The Unknown O'Neill: Unpublished Or Unfamiliar Writings of Eugene O'Neill

Capa
Yale University Press, 01/01/1988 - 434 páginas
Eugene O'Neill has long been celebrated as America's greatest playwright. This year, in the centennial of his birth, Yale University Press takes pride in bringing out an edition of O'Neill's little-known works of the imagination and his principal critical statements, most of which have not hitherto been published. Edited and introduced by eminent O'Neill scholar Travis Bogard, the pieces--mostly early works--shed valuable light on O'Neill's artistic development.
Contained here are a four-act tragedy, "The Personal Equation"; the original version of Marco Millions; a dramatic adaptation of Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"; a scenario "The Reckoning," and Bolton O'Neill; the fourth act of "The Ole Davil," which became, with some alteration of tone, "Anna Christie"; and two short stories, "Tomorrow" and "S.O.S." Also included are an unpublished love poem and several critical and occasional pieces, composition of Mourning Becomes Electra and "The Last Will and Testament of Silverdene Emblem O'Neill," written on behalf of his Dalmatian, Blemie. "There is here no undiscovered masterwork," says Bogard in his foreword, "but much here foreshadows what was to come as 'Tomorrow,' written in 1917, explores the ground on which The Iceman Cometh was to be created. In some of the writing, O'Neill is struggling to learn his craft: the scenario of 'The Reckoning,' for example, shows him in the process of forming a lifelong habit of detailing a play in a long narrative account. In the poem to Jane Caldwell and the memorial for Blemie, glimpses of a gentle, private man can be caught. In the critical pieces, O'Neill attempts an uncharacteristic but interesting articulation of his theatrical principles. In all the fugitive works gathered here, the O'Neill voice sounds clear.... It remains worth hearing."
"An important work about an unknown O'Neill that will reveal this fascinating personality to the general public." -Paul Shyre
Travis Bogard, emeritus professor of dramatic art at the University of California, Berkeley, has edited many works and papers of O'Neill, including, with Jackson R. Bryer, "The Theatre We Worked For": The Letters of Eugene O'Neill to Kenneth Macgowan.

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Páginas seleccionadas

Índice

The Reckoning and The Guilty One
76
The Ole Davil Act Four
147
The Ancient Mariner A Dramatic Arrangement of Coleridges Poem
167
Marcos Millions
191
Tomorrow
311
S O S
332
To a Stolen Moment
375
Are the Actors to Blame?
389
Memoranda on Masks
404
To the Kamerny Theatre
417
The Last Will and Testament of Silverdene Emblem ONeill
431
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Acerca do autor (1988)

Eugene O'Neill was born in New York City on October 16, 1888, the son of popular actors James O'Neill and Ellen Quinlan. As a young child, he frequently went on tour with his father and later attended a Catholic boarding school and a private preparatory school. He entered Princeton University but stayed for only a year. He took a variety of jobs, including prospecting for gold, shipping out as a merchant sailor, joining his father on the stage, and writing for newspapers. In 1912, he was hospitalized for tuberculosis and emotional exhaustion. While recovering, he read a great deal of dramatic literature and, after his release from the sanitarium, began writing plays. O'Neill got his theatrical start with a group known as the Provincetown Players, a company of actors, writers, and other theatrical newcomers, many of whom went on to achieve commercial and critical success. His first plays were one-act works for this group, works that combined realism with experimental forms. O'Neill's first commercial successes, Beyond the Horizon (1920) and Anna Christie (1921) were traditional realistic plays. Anna Christie is still frequently performed. It is the story of a young woman, Anna, whose hard life has led her to become a prostitute. Anna comes to live with her long-lost father, who is unaware of her past, and she falls in love with a sailor, who is also unaware. When Anna finds the two men fighting over her as though she were property, she is so angry and disgusted that she insists on telling them the truth. The man she loves rejects her at first, but then later returns to marry her. Soon O'Neill began to experiment more, and over the next 12 years used a wide variety of unusual techniques, settings, and dramatic devices. It is no exaggeration to say that, virtually on his own, O'Neill created a tradition of serious American theater. His influence on the playwrights who followed him has been enormous, and much of what is taken today for granted in modern American theater originated with O'Neill. A major legacy has been the nine plays he wrote between 1924 and 1931, tragedies that made heavy use of the new Freudian psychology just coming into fashion. His one comedy, Ah, Wilderness (1933), was the basis for the musical comedy, Oklahoma!, itself a groundbreaking event in American theater. O'Neill later began to write the intense, brooding, and highly autobiographical plays that are now considered to his best work. The Iceman Cometh (1946) is set in a bar in Manhattan's Bowery, or skid-row district. In the course of the play, a group of apparently happy men are forced to recognize the true emptiness of their lives. In A Long Day's Journey into Night (1956), O'Neill examines his own family and their tormented lives, a subject he continues in A Moon for the Misbegotten (1957). O'Neill's work was highly honored. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1936 and Pulitzer Prizes for Anna Christie, Beyond the Horizon, Strange Interlude (1928), and A Long Day's Journey Into Night, which also received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. O'Neill died in Room 401 of the Sheraton Hotel on Bay State Road in Boston, on November 27, 1953, at the age of 65. He was also born in a hotel room in Times Square, NYC.

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