AUTHOR: Eugene O’Neill

GIVEN NAME: Eugene Gladstone O’Neill

BORN: October 16, 1888, New York City

DIED: November 27, 1953

For nearly half a century, the plays of Eugene O’Neill have been profoundly shaped by the theater artists who have brought them to life. The opportunity to work on one of his three defining masterworks, Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956), The Iceman Cometh (1946), or A Moon for the Misbegotten (1947), is considered a rare and significant privilege by actors, directors, and designers. Along with Hamlet, Medea, King Lear, and Hedda Gabler, the characters of Edmund, Mary, Jamie, Josie, Tyrone, and Hickey are prized as iconic dream roles by many actors. To perform Long Day’s Journey into Night, in particular, is considered a defining moment in a stage career. Many of the finest actors of the past one hundred years, from Laurence Olivier to Philip Seymour Hoffman, have attempted to scale this theatrical Mount Olympus as proof that they have achieved the pinnacle of their profession. In the 2000 book Performing O’Neill, director Michael Kahn states: “Except for Shakespeare, who’s richer than O’Neill I think actors love doing O’Neill. . . . almost all the actors who worked with me on O’Neill thought they were in a major artistic event of their lives. People know that they’re working with a genius” (Shafer 115).

Playwrights, like composers or painters, are creative artists. Actors, designers, and directors, in contrast, are considered interpretive artists; they give form and meaning to what was originally created by someone else. O’Neill’s early experimental works provide bountiful feasts of interpretive possibilities for directors and designers. Written in the 1920s and 1930s, they are ambitious plays determined to break new boundaries in style and themes. Drawing on the heightened qualities of expressionism, the texts offer startling and surreal imagery that is so imaginative that one could envision breathtaking, avant-garde productions of The Great God Brown (1926) or The Emperor Jones (1920) directed today by visually innovative directors such as Julie Taymor (The Lion King, Spiderman) or Tim Burton (Alice in Wonderland, Sweeney Todd).

It is O’Neill’s later plays, however—those written during the 1940s and now considered his masterpieces—that are most often produced in professional theaters today. Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh, and A Moon for the Misbegotten are considered actor plays. They depict real people in outwardly simple, real-life situations. There are no bold conceptual metaphors, no stylized sets and costumes—almost no action. The work of the designers and director can seem virtually invisible. O’Neill wanted to create a modern American equivalent to Greek tragedy, and in these remarkable dramas, the majesty and magnitude are internal. The grandeur must be filtered through the lens of everyday behavior. How does an interpretive theater artist bring spiritual heft to scenes of people in ordinary situations Can an actor’s performance be magnificently tragic and intimately true at the same time

Beyond Melodrama

One of the many aspects that distinguish O’Neill’s biography and body of work is his unusual love-hate relationship with actors and the acting profession. From an early age, Eugene loved literature and his writing talents might have found expression in poetry or prose—like his literary idols Friedrich Nietzsche, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Arthur Schopenhauer. But for better and for worse, O’Neill had the theater in his blood. His father was a celebrated actor in the 1800s; his brother was an actor; as a young man, O’Neill himself appeared onstage—first with his father’s acting company and later in some of his own early one-acts. His third wife, Carlotta, was an actress. His daughter, Oona, married one of the most famous actors of the twentieth century, Charlie Chaplin; and O’Neill’s granddaughter, Geraldine Chaplin, and his great-granddaughter, Oona Chaplain, are actresses working in 2012.

Unique among the great playwrights of the modern era, O’Neill grew up backstage surrounded by actors—many of them colorful, charismatic, and exciting for a young boy to be around. But there was a difficult side to growing up in the theater—living in hotels, a lack of playmates, and a disorienting mix of fantasy and reality. O’Neill had a particularly unstable childhood moving from city to city with his drug- and alcohol-addicted parents. He greatly admired his famous actor-father and in other ways deeply resented him. Contradictory impulses of love-hate, fear-desire, and blame-guilt are found in the behavior of most of his characters and throughout his body of work. One could speculate that he felt a similar attraction and revulsion toward the theater itself. It was the source of his identity, fame, and creative expression, but writing plays required O’Neill to examine and reveal himself in a public manner that was surely difficult for an emotionally damaged and rather introverted person. The theater was both his home and a place where he never really belonged.

To better understand the relationship between O’Neill and actors, one must understand the context of acting styles and stagecraft that were prevalent during his lifetime (from 1888 to 1953). At first, O’Neill was writing scripts for largely uneducated and untrained actors who (like his father) were primarily experienced in performing William Shakespeare’s plays or Victorian melodramas—long before the modern concept of a stage director had emerged. O’Neill’s father made sure his son was well versed in Shakespeare’s tragedies, but it would have been melodramas that Eugene primarily attended as a boy.

Stage melodramas were enormously popular during the 1800s. They were the great mass entertainment of their time, much like movies and television would later become. Their stories were populated by broadly defined stock characters—the dashing hero, the dastardly villain, the virtuous heroine—who were engaged in a densely plotted story crammed with lively twists of fate and often improbable coincidences. In the end, good triumphed over evil, orphans found homes, the poor inherited unforeseen wealth, and the hero married the heroine. Melodramas largely lacked serious literary merit and would probably seem simplistic and silly to contemporary audiences, but they provided immense pleasure to Victorian audiences. The actors performed in enormous, ornate theaters sumptuously filled with spectacular scenery and costumes, long before the invention of electronic lights and microphones. An actor’s voice was required to be loud and proclamatory and his gestures bold and easily recognizable for audiences in the back balconies to be able to distinguish the characters and follow the plot. One can get a feeling of this acting style by watching early silent movies. The term melodrama (literally meaning drama underscored by music) still evokes associations of exaggeration and overreacting

Eugene O’Neill’s father, James O’Neill, was a bright and beloved star of the Victorian era. He was best known for appearing in the title role of a stage adaptation of Alexander Dumas’s swashbuckling adventure tale The Count of Monte Cristo (1845). To a large degree, Eugene O’Neill’s artistic values were a reaction against the dramatic conventions of melodrama and the acting style of his father’s generation. The playwright aspired to bring a new sensibility to American theater, based not on star personalities, two-dimensional characters, and simplistic tales of good triumphing over evil, but on psychological truth, social issues, and a dark, even tragic view of the human struggle. He drew inspiration from classical tragedies, the emerging theories of psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and the daring modern dramas written by Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. His three late masterpieces especially denounce conceptual artifice and theatricality. They have one set and almost no conventional plot. There are no clear-cut villains or heroes. The drama is interior. In James O’Neill’s theater of the nineteenth century, the predominant dramatic elements were plot and spectacle; in his son’s groundbreaking twentieth-century dramas, the predominant elements are character and theme. One can view Eugene O’Neill’s aesthetic as a rejection of his father’s art and the father himself.

O’Neill’s greatest period of popular and critical success extended from 1920 to 1933 when the majority of his plays were produced on Broadway, and he became an international celebrity. During that time, there were no stage directors or acting schools as they are known in the twenty-first century. High schools did not offer acting classes and colleges did not offer advanced degrees in theater arts. Plays were generally staged by the producers (the men who financed the production), the owners of the theater building, or sometimes the playwright or cast members. Even though O’Neill and his contemporaries had begun to write more complex dramas than were seen in the days of melodrama, acting technique was still highly externalized and utilized larger-than-life facial expressions, hand gestures denoting rage or sorrow, and musicalized speech that sometimes bordered on operatic.

The pioneering plays that made O’Neill arguably the world’s most famous playwright during his lifetime—Beyond the Horizon (1920), “Anna Christie” (1921), The Hairy Ape (1922), The Emperor Jones, Desire under the Elms (1924), Strange Interlude (1928),and Mourning Becomes Electra (1931)—are rarely produced in theaters in the twenty-first century. Thus most must judge their merits by reading the plays, not experiencing them as an audience member as the author intended. The works are astonishing in their ambitions—O’Neill relentlessly experimented with new theatrical concepts, themes and ideas, symbolism, and styles. They are populated with morally ambiguous, flawed, and fascinating characters. Like his hero Henrik Ibsen, O’Neill wrote strong-willed and fully dimensional female characters who were liberated beyond the conventions of their time. His daring range of topics—racism, prostitution, sexual abuse, incest, atheism, social and economic inequality—are as provocative today as they were decades ago.

In some ways, these audacious works demonstrate an ability to shape the experience of the audience beyond the limitations of the actors and directors. They abound with colorful stage directions (so much so that, in 2011, the New York Neo-Futurists mounted The Complete & Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O’Neill Volume 1, an evening of actors performing his stage directions, not the actual plays). Many of O’Neill’s scripts have dialogue that is phonetically spelled in a form of dialect to help the actor define the character. In The Hairy Ape, for example, the title role of Yank is an uneducated ship foreman who is called “a filthy beast” by one of the ship’s passengers. He responds:

This phonetic spelling is rather difficult to read, but the diligence with which O’Neill is attempting to shape the actor’s performance is admirable. For the most part, contemporary playwrights no longer write in colloquial dialect, and twenty-first century actors would probably have difficulty memorizing lines transcribed in such a manner. Today’s stage actors, usually college graduates of professional training programs or conservatories, have studied various dialects and vocal techniques. They are able to choose (in collaboration and consultation with the director) whether to bring dialectic elements to a performance.

For The Great God Brown, O’Neill required the actors to wear masks as they did in ancient Greek theater. This is a reflection of his fascination with Greek tragedy and his desire to find a modern equivalent of the form in which human psychology replaced the ancient belief in fate. It also demonstrates, however, the ways in which O’Neill was dramatically exploring the concept of the private life behind the public face. In performance, one could not see the actors’ facial expressions and had to experience them as symbols rather than real people. Perhaps O’Neill was searching for a way to embrace the limitations of his actors, but it is more likely he was attempting to communicate that the true self is hidden behind the mask—in this case, a symbolically literal one. Five years later in Mourning Becomes Electra, his modern re-imagining of the trilogy of Greek tragedies known as the Oresteia, O’Neill describes the characters as having mask-like faces but he does not require them to wear physical masks. The theatrical metaphor is gone, and he trusted the talents of his actors to reveal the duality of their characters’ public and private identities.

O’Neill explored this dichotomy with a different technique in his 1928 Broadway success Strange Interlude. In that play, his characters turn to the audience and directly explain, through asides, what they are secretly thinking and feeling about their circumstances and fellow characters. This is an astonishing and daring stage device that, again, showed the playwright’s desire to explore the difference between what appears to be true and what is actually true—to reveal the inner life. Acting technique had not yet evolved to the point at which it had codified the idea of subtext—a meaning or feeling behind the words. An actor approaching a role in Strange Interlude today could potentially use the character’s inner monologue entirely as subtext—not speak it but still play it as an inner impulse, a private truth, a secret that would give the characterization nuance and contradictory dimensions.

Resurrected by the Method

As O’Neill’s most prolific period was coming to a close, a new generation of American theater artists began to emerge, bringing another artistic revolution to the stage. O’Neill himself played some role in this sea change. In 1915, he joined the Provincetown Players, a rebellious collective of artists who aspired to create ensemble-based theater on serious social themes. They produced most of his short one-act plays, and O’Neill himself acted in several of the earliest ones. In 1916, the company moved from Cape Cod to New York City, where it thrived for a time before disbanding after the stock market crash of 1929.

The ideals of the Provincetown Players were more fully realized by the Group Theatre, founded in 1931, which drew its inspiration from the Moscow Art Theatre and Russian acting teacher Konstantin Stanislavski. The Group introduced the concept of actor training and the role of the stage director into the American theater. Many of the Group’s members went on to become influential acting teachers, passing on to subsequent generations their spirit, principles, and techniques. Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner, and Robert Lewis served as teachers to actors Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, Sandra Bullock, Robert DeNiro, and Dustin Hoffman. External factors like facial expressions, a mellifluous voice, and graceful stage motions became obsolete as measures of talent. Acting technique became based on psychological truth and drew intensely upon the personal histories and private emotions of the actor.

After World War II, this new process of American acting became popularly known as the method. The plays of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller were interpreted and greatly influenced by method actors and directors. Marlon Brando’s performance as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) emerged as the prototype of this new kind of acting—intense, deeply felt, mumbling, and so natural that one could not be sure if he was acting or just being. Elia Kazan and Harold Clurman, who were members of the Group Theatre, pioneered a new understanding of the role of the director to include text analysis and actor coaching. They aspired to unite the writer’s fictional character with the actual experiences and qualities of the actor who embodied him. Film acting, which captured performances in extreme close-up, also exerted an influence on stage acting, which became increasingly more subtle. Smaller theaters were built—including what is known as Off Broadway—providing a more intimate spatial relationship between the actor and audiences. Unfortunately, Eugene O’Neill’s plays would not fully benefit from these developments in the art form until after his death.

After winning the Noble Prize in Literature in 1936, O’Neill largely withdrew from public life. He was battling declining health and personal demons, but he also began working on a new style of playwriting for him that would ultimately result in his famed final trilogy. What truly distinguishes Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh, and A Moon for the Misbegotten is that the plays are, to varying degrees, bravely autobiographical.The scope of O’Neill’s ambitious reach turned introspective, and the results were something unprecedented. Long Day’s Journey into Night is a harrowing, uncompromising, almost documentary-like depiction of his own family in 1912, with the character of Edmund representing O’Neill himself. The Iceman Cometh is drawn, in part, from O’Neill’s years of drunken dissipation and contemplated suicide when he lived in a rooming house over a Greenwich Village bar called Jimmy the Priest’s. A Moon for the Misbegotten, although it has a fictional plot, has a central character based on O’Neill’s self-destructive, alcoholic brother Jamie, who died at the age of forty-three. By refocusing his creativity beneath his own mask to the memories and questions of identity there, O’Neill was able to find the modern tragedy he had long pursued. He revealed himself with courage, honesty, and an unparalleled—even shocking—dimension of stage truth. Soon, American theater artists would be able to realize the greatness of his vision.

The Iceman Cometh was produced in 1946, and A Moon for the Misbegotten a year later. Neither was enthusiastically received, and both were somewhat dismissed as flops. Ten years after its initial failure, however, and just three years after O’Neill death, The Iceman Cometh was produced again—this time Off Broadway at the Circle in the Square Theatre. The production featured a cast of actors who were well versed in a modern acting methodology that enabled them to realize the inner psychology and emotions of O’Neill’s late writing. The revival featured actor Jason Robards as Hickey and was directed by José Quintero, two dynamic new talents of the new generation. The production was a revelation to audiences, critics, and scholars. The flop was reassessed and proclaimed a modern classic.

Robards and Quintero reunited later that same year for the Broadway premiere of Long Day’s Journey into Night (completedin1941, but not produced until 1956). Hailed by many as “the Great American Play,” it was an even greater triumph than The Iceman Cometh and earned O’Neill a posthumous Pulitzer Prize (his fourth).Robards and Quintero brought their interpretive talents to O’Neill’s late work one more time with a Broadway revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1973. Twenty-six years after its initial failure, the acting and direction of the play caused a sensation and the play was reclaimed as among O’Neill’s finest. In his 1973 New York Times review, critic Clive Barnes wrote:

Eugene O’Neill’s three defining masterworks and his reputation as America’s greatest playwright were now established—and to some degree even rescued—by actors and directors who were capable of giving them life. As of 2012, according to the Internet Broadway Database, O’Neill’s body of work had received thirty-four Broadway productions since his death, including four major revivals of Long Day’s Journey into Night. His greatest literary achievements continue to astonish and resonate with new generations of theater artists and to move audiences all over the world. Ironically, or perhaps fittingly for a man who was “always a little in love with death” (O’Neill, Long 154), O’Neill did not live to see this happen.

The Actor’s Journey

In the theater, a play’s defining but intangible qualities are often described as “the world of the play.” It is a term that denotes the play’s unique essence or tone as embodied by interpretive artists—not only what is written on the page, but what is alive and breathing on the stage. What is it about O’Neill’s world, specifically in his three late plays, that is so compelling to actors and directors What is distinctive for theater artists who have the privilege of interpreting Long Day’s Journey into Night, a work he described in its dedication as “written in tears and blood . . . with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness”

Reading Long Day’s Journey into Night offers enormous rewards. It reads almost like a novel. Drawing from his own memories, O’Neill has an exacting eye for physical detail when describing a character, a moment, or a setting. The play begins with more than three pages of such descriptions and stage directions. He tells us exactly what the set looks like, even down to the names of books located on the shelves. He describes not only a character’s appearance but history and state of mind. For example, the mother Mary Tyrone:

O’Neill’s detailed descriptions extend further into directions for the actors that suggest what the character is feeling and how the line should be spoken: “With a resentment that has a quality of being automatic and on the surface while inwardly she is indifferent”(61). Evidently, this is how O’Neill saw and heard the roles played in his imagination. He was attempting to help the actors understand his intention and shape their interpretations. He gives actors a dizzying array of adverbs to play, including Tormentedly, Tensely, Maliciously, Dryly, Shakenly, Bitterly, Pitiably, Miserably, Brokenly, and Violently.

Contemporary playwrights no longer give such specific directives to actors and directors. It would seem too limiting, controlling, or perhaps even disrespectful to the actor’s own choices and process. Should directors cast actors in Long Day’s Journey into Night based on their physical traits as O’Neill outlines them Should actors follow O’Neill’s elaborate stage directions when interpreting his plays Skillful directors are interested in the personal identification that an actor brings to characterization more than the actor’s outward appearance. Professional actors may allow stage directions to suggest or inform their ideas and behavior, but generally want to make their own original interpretative choices, especially when portraying characters from classic works of dramatic literature.

Unlike many of his richly plotted early plays, which often span years and feature doomed marriages, murders, and an array of other life-changing incidents, O’Neill’s later plays have very little story. His interest lies in the characters, not events. All vestiges of melodrama are virtually gone. In Long Day’s Journey into Night, what really happens Edmund’s diagnosis of tuberculosis is confirmed, and it is established that his drug-addicted mother is using morphine once again. Both of these incidents are suspected from the play’s beginning and neither is a surprise revelation. What is surprising is the unforeseen depth of humanity in the characters. Tyrone, Mary, Jamie, and Edmund experience an astounding range of emotions, constantly changing alliances, and multifaceted relationships with one another. The audience’s interest rests largely on how the actors peel away each psychological layer to expose the valor and vulnerabilities of these very human beings.

The Tyrone family, like many of O’Neill’s men and women, construct intricate layers of lies and self-delusion around themselves for protection, alcohol and drugs being both the problem and the passageway to escape. Embodying these qualities is a particularly exciting challenge for actors that requires a deep, personal connection, even fearlessness, as well as exceptional technique to achieve with honesty. Katharine Hepburn, the four-time Academy Award-winning actress who played Mary in the 1961 film version, described the experience: “It is a brilliantly written play, the character of the mother described with such sensitivity that it was an inspiration to do. . . . One could never be better than the part. O’Neill’s knowledge of people, and his analysis of that couple, was really thrilling” (255).

Actors regularly imagine themselves into extraordinarily dramatic and often painful situations that would be terrifying in real life but can be vicariously thrilling if experienced in a fictional work of stage drama. O’Neill’s people live in heightened emotional states and possess the startling and devastating capacity to shift suddenly from one emotional extreme to its opposite. In the claustrophobic family scenario of Long Day’s Journey into Night, primal emotions of love, hate, fear, jealousy, shame, and guilt spin around in the characters in a game of emotional Russian roulette. They vacillate between blame and forgiveness, loving and wounding, reaching out and pushing away. They are propelled by both self-assuredness and self-doubt.

Consider the amazing emotional dexterity required of the actor playing Jamie in the fourth act of Long Day’s Journey into Night when he confronts Edmund. He begins by pledging fraternal loyalty, saying “We’ve been more than brothers. You are the only pal I’ve ever had. I love your guts. I’d do anything for you.” In his next line, however, he shifts to suspicious jealousy: “You suspect now I’m thinking to myself that Papa is old and can’t last much longer, and if you were to die, Mama and I would get all he’s got and I’m probably hoping –.” Then he goes on a raging attack followed by remorse:

The pendulum of emotions swings several more times and lands on a love-hate moment that is quintessential O’Neill:

No other playwright, before or since, has created such tremendous, abrupt, contradictory shifts of feeling for his characters. Actors performing O’Neill must be emotional acrobats, capable of moving in a single breath through an astonishing range of polarized feelings, moment by moment. This demanding and yet exhilarating process is in many ways at the very heart of the acting process and a veritable skill test for an actor. O’Neill’s plays offer such an emotional roller coaster ride that it is no wonder that Hepburn described her experience as “thrilling,” and that performers long to see if they have the talent to rise to the challenge.

Much has been written about the distinctive qualities of O’Neill’s dialogue. A frequent complaint is that it lacks the flow and rhythms of natural speech. Some critics feel that it is too artfully or self-consciously constructed; others say that his use of dialects and slang gives it an aural clumsiness. Certainly, his dialogue lacks the graceful musicality of Williams or the common man directness of Arthur Miller. But O’Neill’s dialogue has a muscular cadence and vitality that is wonderfully his own. His characters are impassioned and active, even within their vacillating denials and delusions. Correspondingly, their speech has urgency, power, and an aggressive energy to it. Try reading an O’Neill scene aloud and see how it sounds. His words were meant to be spoken and heard, not silently read. Gifted actors are capable of making them sound naturally conversational yet elevated with a hardscrabble poetry that is unmistakably O’Neill. When the Tyrones attack or reach out to one another, their words ring with power and pain, the ability to give hurt or give comfort. The dialogue cuts like a scalpel—knowingly and precisely exposing the wounds of the past.

As his surrogate Edmund explains in Long Day’s Journey into Night, from an early age O’Neill felt that his birth was a mistake. He was an alcoholic by the age of fifteen and first attempted suicide at the age of twenty-three. His writing captures the wounded humanness of people like him, those he called “fog people.” His best plays are populated with outsiders and misfits—the alcoholic bums and prostitutes in The Iceman Cometh, the oversized farm-girl in A Moon for the Misbegotten,and his own isolated and doomed family struggling to survive one endless day. In his dramatic depictions of the lost and lonely, O’Neill gives dignity and respect to these damaged souls—the misbegotten. He accepts and forgives them because he is one of them.

The theater, and indeed all of the arts, are populated with brilliant artists who, like O’Neill, feel that they do not belong. Their separateness, whatever its source, also contributes to their artistic gifts. Part of the appeal of O’Neill’s writing for theater artists indisputably comes from a feeling that he understands their struggles and accepts their innate sense of difference. In some deeply intuitive way, he calls to their blood. In the world of Eugene O’Neill, the misbegotten actor and the misbegotten character become one. The New York Times’s editorial tribute to Jason Robards, the definitive O’Neill actor, described it his way:

There is a common perception that acting is a form of hiding, of imagination, of transformation of the actor into another identity—this was certainly true of O’Neill’s father. But in Long Day’s Journey into Night, O’Neill’s collaborators, like the playwright himself, must reveal rather than hide the deepest truths about themselves with an uncompromising and devastating sort of psychic penetration. Acting O’Neill demands a spiritual commitment of the entire being that is relentless, dangerous, and ultimately exhilarating. It invites risk, exposure, sacrifice—a transcending of limits in service to truth that is the hallmark of a great acting performance and the essential task behind the creation of every great work of art.

In his early plays, O’Neill aspires to bring the majesty of tragedy to the modern stage through an innovative range of fascinating concepts and theatrical constructs. In his three greatest plays, however, the playwright captures tragedy on a personal scale. He found epic grandeur in the sufferings of ordinary human beings seeking peace, forgiveness, and redemption. It is this commitment to truth, as much as to the tragic, that compels generations of theater artists to enter the masterpieces of Eugene O’Neill—a truth that belongs beyond established theatrical conventions, beyond imagined horizons, beyond the life of one playwright.

Works Cited