The Plays of Eugene O’Neill: Long Day’s Journey Into Night

(l-r) Dean Stockwell, Ralph Richardson, Katharine Hepburn, and Jason Robards in Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962) Long Day’s Journey Into Night is the final play by Eugene O’Neill to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. It’s also the first of his plays to be published post-humously. O’Neill didn’t want it published for twenty-five …

Review: Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down

On January 8, 2011, Gabby Giffords was shot in the head while participating in a Congress at Your Corner meet-and-greet with her constituents. Several of them died. Giffords was lucky in that she survived, though where the bullet hit meant that she’d have to deal with paralysis on the right side of her body, partial …

The Plays of Eugene O’Neill: The Iceman Cometh

Lee Marvin as Hickey and Hildy Brooks as Margie in John Frankenheimer's adaptation of The Iceman Cometh In 1936, Eugene O’Neill would become the first (and only) American playwright to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, “for the power, honesty and deep-felt emotions of his dramatic works, which embody an original concept of tragedy” (Nobel …

Seattle Opera: Tristan & Isolde – October 21, 2022

The first Tristan and Isolde: Ludwig and Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld, June 1865. Photograph by Josef Albert. Tristan und Isolde was the first opera I bought on CD, before I had heard or seen any opera outside of excerpts on TV commercials. That was almost 30 years ago, and outside of a performance in New …

The Plays of Eugene O’Neill: Ah, Wilderness!

Eric Linden as Richard Miller and Helen Flint as Belle in Ah, Wilderness! (1935) Ah, Wilderness! is a bit of an anomaly in the Eugene O'Neill canon, in that it's a comedy. It is, in fact, his only full length comedy. Coming after the 5-hour Strange Interlude and (right after) the play cycle Mourning Becomes …

The Plays of Eugene O’Neill: Mourning Becomes Electra

Rosalind Russell and Michael Redgrave in Mourning Becomes Electra (1947) The dead! Why can't the dead die! -Lavinia Mannon, The Haunted, Act Four (O'Neill 372) After the 5-hour Strange Interlude, which was the height of his experimental phase, Eugene O’Neill wrote the three-play cycle Mourning Becomes Electra, which is the height of his Greek tragedy …

The Plays of Eugene O’Neill: Strange Interlude

Norma Shearer, Alexander Kirkland, and Clark Gable in Strange Interlude (1932) While the best of O'Neill's Greek tragedy-inspired plays and realistic plays were in the future, we now come to the culmination of his experimental plays. Strange Interlude was the third play to win him a Pulitzer Prize and the last one he'd win while …

The Plays of Eugene O’Neill: Desire Under the Elms

Sophia Loren and Anthony Perkins in Desire Under the Elms Eugene O'Neill's plays can be grouped into three or four major categories. In Beyond the Horizon and Anna Christie, O’Neill wrote realistic plays with melodramatic elements. Starting with The Emperor Jones and culminating in Strange Interlude (which we'll discuss in the next post), O'Neill dabbled …

The Plays of Eugene O’Neill: The Emperor Jones

Paul Robeson as The Emperor Jones Between Beyond the Horizon and Anna Christie comes The Emperor Jones. Charles S. Gilpin originated the role of Brutus Jones, but had a falling out with O'Neill when the playwright refused to remove the N-word from the play, which Gilpin would often change to "Negro" during performances. For the …

The Plays of Eugene O’Neill: Anna Christie

Greta Garbo as Anna Christie Next up on the list of important O'Neill plays is Anna Christie, which won O'Neill his second Pulitzer Prize, just two years after he won for Beyond the Horizon.  It was also the first play of his to be adapted to the screen, in a 1923 silent version directed by …