Eugene O’Neill and 20th Century Drama

Script AnalysisTH 325

An international drama

During the 20th century (especially after World War I) Western drama became more unified and less the product of separate national literary traditions. Realism, naturalism, and symbolism (and various combinations of these) continued to inform important plays.

Experiments

For most of 20th- century theatre, realism was the mainstream. There were some, however, who turned their backs on realism. Realism originally began as an experiment to make theatre more useful to society—a reaction against melodrama, highly romanticized plays—and realism has become the dominant form of theatre in the 20th-century. There have been some experiments, though, which have allowed for more adventurous innovation in mainstream theatre.

Early 20th century naturalismAmong the many 20th-century playwrights who wrote what can be broadly termed naturalist dramas were Gerhart Hauptmann (German), John Galsworthy (English), John Millington Synge and Sean O'Casey (Irish), and Eugene O'Neill, Clifford Odets, and Lillian Hellman (American).

Eugene O’Neill

Lillian Hellman

Clifford Odets

International influences

Three vital figures of 20th-century drama are the American Eugene O'Neill, the German Bertolt Brecht, and the Italian Luigi Pirandello.

Eugene O’Neill

Three vital figures of 20th-century drama are the American Eugene O'Neill, the German Bertolt Brecht, and the Italian Luigi Pirandello. O'Neill's body of plays in many forms—naturalistic, expressionist, symbolic, psychological—won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936 and indicated the coming-of-age of American drama.

Bertolt Brecht

Brecht wrote dramas of ideas, usually promulgating socialist or Marxist theory. In order to make his audience more intellectually receptive to his theses, he endeavored—by using expressionist techniques—to make them continually aware that they were watching a play, not vicariously experiencing reality.

Luigi Pirandello

For Pirandello, too, it was paramount to fix an awareness of his plays as theater; indeed, the major philosophical concern of his dramas is the difficulty of differentiating between illusion and reality.

The rise of realismIn the 1920s, realism had become widespread in England, France, and the United States; in the U.S. theatre boomed— There were 200 to 275 new productions a year average. One of the important groups that enhanced the theatrical presence in the U.S. was the Theatre Guild, founded in 1919 with the intention of bringing important foreign works to improve theatre in the U.S. By the mid 1920s, playwrights the United States were also competing to have their works produced by the Theatre Guild.

Perhaps the most significant American playwright to have plays produced by the Theatre Guild was Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953), with five of his plays appearing at one time in New York during the 1924-25 season. O’Neill helped establish serious realistic Drama as the main Broadway form. His Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Desire Under The Elms are two of his great serious dramas.

The New Stagecraft

Also in the 1920s, came something called "The New Stagecraft." The Theatrical Syndicate had pretty much controlled American theatre till around 1915. But developing around 1910 was a loose-knit group of what came to be known as the "little theatres." The Provincetown Players introduced the work of O’Neill, and the Washington Square Players, which later evolved into the Theatre Guild, encouraged the New Stagecraft.

Notable American Designers

Two major American designers who advocated this New Stagecraft were Robert Edmund Jones (1887-1954) and Lee Simonson (1888-1967). Both were major forces in American theatrical design in the first half of 20th-century, moving away from realism and towards suggestion and mood--perhaps a realism of mood and feeling would describe its "realist" origins.

HE WHO GETS SLAPPED, Sets and costumes designed by Lee Simonson,The Theatre Guild, 1922

ROBERT EDMOND JONES

JONES’ design for O’Neill’s DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS

Production photo from DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS, 1924

Robert Edmond Jones design for O’Neill’s THE ICEMAN COMETH

The Provincetown Players

Musical revue

But during the 1920s, as well, a period known as the roaring twenties--the American musical theatre began to develop more fully, with the Ziegfeld Follies offering variety acts and introducing songwriters and performers to theatre audiences.

Worker’s TheatreDuring the decade of the twenties, there were also the beginnings of the Workers’ Theatre Movement. In 1926, a small group of authors and theater directors formed the Workers’ Drama League, and the New Playwrights’ Theatre formed the next year. Both hoped to present drama that had some social significance and would deal with some of the problems of the day. The workers’ theatre movement would not develop fully in the United States until after the stock market crash of October 1929.

WORKS BY EUGENE O’NEILL

The Glencairn Plays—filmed together as The Long Voyage Home:

Bound East for Cardiff, 1914In The Zone, 1917The Long Voyage Home, 1917Moon of the Caribbees, 1918

Moon of the Caribees at Provincetown

1924

A revival of the play staged at NYU’s Studio Theatre in 1988

A revival of MOON OF THE CARIBEES presented as part of a trilogy of O’Neill Sea Plays in NYC by the Wooster Group.

Other one-act plays

• A Wife for a Life, 1913• The Web, 1913• Thirst, 1913• Recklessness, 1913• Warnings, 1913• Fog, 1914• Abortion, 1914• The Movie Man: A

Comedy, 1914• The Sniper, 1915

• Before Breakfast, 1916• Ile, 1917• The Rope, 1918• Shell Shock, 1918• The Dreamy Kid, 1918• Where the Cross Is Made,

1918• Exorcism 1919

• Bread and Butter, 1914• Servitude, 1914• The Personal Equation,

1915• Now I Ask You, 1916• Beyond the Horizon, 1918 -

Pulitzer Prize, 1920• The Straw, 1919• Chris Christophersen, 1919

• Gold, 1920• Anna Christie, 1920 -

Pulitzer Prize, 1922• The Emperor Jones, 1920• Diff'rent, 1921• The First Man, 1922• The Hairy Ape, 1922• The Fountain, 1923

WORKS BY EUGENE O’NEILL• Marco Millions, 1923–25• All God's Chillun Got Wings , 1924• Welded, 1924• Desire Under the Elms, 1925• Lazarus Laughed, 1925–26• The Great God Brown, 1926• Strange Interlude, 1928 - Pulitzer Prize• Dynamo, 1929• Mourning Becomes Electra , 1931• Ah, Wilderness!, 1933• Days Without End, 1933

WORKS BY EUGENE O’NEILL

• The Iceman Cometh, written 1939, published 1940, first performed 1946

WORKS BY EUGENE O’NEILL

• Hughie, written 1941, first performed 1959

• Long Day's Journey Into Night, written 1941, first performed 1956 - Pulitzer Prize 1957

WORKS BY EUGENE O’NEILL

• A Moon for the Misbegotten, written 1941–1943, first performed 1947

A Touch of the Poet, completed in 1942, first performed 1958

More Stately Mansions, second draft found in O'Neill's papers, first performed 1967

AH, WILDERNESS at ACT (San Francisco - October 2015)

HUGHIE on Broadway - 2016Announced earlier this year, Forest Whitaker will make his Broadway debut next spring in a revival of “Hughie,” a play by Eugene O’Neill, set in a New York City hotel in 1928, and centers on a hustler named Erie Smith, who confides in a night clerk.

The production has now shored-up its team both in front of and behind the camera, and set a theater and opening date.

Tony Award winner Frank Wood has joined the production, and will star opposite Whitaker in the play, which will be housed at the Booth Theatre, with performances (reviews) set to begin on February 5, 2016, with an official opening on February 25 for a limited engagement.

O'Neil wrote the play in the 1940s, and it was first staged on Broadway in 1964, starring Jason Robards.

This revival will be directed by Michael Grandage, former artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse in London, who won a 2010 Tony Award for his direction of “Red.”

There was a 1975 revival that starred Ben Gazzara, followed by another revival, in 1996, starring Al Pacino.