants for total control reached approximate equality in the mid-1920s.

1907 Spring Eugene O’Neill sees his first Ibsen play, Hedda Gabler, and goes back nine
more times. He later says that the performance”discovered an entire new world of the
drama for me. It gave me my first conception of a modern theater where truth might live.”

1908 November Edward Sheldon’s naturalistic but finally sentimental drama Salvation
Nell, produced by the Fiskes and starring the strong Ibsenite Mrs. Fiske, is performed in
New York. Sheldon gives credit for inspiration to George Pierce Baker’s playwriting
seminar at Harvard, where Baker had encouraged him to pursue “the newer and truer
methods of drama”; critics alternately praise and damn the play for its exposé of slum life,
one comparing it to Gorky’s “depressing” The Lower Depths.

1909 November America’s bastion of conservative drama criticism and relentless

denouncer of advanced drama, William Winter, resigns from the New York Tribune after
44 years in the post. He confesses that his columns “relative to indecent and reprehensible
plays have been, and are, framed for the purpose of doing . . . injury to the business of the
persons exploiting them.”

The lavish New Theatre opens on Broadway with a performance of Antony and Cleopatra.
Subsidized by a group of wealthy New Yorkers led by Winthrop Ames to fulfill the
growing demand for a place to present advanced dramas, but clearly designed for huge
audiences and dramatic spectacles, the enterprise makes little headway and closes in early
1911. (It reopens as the Century later that year but specializes in musical shows.) Before
closing, it presents Galsworthy’s Strife, Sheldon’s The Nigger, Ibsen’s Brand, three
Maeterlinck plays, and others.

Two months after William Winter steps down, the critic George Jean Nathan begins
writing a theatre column for the magazine The Smart Set (an early equivalent of The New
Yorker). He will soon be recognized as America’s most influential early champion of
advanced drama, “discovering” O’Neill and becoming a valued supporter of him and,
later, Sean O’Casey.

December Fitch’s sensational melodrama The City: A Modern Play of American Life is
produced in New York, three months after the author’s death at the age of 43. The play
incites hysterical enthusiasm (and even some fainting) and enjoys a run of 190
performances in spite of scandalous topics and language.

Sheldon’s daring drama of averted miscegenation, The Nigger, is introduced into the New
Theatre’s repertory and makes a sensation. (George Jean Nathan, who reviewed it
favorably, later chooses it as one of the “Ten Dramatic Shocks of the Century.”) The play
depicts a (typically racist) Southern candidate for governor who is on the brink of marriage
when he discovers that his grandmother was one-fourth Negro. Transformed by this
coincidence, he not only convinces his fiancée that she must not marry a “nigger” but also
confesses his lineage publicly and vows to dedicate himself to promoting racial harmony.
Unfortunately, the final impact rests with his heroic sacrifice rather than with the existence
of a real social problem.

1911 September The Abbey Theatre begins a half-year tour of America, highlighted by
the disruption of the first performance of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in
New York in November. O’Neill sees every play and later comments on the contrast
between “the old ranting, artificial, romantic stage stuff” and “the possibilities of
naturalistic acting” realized by the troupe. The play that impressed him most was Synge’s
Riders to the Sea, which he drew upon later in Anna Christie.

1912 January O’Neill, in a deep depression at age 23, attempts suicide in a room over
Jimmy the Priest’s bar in New York by taking a heavy dose of Veronal tablets, but is saved
by a friend. (His play written in 1919 and performed in 1920, Exorcism, depicts the event
and its apparent effect on him.)

December Threatened by “the great killer” of the day, consumption (tuberculosis),

O’Neill goes to a sanatorium for five and a half months, where the disease is cured. While
there he immerses himself in the dramas of Hauptmann, Strindberg, Brieux, and Synge;
after he returns home he begins writing plays. In early 1919 he writes a play based on
these experiences, The Straw; its performance at the Greenwich Village Theater in
November 1921 is reviewed negatively.

1914 Spring Culminating a burst of trial-and-error creativity, O’Neill writes his first
enduring play, the one-act Bound East for Cardiff (first entitled “Children of the Sea”) It
becomes the first play of the S. S. Glencairn cycle. In 1935 O’Neill said of it, “Very
important from my point of view. In it can be seen, or felt, the germ of the spirit, life-
attitude, etc., of all my more important future work.”

August O’Neill makes his first dent on the American dramatic scene by publishing Thirst
and Other One Act Plays in an edition of 1,000 copies financed by his father. The volume,
which sells very few copies and is reviewed only once, includes Thirst, Recklessness,
Warnings, Fog, and The Web (which he later called “the first play I ever wrote”).

September O’Neill begins Professor George Pierce Baker’s two-term playwriting seminar
at Harvard, the “47 Workshop” made famous in 1908 when a play written by a class
member, Edward Sheldon’s Salvation Nell, became a Broadway hit. O’Neill is wary
because Baker, in evaluating his ample portfolio, had said that Bound East for Cardiff is
“not a play,” and he becomes disillusioned by the emphasis on the means to attain
commercial viability. When Augustus Thomas comes as guest lecturer for six hours and
regales the students with methods to devise sure-fire hits, O’Neill is disgusted. Still, he
profits from practical advice such as starting the composing process with detailed
scenarios, and he accepts the invitation to continue the course the following year. (It turns
out that he cannot afford it.)

1915 February In New York the Washington Square Players, a group developed over
the past few months by Philip Moeller, Edward Goodman, Lawrence Langner, Robert
Edmond Jones, Ida Rauh, and others to provide a haven for noncommercial drama,
performs three one-acts at the Bandbox Theater. They reject the first plays that O’Neill
sends them, but later accept and produce In the Zone. They also reject as “too
experimental” the one-act satire of Freudianism by Susan Glaspell and her husband
George Cram Cook, Suppressed Desires, adding a motive for those authors to originate the
Provincetown Players.

July The as-yet unnamed Provincetown Players, a group consisting of Cook, Glaspell,
Jones, Wilbur Daniel Steele, John Reed, and others, is formed (in Cook’s words) “to give
American playwrights a chance to work out their ideas in freedom.” Disgusted by the
mindless commercialism of virtually all American theater, and irked by the Washington
Square Players’ preference for foreign plays, they look to Chicago’s Little Theatre (an
amateur company begun in 1912 by Maurice Browne, a friend of Cook’s), the
performances of the visiting Abbey Theatre players, and the stagecraft of Gordon Craig for
inspiration.

December Hauptmann’s The Weavers begins an eleven-week run in New York. O’Neill
attends the play six times.
1916 July The Provincetown Players offers its first plays to the public in a renovated
fishhouse on a wharf in Provincetown christened the Wharf Theater. Three one-acts are
presented as the first bill, among them Suppressed Desires by Glaspell and Cook. Groping
for a second bill, the group is introduced to O’Neill by his friend Terry Carlin, who says he
has “a whole trunk full of plays,” and listens to a reading of Bound East for Cardiff.
Glaspell recalls, “Then we knew what we were for.” In August the group produces
O’Neill’s already published one-act Thirst and Glaspell’s Trifles.

Bound East for Cardiff, the first O’Neill play to be produced, will come to be recognized
as one of the finest one-acts written by an American. Innovative for the time, it is a drama
in which setting, atmosphere, mood, and language—featuring a galaxy of dialects—
replace plot. On a foggy night at sea, a badly injured seaman (the only “Yank”) is slowly
dying in the presence of his vulgar mates, one of whom talks seriously to him about life as
it might have been and tries to calm his fears of death. Just after Yank finally visualizes
death coming as “a pretty lady dressed in black,” a seaman announces that the fog has
lifted. Glaspell recalled that the fog, foghorn, and sounds of the sea at the wharf
collaborated to make the first performance unusually impressive. Thirst is a three-character
melodrama set on a life raft that portrays the threat of cannibalism averted, only to result in
a sumptuous feast for sharks at the curtain.

November The Provincetown Players begin a New York season in humble venues, each
one designated the Playwrights Theater. Besides repeating O’Neill’s Bound East for
Cardiff, they present three more of his one-acts: Before Breakfast, Fog, and The Sniper.

1917 January David Belasco (quoted in the New York Herald) reacts to the burgeoning
of noncommercial theatres in New York by describing their “new art” as “the cubism of
the theater—the wail of the incompetent and the degenerate, . . . the haven of those who
lack experience and knowledge of the drama.”

October The Washington Square Players perform O’Neill’s one-act In the Zone, set on a
British steamer carrying ammunition through sub-infested waters in 1915. Paranoia grips
some crewmen when they suspect a superior man of being a spy; they bind and gag him,
then check out an iron box that is the focus of his furtive behavior. Far from confirming
their suspicions, it turns out to contain love letters from his fiancée, culminating in a recent
rejection that has filled him with remorse.

November The Provincetown Players begin their New York season with bills of one-
acters that include O’Neill’s The Long Voyage Home and Ile. Critics continue to pay little
attention to the company, but the Sunday drama section of the New York Times gives
O’Neill his first public notice in a 400-word piece, “Who Is Eugene O’Neill?”.

December The play awarded the first Pulitzer Prize for drama, Why Marry? by Jesse
Lynch Williams, is performed.

1919 April The Theatre Guild of New York, a group evolved from the failed
Washington Square Players through the efforts of Lawrence Langner, presents its first
play, Jacinto Benavente’s The Bonds of Interest, at the Garrick Theatre (its venue until the
Guild Theatre is opened in April 1925). A subscription society intending “to produce plays
of artistic merit not ordinarily produced by the commercial managers,” the Guild in its first
few years will perform such notable foreign plays as Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom, Leo
Tolstoy’s The Power of Darkness, Karel Capek’s R.U.R., Paul Claudel’s The Tidings
Brought to Mary, and Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, as well as English and American plays.

May The publishers Albert Boni and Horace Liveright, impressed by O’Neill’s talent,
issue The Moon of the Caribbees and Six Other Plays of the Sea. Reviews are uniformly
enthusiastic.

1920 February O’Neill’s domestic tragedy Beyond the Horizon, after nearly two years
of delays, is performed on Broadway and hailed loudly enough by the younger critics to
insure a long New York run. Then (despite its faults) it wins the Pulitzer Prize and
establishes the young playwright as a potent force in modern drama. (The Pulitzer carried
little weight in its early years, but O’Neill was delighted by the $1000 stipend.) In the vein
of T. C. Murray’s Birthright, which O’Neill had seen in 1911, the play portrays contrasting
sons of an aging farmer, one well-equipped to take over the farm, the other so much of a
dreamer that he is preparing for a voyage in search of fulfillment. Because both men love
the same woman and she chooses the dreamer, however, the unfit brother stays and the fit
one leaves in order to forget his beloved. The love-match soon disintegrates into a
Strindbergian war of the sexes, the farm goes to seed, and the husband dies of
consumption—after a last gesture of triumph that he is finally free to set out “beyond the
horizon.” In a November 1922 interview in American Magazine, O’Neill explains the
play’s three-act, six-scene structure which had bothered critics: “One scene is out of doors,
showing the horizon, suggesting the man’s desire and dreams. The other is indoors, the
horizon gone, suggesting what has come between him and his dreams. In that way, I tried
to get rhythm, the alternation of longing and loss.”

March The first completed version of O’Neill’s Anna Christie, begun in January 1919
and entitled Chris Christopherson (but performed as Chris), has out-of-town tryouts but is
deemed inadequate for Broadway. O’Neill revises it radically, changing the barge
captain’s daughter Anna from a pure woman needing to be protected into a prostitute who
finds reformation and love from life on the sea. The new play is first performed in
November 1921. Also in March the Provincetown Players produce his autobiographical
one-act Exorcism, based on his attempted suicide. But O’Neill quickly deplores releasing
it, asks that all scripts be returned to him, and destroys them.

July Referring to American drama of the last forty years, William Dean Howells declares,
“We have a drama which has touched our life at many characteristic points, which has
dealt with our moral and material problems and penetrated the psychological regions
which it seemed impossible an art so objective should reach” (North American Review).

In “The American Playwright” (Smart Set), Nathan places O’Neill above the crowd of new
dramatists by calling him “the one writer for the native stage who gives promise of
achieving a sound position for himself.”

November O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, composed in only two weeks, is performed by
the Provincetown Players, who risk bankruptcy by constructing a plastic dome to convey
the illusion of infinite space that surrounds O’Neill’s “Great Forest.” The play is received
so well that it is subsequently moved to Broadway, despite the group’s fear that it would
taint their enterprise with commercialism. Not only is its original combination of a
naturalistic situation framing an expressionistic nightmare a striking feature to the critics,
but it is the first play by a white dramatist, presented by a white theatre company, to have a
black in the starring role. “Emperor” Jones, a former porter who has satisfied his lust for
money and power in a West Indian island community, faces a rebellion staunchly by
putting his careful escape plans into operation. But fleeing through a dark woods at night,
and hearing the escalating beat of a tom-tom in the distance, he descends into a psychotic
maelstrom that progresses from echoes of his criminal deeds in America to manifestations
of his racial past (à la Carl Jung’s theory of a “racial memory”). He finally discovers that
he has traveled full circle and is shot by natives.

1921 February Acting as a prophet during a visit to the United States, English drama
critic William Archer states that the “great hope of the future lies in the fertilization of the
large by the little theater, of Broadway by Provincetown.” The “real birthplace of the New
American Drama” will occur in Washington Square, Greenwich Village, “or ultimately
among the sand dunes of Cape Cod.”

November O’Neill’s Anna Christie is performed on Broadway. Despite doubts about the
appropriateness of its ending and the awkwardness of the Swedish dialect, the play gains
popularity and wins the Pulitzer Prize. (However, it attracts few Londoners when it was
performed there in April 1923). This version of a much-revised play commences with
Anna’s father seeing her for the first time in many years and telling her how “dat ole davil,
sea” took his father and sons (much as it victimized the mother in Synge’s Riders to the
Sea). When a rough-hewn Irishman he saved from a shipwreck falls in love with Anna, he
rages against marriage to a seaman. She is provoked to disclose that she has lived as a
prostitute, and even though she declares that returning the seaman’s love has made her
“clean,” he curses her and both men abandon her. The two soon realize they need her and
make amends, however, and she vows to make a good home for them. When some critics
deplored the weakly motivated happy ending, O’Neill retorted that they ignored the
father’s final reminder that only the malicious, fogbound sea knows where their lives are
going; they themselves cannot know.

1922 March O’Neill’s highly distinctive drama The Hairy Ape: A Comedy of Ancient
and Modern Life is performed by the Provincetown Players and later moved uptown.
Written in only two weeks, the play has similarities to Georg Kaiser’s classic of
expressionism, From Morn to Midnight (which O’Neill had recently read and disliked).
However, he and several critics link it more closely to The Emperor Jones because the key
feature of its dramaturgy, within its thoroughgoing expressionistic context, is the complex
characterization of the protagonist as he searches for where he “belongs.” A powerful
stoker on a transatlantic liner, exultant in his role as the “steel” that runs the ship, is jolted
from his self-assurance when a society lady calls him a “filthy beast.” On leave in
Manhattan, he tries to get back at her kind by assaulting a “procession of gaudy
marionettes,” but they prove impenetrable and he is suppressed by police. After a radical
leftist group rejects his offer of dynamiting a steel works in their cause as the idea of “a
brainless ape,” he thinks that he may “belong” with a gorilla at the zoo. It crushes him to
death.

1923 March The Austrian dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal commends O’Neill’s The
Emperor Jones, Anna Christie, and The Hairy Ape as “clear-cut and sharp in outline,
solidly constructed from beginning to end” (Freeman).

May In a New York Tribune interview, O'Neill expounds his "innate feeling of exultance
about tragedy": "The tragedy of Man is perhaps the only significant thing about him. . . .
What I am after is to get an audience to leave the theatre with an exultant feeling from
seeing somebody on the stage facing life, fighting against the eternal odds, not conquering,
but perhaps inevitably being conquered. The individual life is made significant just by the
struggle."

August In a letter to a friend, O’Neill eloquently describes his tragic view of life: “I’m far
from being a pessimist. I see life as a gorgeously-ironical, beautifully-indifferent,
splendidly-suffering bit of chaos the tragedy of which gives Man a tremendous
significance, while without his losing fight with fate he would be a tepid, silly animal. I
say ‘losing fight’ only symbolically for the brave individual always wins. Fate can never
conquer his—or her—spirit. So you see I’m no pessimist. On the contrary, in spite of my
scars, I’m tickled to death with life!”

1924 January The Provincetown Players are revived by Kenneth McGowan, Robert
Edmond Jones, and O’Neill (“the Triumvirate”), with the group’s name changed to The
Experimental Theater. Their first offering is Strindberg’s The Spook Sonata, which baffled
critics, especially since masks were used.

February O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings is published by Nathan in American
Mercury, the successor of Smart Set, where its depiction of a white woman married to a
black man is condemned by newspapers, church and women’s groups, and the president of
the Society for the Prevention of Vice. Nathan retorts in the May issue (just before the
performance) that the play contains nothing offensive “to any human being above the
mental level of an apple dumpling,” and reminds readers of Othello. Primarily naturalistic
but with strong symbolic and expressionistic elements, the drama revolves around the
tortured relationship of a black with ambitions to become a lawyer and his white wife, who
suffers a nervous breakdown from the pressures of their social ostracism and her inbred
feelings of white superiority. The closer he comes to achieving his goal, the more irrational
she becomes, even though his incentive is the same as hers for him, to “prove I’m the
whitest of the white!” She finally goes insane, raving that she will kill her husband if he
passes the law exams. He does not, and she plunges a carving knife into a conspicuous
African mask that has tormented her; the double catharsis reconciles her to him, but only
because she has escaped into childhood when their affection had no Strindbergian
repercussions.

May Ten days before their presentation of O’Neill’s highly controversial All God’s
Chillun Got Wings, the Provincetown Players strategically revive The Emperor Jones,
starring the actor who will play the male lead in the play, Paul Robeson. But nothing
reduces the clamor of conservative opponents, among them whites who warn of possible
race riots and blacks who say that the play can cause “only harm.” The publicity spurs
death threats from the Ku Klux Klan and anonymous bomb warnings. O’Neill asserts
publicly that anyone who reads the script intelligently knows it is not “a ‘race-problem’
play. Its intention is confined to portraying the special lives of individual human beings . . .
and their tragic struggle for happiness.” Local officials finally resort to an exceptional
refusal to permit the use of child actors, who are necessary in the first scene because the
main characters appear as pre-teens; throughout the marred production the director has to
read the (brief) scene aloud. But the performances are not disrupted, and the play goes on
to a run of 100 despite very mixed notices.

October O’Neill finishes his satirical extravaganza Marco Millions. Extra long and
extremely costly to produce (as well as being atypical of O’Neill), it will not be performed
until January 1928.

November O’Neill’s naturalistic tragedy Desire Under the Elms, which he wrote in the
first half of the year, is presented at the Greenwich Village Theatre, then on Broadway,
and attains a run of 208 performances. (The play will be banned in Boston and refused a
license in England.) Conservatives attack its daring sexual component as “immoral and
obscene,” but the notoriety simply increases its audiences. Bearing resemblances in plot to
both T. C. Murray’s Birthright, which had impressed O’Neill favorably in 1911, and
Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted, the script of which he had recently read,
the play has deeper affinities to Greek dramas of fate and retribution such as Euripides’
Hippolytus. It is set in 1850 on a tract of stony land in New England that a figure of epic
proportions, the 75-year-old owner, transformed into a “jim-dandy” farm with grudging
help from his wife, whom he worked to death, and three sons. When he brings home a
new, young wife to give him an alternative heir, two sons leave but the third remains to
claim what he considers property stolen from his mother. A powerful attraction builds up
between the son and new wife; its consummation (in “Maw’s” parlor) results in the heir
that the old man craved, but also prompts fierce conflict between the lovers since the son
now believes she seduced him to insure her inheritance. The adultress “proves” he is
wrong by killing the baby. At first horrified, but soon convinced of her love and his
complicity in the murder, he decides to share her punishment. The old man, bereft of
consolations (and his savings, which the son had stolen), decides to stay on the farm and
be “hard an’ lonesome” like his Puritan God. Scenic devices such as two brooding elm
trees and removable walls on the lovers’ adjoining bedrooms enhance several scenes.
Notable among the mixed reviews of Desire Under the Elms is one by the new drama
critic of the Nation, Joseph Wood Krutch, who generalizes that “the meaning and unity of
(O’Neill’s) work lies not in any controlling intellectual idea . . . , but merely in the fact that
each play is an experience of extraordinary intensity.” Much more receptive to the literary
and experimental qualities in plays than the usual run of critics, Krutch will publish The
American Drama Since 1918 in 1939, a distinguished study for its time.

1925 February Asked about the Freudianism in Desire Under the Elms, O’Neill replies
that whatever is there “must have walked in ‘through my unconscious.’” He notes that he
has great respect for Freud, but “playwrights are either intuitively keen analytical
psychologists or they aren’t good playwrights. . . . To me, Freud only means uncertain
conjectures and explanations about truths of the emotional past of mankind that every
dramatist has clearly sensed ever since real drama began.”

1926 January O’Neill’s complex experimental drama The Great God Brown, written in
only two months, is presented at the Greenwich Village Theatre, then transferred to
Broadway, for a total of 278 performances. O’Neill emphasizes that such a public response
to “a mask drama, the main values of which are psychological, mystical, and abstract”
seems “a more significant proof of the deeply responsive possibilities in our public than
anything that has happened in our modern theater before or since.” But he is impelled to
explain the play to baffled critics. The protagonist, Dion Anthony, embodies two forces
that conflict and finally destroy him: masked, “the creative pagan acceptance of life”
(Dionysius); unmasked, “the masochistic, life-denying spirit of Christianity” (St.
Anthony). The title character represents a “visionless demigod of our new materialistic
myth”; though successful, he envies the “creative life force” of the protagonist. The
woman both men love is a mother-figure who prefers Dion to Brown because he is “just
like a baby sometimes” but is horrified when he momentarily shows his unmasked self; the
other key female is a prostitute/Earth-Mother who, although a “pariah” in social terms,
accepts Dion unmasked and administers to his emotional needs. The play spans eighteen
years, during which time the protagonist dissipates as an artist, goes to work for Brown
and endures only because of his cherished “Miss Earth,” then dies and wills the
businessman his mask. Brown “becomes” Dion Brown but, in the melodramatic
dénouement, is accused of having murdered Dion and is shot. His own corpse is identified
as “Man!” (In London the Stage Society will perform the play twice in June 1927.)

June O’Neill is awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Literature at Yale, where

George Pierce Baker had joined the newly established drama department. William Lyon
Phelps declares, “He is the only American dramatist who has produced a deep impression
on European drama and European thought . . . he has redeemed the American theater from
commonplaceness and triviality.”

1927 April Lawrence Langner, principal director of the Theatre Guild, urges the
theatre’s board to produce O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, calling it “probably the bravest and
most far-reaching dramatic experiment” since Ibsen’s plays and asserting that it reflects
“more deep knowledge of the dark corners of the human mind than anything ever written
before.” The play is accepted, and concurrently the Theatre Guild becomes the primary
producer of O’Neill’s works.

1928 January O’Neill’s Marco Millions, cut and altered drastically by the author to save
production costs, is performed by the Theatre Guild. Despite serious flaws and mixed
reviews, the play alternates in repertory with Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma for the rest of
the season, totalling 92 performances. O’Neill’s attempt to satirize the banality and
materialism of American business, represented by a crass Marco Polo, by confronting his
values with those of the cultured and spiritual Orient, embodied in Kublai Kaan, brings out
more shortcomings than virtues in his particular dramatic talents.

Late in the month O’Neill’s huge, innovative drama Strange Interlude is presented by the
Theatre Guild (with ample cuts), attains a run of 441 performances, and wins the Pulitzer
Prize. The full version, published later in the year, sells over 100,000 copies by 1931, no
doubt helped by having the play banned in Boston. The production, the longest yet to
reach Broadway, runs from 5:15 until shortly after eleven (with a dinner break from 7:30
to 9:00). O’Neill had first made notes for the play in 1923 and did not finish it until
February 1927. An experiment in “wedding the theme for a novel to the play form in a
way that would still leave the play master of the house,” the nine-act drama features
extensive use of what O’Neill called “thought asides”; a third of the dialogue consists of
expressions of thoughts and feelings that are unheard onstage and often contradict the
words that precede them. The central figure of the play is an Everywoman who manifests
the full range of female roles, from innocent virgin to Earth Mother, a conception akin to
Shaw’s heroine in Man and Superman but with a sharply divergent emotional makeup.
Revolving around her are four potential or actual lovers: her godlike fiancé, who died in
World War I but remains as a standard for all men in her mind; the ineffectual man she
agrees to marry, whose lineage reveals a strong tendency toward insanity; her doctor, to
whom she proposes the experiment of impregnating her with a taint-free child, which
results in a long-term, overriding passion as well as a child; and a mild, affectionate
novelist who serves as a father-figure but awaits his chance. She rhapsodically sums up her
often tender, more often tumultuous interactions with the three living males by saying “My
three men! I feel their desires converge in me! . . . to form one complete beautiful male
desire which I absorb . . . and am whole. . . . I am pregnant with the three! . . . husband! . . .
lover! . . . father!” Complications arising from her son’s maturing into a duplicate of her
dead fiancé, from her husband’s sudden death, and from the dissolution of her adulterous
affair lead finally to her proclaiming “our lives are merely strange dark interludes in the
electrical display of God the Father!”—and agreeing to marry the always-faithful novelist,
who “has all the luck at last!” A London production will not occur until February 1931,
and then it will run for only 35 performances.

Asked by a reporter if he had a literary idol, O’Neill replied, “The answer to that is in one
word—Nietzsche.” The previous year he had told a critic that Thus Spake Zarathustra,
which he had discovered in 1907, “has influenced me more than any book I’ve ever read”;
several of his plays show that influence directly, among them The Great God Brown and
Dynamo. After reading The Birth of Tragedy in 1925 he called it the “most stimulating
book on drama ever written.” When he had finished Dynamo in September 1928 he told a
friend that it was the first part of a trilogy he envisioned, perhaps to be entitled “God Is
Dead! Long Live—What?” (later, “Myth Plays of the God-Forsaken”). The three plays, he
told Nathan, would “dig at the roots of the sickness of Today as I feel it—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, and to comfort its fears
of death with.”

April O’Neill’s Lazarus Laughed: A Play for an Imaginative Theater is performed at the
Pasadena Playhouse to largely negative reviews; it has never been performed in New
York. The play makes well-nigh impossible demands upon the leading actor, who must
exude rhapsodic laughter almost constantly as he reenacts the legend of Lazarus, and upon
audiences, who must endure the experience. O’Neill offered the rationale that the fear of
death “is the root of all evil, the cause of all man’s blundering unhappiness. Lazarus knows
there is no death, there is only change. He is reborn without that fear. Therefore he is the
first and only man who is able to laugh affirmatively. His laughter is a triumphant Yes to
life in its entirety and its eternity. . . . His laughter is the direct expression of joy in the
Dionysian sense, the joy of a celebrant who is at the same time a sacrifice in the eternal
process of change and growth and transmutation which is life.” Even as he is burnt at the
stake, Lazarus laughs. The play contrasts with The Great God Brown, in which the
Dionysian spirit in its several manifestations is beaten down.

1929 February O’Neill’s Dynamo is produced by the Theatre Guild but manages only
fifty performances. The uniqueness of the play lies in its extravagant demonstration that
science cannot replace theism as an outlet for man’s religious instincts. At its center is a
young man, who abandons his father’s fundamentalist Christianity and turns to the
worship of science as manifested in a hydroelectric power plant (“There is no God! No
God but Electricity!”), which he also perceives as a mother-figure. His love for the
daughter of an atheist finally results in his guiltily coupling with her before the dynamo,
then killing her as a temptress and electrocuting himself by embracing the giant machine.
A playwright/critic new on the scene, St John Ervine, protests that the “infinitely dreary
dialogue” fatigued him (New York World), and Nathan pans the play as “amateurish,
strident and juvenile” (American Mercury). O’Neill makes several revisions for the
published version.

July While contemplating Mourning Becomes Electra, O’Neill in a letter to Krutch

expresses optimism tempered by a seemingly insoluble artistic problem: “Oh, for a
language to write drama in! For a speech that is dramatic and not just conversation. I’m so
strait-jacketed by writing in terms of talk. . . . But where to find that language?” In his
highly favorable review (November 1931), Krutch comments: “Here is a scenario to which
the most soaring eloquence and the most profound poetry are appropriate. . . . But no
modern is capable of language really worthy of O’Neill’s play, and the lack of that one
thing is the penalty we must pay for living in an age which is not equal to more than
prose.”
1931 February Replying to a request for comments on O’Neill’s drama, O’Casey
rhapsodizes: “his work is always bearing witness to the things great and the things
beautiful which have saved the Theater from the shame of a house of ill-repute and a den
of thieves, and have kept the ground in and around the Theater as holy as the ground
around the burning bush.”

October In a New York Times Magazine interview anticipating the first performance of
Mourning Becomes Electra, O’Neill comments on a portrait of Shaw hanging on the office
wall, “I wish they would take that down; the old gentleman seems to be laughing at me.”

O’Neill’s largely naturalistic modernization of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Mourning Becomes

Electra: A Trilogy, is presented by the Theatre Guild. Although it earns enthusiastic
reviews and attains a run of 150 performances in spite of its inordinate length, it does not
win the Pulitzer Prize, which goes to the musical Of Thee I Sing. Written between
September 1929 and April 1931, the drama consists of Homecoming (four acts), The
Hunted (five acts), and The Haunted (four acts). O’Neill set the play in a seaport town in
New England just after Union troops have returned from the Civil War because he thought
that the still-pervasive “Puritan conviction of man born to sin and punishment” was
dramatically the “best possible” milieu for a “Greek plot of crime and retribution, chain of
fate.” A neo-Greek mansion that dominates the setting is described by a character as a
“pagan temple front stuck like a mask on Puritan gray ugliness!” The chief dramatis
personae are equivalents of the legendary Greek figures, but while stripped of their beliefs
in controlling gods and predeterminied destinies, they are acutely aware of the
psychological forces driving them to similar tragic ends. The play is more subject to the
charge of outdated Freudianism than Desire Under the Elms or Strange Interlude because
of the “deep hidden relationships” that O’Neill found in the Oresteia and focused on
strongly: parents and children behave according to the Freudian Oedipus and Electra
formulas, even to the extent of the brother proposing virtual marriage to his sister. But the
finale puts Puritan pressures in the forefront; O’Neill deplored the fact that the Greek
trilogy let Electra escape the Furies’ retribution and gave his modern Electra a “tragic
ending worthy of (her) character”: she shuts herself up in the mansion forever and cries,
“I’ll live alone with the dead, and keep their secrets, and let them hound me, until the curse
is paid out.”

1932 March Just before O’Neill and Hauptmann will meet at a Theatre Guild dinner
during the intermission in a performance of Mourning Becomes Electra, Hauptmann states
in a Herald Tribune interview that O’Neill “is one of the really great figures in modern
drama. . . . The drama, under him, has found a new type of artistic expression. In some
plays O’Neill is a really vital social force. I esteem his Hairy Ape as one of the really great
social plays of our time. In other plays O’Neill is a sensitive poet; a really fine poet. His
Negro play, All God’s Chillun Got Wings, . . . treats a very important problem
intelligently, and above all, beautifully.”

September O’Neill has been struggling to compose Days Without End since June, but on
September 1 he records: “awoke with idea for this ‘Nostalgic Comedy’ & worked out
tentative outline—seems fully formed & ready to write.” By the end of the month he had
completed the first draft of Ah, Wilderness! He does not finish Days Without End to his
satisfaction until October 1933.

November In his “Memoranda on Masks” (American Spectator), O’Neill writes, “I hold

more and more surely to the conviction that the use of masks will be discovered eventually
to be the freest solution of the modern dramatist’s problem as to how—with the greatest
possible dramatic clarity and economy of means—he can express those profound hidden
conflicts of the mind which the probings of psychology continue to disclose to us. . . . For
what, at bottom, is the new psychological insight into human cause and effect but a study
in masks, an exercise in unmasking?” In a followup two months later he makes the claim
that masks would give actors “the opportunity for a totally new kind of acting,” unfolding
“many undeveloped possibilities of their art,” since “the mask is dramatic in itself, is a
proven weapon of attack. At its best, it is more subtly, imaginatively, suggestively
dramatic than any actor’s face can ever be.”

1933 October O’Neill’s only comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, is staged by the Theatre Guild,
enjoys a run of 289 performances, and is revived frequently. The intense 17-year-old
protagonist quotes Wilde, Shaw, Swinburne and Omar Khayyam to scandalize his
conventional parents (à la the young O’Neill), but avows innocent intentions when the
father of a girl he is infatuated with shows them a “dissolute and blasphemous” poem he
had sent her (“Why, I—I love her!”). Still, he risks alienating them after he receives a
rejecting letter from the girl: he gets drunk and goes to a brothel for revenge. However, all
ends well when he cannot go through with his plan, and he soon learns that the girl’s father
made her write the letter. The reunion with her is tender and the reconciliation with his
parents as sentimental as even an atypical O’Neill can get. The playwright tells a friend
that the play’s “whole importance and reality depend on its conveying a mood of memory
in exactly the right illuminating blend of wistful grin and lump in the throat.”

1934 January O’Neill’s semi-expressionistic Days Without End is staged by the Theatre
Guild, evokes a host of negative reviews, and manages only 57 performances. (In London
it is staged just twice in February 1935.) The playwright described it as a “modern miracle
play” which “reveals a man’s search for truth amid the conflicting doctrines of the modern
world and his return to his old religious faith.” The two-sided protagonist, a Faust-figure
who strives for spiritual enlightenment combined with a Mephistophelian second self (a
masked actor only he can see), goes through phases of atheism, Socialism, and
Nietzscheanism until he finds a soul-mate with whom he unites in apparently perfect love.
However, when he yields to the temptation of adultery, his wife is propelled to the brink of
death by a traumatic loss of faith and, stricken with guilt, he dominates his alter ego and
confronts the figure of Christ in a Catholic church to beg forgiveness and find divine love.
His wife intuits his spiritual state, forgives him, and regains her health. His return to the
faith of his childhood strikes his second self mortally, and the good news about his wife
prompts an exultant curtain line: “Life laughs with God’s love again! Life laughs with
love!” O’Neill later pronounced the last act “a phony.” A Catholic reviewer heralded the
drama as “the great Catholic play of the age,” but a more typical reaction was that of John
Mason Brown: “almost everything that was simple, straight-forward and disarmingly
poignant in the miracle plays of old becomes tedious . . . turgid and artificial in this fakey
preachment of our times.”

1935 January O’Neill begins planning and writing unquestionably the most ambitious
dramatic opus magnum ever conceived: an epic cycle of dramas (progressing as the years
pass from five to eleven long plays) which will depict the generations of an Irish-American
family, representative of the United States throughout its history, living out the nation’s
“ironic tragedy” of a preoccupation with material gain in a land of plenty at the expense of
humanistic values—and of the women caught in the web. As he describes the project in a
July letter to a friend, when he visualizes seven plays encompassing 1829 to 1932, “Each
play will be, as far as it is possible, complete in itself while at the same time an
indispensable link in the whole. . . . Each play will be concentrated around the final fate of
one member of the family but will also carry the story of the family as a whole.” The
theme is conveyed by the title he ultimately decides upon, “A Tale of Possessors Self-
Dispossesed,” and by a biblical saying he applies to the cycle, “For what shall it profit a
man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” O’Neill finishes preliminary drafts
of several of the plays in the next eight years, but is fully satisfied with only one, A Touch
of the Poet. His increasing physical problems in the 1940s will make him realize that he is
unable to finish the others; he therefore destroys all the unfinished manuscripts except the
one for More Stately Mansions. He leaves explicit directions for that to be destroyed in
case of his death, but a copy survives and his wife authorizes an abridged version to be
published in 1964.

1936 November O’Neill is awarded the Nobel Prize. In his acceptance speech (delivered
for him in Stockholm, since he was too sick to travel there), he expresses his debt to “that
greatest genius of all modern dramatists, your August Strindberg. . . . It was reading his
plays, when I first started to write back in the winter of 1913-14, that, above all else, first
gave me the vision of what modern drama could be, and first inspired me with the urge to
write for the theatre myself.” During an interview, he speculates that Mourning Becomes
Electra was probably the crucial reason why he was chosen for the award, but notes that
he had gained more personal gratification from writing The Great God Brown.

1940 January O’Neill finishes writing The Iceman Cometh, which he had begun in June
1939. He tells Lawrence Langner that it is “one of the best things I’ve ever done, perhaps
the best. . . . There are moments in it that suddenly strip the secret soul of a man stark
naked, not in cruelty or moral superiority, but with an understanding compassion which
sees him as a victim of the ironies of life and of himself. These moments are to me the
depth of tragedy, with nothing more that can possibly be said.” Judging that the play
would not be welcomed by war-conscious playgoers, and dreading the strain of New York
rehearsals, he postpones a stage production until 1946.

1941 March O’Neill finishes Long Day’s Journey Into Night to his satisfaction—“like
this play better than any I have ever written–does most with the least—a quiet play!—and
a great one, I believe.” He had begun making detailed notes and a scenario in July 1939,
and after months of concentrating on The Iceman Cometh, had proceeded with the
agonizing process of composition in March 1940. He had told his wife that he was
“bedeviled” into writing the deeply autobiographical play to come to terms with the
members of his family. According to her “it was a most strange experience to watch that
man being tortured every day by his own writing. He would come out of his study at the
end of the day gaunt and sometimes weeping.”

1942 June O’Neill finishes revising his short play Hughie, the first one-act he has
written since 1918. He had planned eight monologues in a series to be called “By Way of
Obit,” but completes only this one. It will be performed in Stockholm in 1958 and
published in 1959, but not staged in America until December 1964.

1943 May O’Neill finishes A Moon for the Misbegotten, which is published in June
1952 but not produced in New York until May 1957. (Out-of-town tryouts in February and
March 1947 convince him and the producers that the casting is unsatisfactory.) Due to an
extreme preoccupation with the war, an increasingly severe tremor in his hands, and an
inability to compose satisfactorily on the typewriter or by dictation, it is the last play
O’Neill will write.

1945 November O’Neill deposits a copy of Long Day’s Journey Into Night with
Random House with the proviso that it must not be opened until twenty-five years after his
death, at which time it could be published; however, it could never be performed.

1946 June Eric Bentley's seminal study of modern drama, The Playwright as Thinker, is
published and stirs controversy over its contentions that "art and commodity have become
direct antagonists" and that, in America at least, "the theater is dead." ("We have been
fooling ourselves into believing that the period 1920-1940 was a great period of drama,
particularly of American drama. It was not.") He calls O'Neill's tragic dramas of the
thirties "tragedies transported to the intense inane."

October O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, completed in early 1940, is produced by the
Theatre Guild and manages a run of 136 performances despite flaws in presentation and
what some critics perceive as inordinate length and repetitiveness in the script. The event
represents a switch from obscurity to center of controversy for O’Neill, who has not been
in the public eye since winning the Nobel Prize in 1936. The drama is a thoroughgoing
naturalistic tragedy (laced with comic incongruities) grounded in a deterministic view of
life, with a cross section of the dregs of humanity struggling against despair by repeatedly
voicing their “hopeless hopes” to emerge from the depths by returning to their professions
and their families, or just freeing themselves from alcoholism. An intruder comparable to
Gregers Werle in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck forces them to pursue their pipe dreams, thus
killing their false aspirations and bringing them “peace.” But the play embodies a basic
O’Neillian thesis, which is explicitly stated in the first minute by a nihilistic “old
Foolosopher”: “The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot
of us.” The ensuing action portrays one man after another returning from a vain attempt at
realizing his dream with a grim and phlegmatic indifference tantamount to a state of living
death. Moreover, the enlightened evangelist turns out to have killed his wife because, once
too often, she foisted upon him her own indestructible pipe dream that he would return to
fidelity and abstinence. This revelation, and the new delusion that he must have been mad,
allows all but one of the lowlifes to restore his dream—and his semblance of life—before
the final curtain. Only the old Foolosopher is left with nothing. When the director Kenneth
Macgowan asked O’Neill to compress Act One, the playwright justified its apparent
prolixity as necessary to build up “the complete picture of the group as it now is in the first
part—the atmosphere of the place, the humour and friendship and human warmth and
deep inner contentment at the bottom”; lacking this, “You wouldn’t feel the same
sympathy and understanding for them, or be so moved by what Hickey does to them.”

November Nathan in American Mercury uses the occasion of O’Neill’s reappearance on

Broadway to compare his gifts with Shaw’s and O’Casey’s: “the great body of his work
has a size and significance not remotely approached by any other American. . . . he is
plainly not the mind that Shaw is, not by a thousand leagues . . . he is not the poet O’Casey
is, for in O’Casey there is the true music of great wonder and beauty. But he has plumbed
depths deeper than either; he is greatly the superior of both in dramaturgy.” O’Casey
responds in a private letter, “I think you are right in saying that he goes far deeper than
Shaw or I do. I’ve often envied him this gift. I’ve pondered his plays and tried to discover
how he came by it, and, of course, never could. . . . It is a powerful gift and Gene . . . uses
it with power and ruthless integrity.”

1948 April Reviewing the published version of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, the
anonymous drama critic of the prestigious London Times Literary Supplement launches an
arresting diatribe on the playwright, generalizing from the play that the entire O’Neill
world is a “dirty pub, frequented by drunks and disorderlies and shiftless loafers.” O’Neill
himself is a “puritan” whose “fury against puritans is so fierce that it appears to be
pathological,” and whose “philosophy” is a “mass of undisciplined emotions and jejune
opinions.” Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times supplies the most eloquent rejoinder:
the genius of O’Neill is “the raw boldness and elemental strength of his attack upon
outworn concepts of destiny. . . . The peevish article in the Times Literary Supplement
overlooks the one thing in O’Neill that is inescapable: the passionate depth and vitality of
his convictions. Nothing said about him is worth the paper it is printed on unless it
recognizes the vitality he has brought into the theater.”

1953 November O’Neill dies on November 27 of a disease resembling Parkinson’s,

complicated by pneumonia, at the age of 65.

1956 February O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night is published by Yale
University Press and produced by the Royal Theatre in Stockholm. The book becomes a
bestseller, and the play is performed in New York in November, giving theatregoers,
students, and the general public its first acquaintance with the dramatic work which comes
to be widely considered the greatest American play. Carlotta O’Neill’s controversial
release of the script two years after her husband’s death, almost surely in defiance of his
wishes, leaves knowledgeable critics and scholars shaking their heads with disapproval but
also with awe and gratitude for the forbidden fruit. At first she refuses to allow a
performance in America, but she soon yielded to demands and the prospect of great profit.

May The revival of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh by José Quintero attains a run of 565
performances Off-Broadway and contributes greatly toward restoring his high reputation.
Played on the arena stage of the Circle in the Square without a break for supper, and
starring Jason Robards in the leading role, the values of the drama are realized much more
than they were in 1946. After that production the New Yorker critic, Wolcott Gibbs, judged
the play not one of O’Neill’s best, but after this one he called it “a great play . . . a tragedy
that, for all its defects, states a terrible truth with extraordinary power and compassion.”

November O’Neill’s reputation rises to an apotheosis with the first American production
of Long Day’s Journey Into Night in the Helen Hayes Theatre, directed by Quintero. It
attracts almost universal acclaim, runs for 390 performances, and wins the Pulitzer Prize,
O’Neill’s fourth. (Its London production beginning in September 1958 manages a run of
only 103.) One of the greatest naturalistic tragedies ever written, and possessing unique
interest as the intimate portrait of the playwright’s own family (“this play of old sorrow,
written in tears and blood”), the drama is cathartic for playgoers and readers as it was
therapeutic for O’Neill. Its naturalism is in the analytical mode of Ibsen’s Ghosts,
revealing and exploring the full skein of motivations for the characters’ present
misfortunes, conflicts, and torments. As the play unfolds and the crossfire of blaming and
defending leads more and more to exoneration, these cause/effect relationships emerge in
reverse chronological order, from very recent to the distant past. The fatalistic premises are
explicitly stated by the mother: “None of us can help the things life has done to us,” and
“The past is the present. . . . It’s the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t
let us.” The chief demonstration is her own addiction, which began after her younger son’s
birth and which she has vainly sought to cure again and again; the exquisitely pathetic
finale, with her “drowned” in morphine worse than ever before, confirms the futility of
trying to escape it. This is also striking evidence that O’Neill was willing to suppress
autobiographical truth for the sake of thematic autonomy, since his mother actually did
succeed in curing her addiction a few years after the time of the play.

1957 May The last play O’Neill finished (in 1943), A Moon for the Misbegotten, is
finally presented on Broadway but draws mixed reviews and runs for only 68
performances. The revivals of June 1968 and July 1974, with runs of 199 and 314
performances respectively, are better productions that enhance respect for the play as one
of his most moving dramatic works. The chief male character reenacts the guilt and self-
loathing that O’Neill’s brother experienced after he reverted to dissolution and
drunkenness when his mother suffered her fatal illness, which culminated in his whoring
on the train that bore her coffin and getting too drunk to attend her funeral. His anguished
confession of this is the climactic incident in a non-autobiographical plot that anticipates
his death and provides him with the absolution he seeks. An oversized but presentable
farmer’s daughter who has secretly loved him reveals that the image of bold promiscuity
she has promoted is false; she is a virgin and desires him passionately. He has also loved
her “in my fashion,” he pretends, but knows he will pollute their love if he fulfills her
wishes. This prompts his cathartic self-revelation, which leaves him in a state of “death-
like repose.” They have their night together, but it is spent with her cradling him on her
breast as he sleeps. The dominant scenes of pathos in the play alternate with exchanges of
sarcastic bantering as he and the woman, along with her father, poke and prod one
another’s protective facades.

1958 October O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet , completed in the early spring of 1936, is
finally staged on Broadway and—hailed as a “magnificent” discovery—attains a run of
284 performances. The play was the only part of O’Neill’s huge abandoned cycle that he
considered finished. Set in a seedy tavern within an Irish enclave near Boston in 1828, it
depicts a “long day’s journey into night” for the proprietor, his incurably loving wife and
their rebellious daughter. The protagonist is a figure of epic pretensions, the displaced son
of a nouveau riche Irishman who keeps his family in poverty by maintaining a
thoroughbred mare and by radiating scorn for his uncultured customers. His daughter has
fallen in love with the son of a well-to-do Yankee, and when the rich man insults him by
offering cash to prevent the match he insures his comeuppance by challenging the man to a
duel. Beaten by police, he is humiliated out of his Byronic pretensions of being “a lord wid
a touch av the poet,” shoots their chief symbol, the mare, and reverts to his lowborn Irish
ways. His wife, habitually treated as a contemptible servant but insistent that “there’s no
slavery in it when you love,” looks forward to the prospect of equal status and perhaps a
return of his affection, while his daughter, who has learned the tenacity of love by
unscrupulously seducing her beloved to insure the marriage, shows understanding for her
mother’s unconditional love and compassion for her father’s loss of pride.

1964 December O’Neill’s one-act Hughie, written in 1941, is finally performed in New
York. The play is a counterpoint of virtual monologues, with a seedy hotel guest babbling
on to a night clerk who rarely listens, and the clerk alternating his perfunctory responses
with “secret thoughts” heard only by the audience. The stimulus for the guest’s
ruminations is the funeral of Hughie, the previous clerk, from whom he gained admiration
for his gambling lifestyle; when the new clerk reveals that his name is Hughes and shows
empathy for the loss of his predecessor, the guest quits “carryin’ the torch for Hughie” and
happily rolls dice with his replacement. The play is quickly recognized as a masterpiece of
its genre, with some critics heralding the surprisingly absurdist qualities of the
incommunicative dialogue and cyclical structure.

1967 October A concocted version of the rough draft of O’Neill’s More Stately
Mansions, half as long as the original (which dates from 1938), is staged on Broadway by
José Quintero to largely negative reviews, but manages a run of 142 performances. The
abridgment, already published in 1964, has more than curio value since its action occurs
after that of A Touch of the Poet, and the two together give rich food for speculation about
the abandoned multiplay cycle of which they were integral parts.

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