“I remember at one point going through everything of Eugene O’Neill. I was struck by the sheer theatricality of his plays. You could see how they worked. I read them all one summer. I had nosebleeds, and for some reason it took all summer to get the appointment to get my nose cauterized. So I just lay on the porch all day and read Eugene O’Neill. That was all I did. And dab at my face with an ice cube.” – Joan Didion
Today is the birthday of American playwright Eugene O’Neill.
He made his New York debut – with a one-act play presented in a night of three one-acts – at the new Playwrights Theatre – on 139 Macdougal Street, in Greenwich Village. It was the first season for this new theatre. The evening of one-acts were:
The Game, by Louise Bryant (ahem)
King Arthur’s Socks, by Floyd Dell
Bound East for Cardiff, by Eugene O’Neill. (I posted an excerpt of this play here)
O’Neill was completely unknown at the time. He went on to write some of the most influential American plays ever written – he won 4 Pulitzer Prizes – and he is the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize. His work is untouchable, as far as I’m concerned. Nobody else even comes CLOSE.
In 1916, the Playwrights Theatre was formed by a group of young artists – they all were up in Provincetown on vacation – and they built the Playwrights Theatre on a wharf.
They called themselves the Provincetown Players. They did everything, they were a true ensemble.
When the idyllic summer ended (and you can see Warren Beatty’s version of all of this in Reds) – the Provincetown Players relocated to Greenwich Village (where many of them lived already) – and opened up their theatre on Macdougall.
This was the beginning of Eugene O’Neill’s career. He got enough of his short plays produced over the next 4 years – that his reputation began to grow – until finally Beyond the Horizon, his first full-length, opened on Broadway in 1920.
In the premiere of Bound East for Cardiff – O’Neill played the “second mate” which is basically a walk-on. He had one line:
“Isn’t this your watch on deck., Driscoll?”
O’Neill’s father, James, had been an actor, very popular, very successful, touring about with popular plays of the day. Long Day’s Journey Into Night was autobiographical. Eugene O’Neill was raised Irish Catholic, and his rejection of the faith devastated his father – just like in the play. O’Neill’s father was also an alcoholic (like James Tyrone) – and has also given up a career as a Shakespearean actor for a part in a very commercial (but worthless) production called Monte Cristo. James Tyrone is haunted by the great Shakespearean actor he could have been … and so was O’Neill’s dad. Like Mary Tyrone, O’Neill’s mother in real-life was a morphine addict. Just like in the play, she became addicted to morphine after an incompetent doctor proscribed it to her following a difficult childibrth. Jamie is modeled after O’Neill’s real-life brother, an alcoholic whoremonger who was basically a huge failure at whatever he tried to accomplish. Eugene had an older brother named Edmund – who had died when he was a baby. In the play, the baby who died is named Eugene. Like Edmund, Eugene O’Neill sailed for years, living a restless peripatetic constantly-broke life. He took odd jobs. O’Neill was also not what you would call a hearty man with a hearty constitution. He was fragile, and eventually got tuberculosis. He spent 6 months in a sanatorium for treatment – turberculosis was a very dangerous disease.
O’Neill was a man with demons, make no mistake. His plays are all personal, all drawing from his own life, but it was as though he held off on family matters until the very end … it was too dangerous, too frightening to even face. There’s a reason why Long Day’s Journey is so relentless, so depressing, so spectacular. It had been boiling up in him for decades.
On Sunday, Aug. 13, 1916 – A.J. Philpot, a journalist for the Boston Globe wrote a piece about the Provincetown Players – and mentioned Eugene O’Neill – the first moment of recognition of this great great writer:
Many people will remember James O’Neill who played “Monte Cristo.” He had a son – Eugene O’Neill – who knocked about the world in tramp steamers – and saw life “in the raw,” and thought much about it. He is one of the Players, and he has written some little plays which have made a very deep impression on those who have seen them produced here.
“some little plays”. Amazing, right?? Knowing what was coming? Knowing the impact that O’Neill would eventually have?
Here’s a photograph of O’Neill at Sea Island Bend (photographer: Carl van Vechten)
O’Neill, due to ill health, was unable to attend the Nobel Prize banquet in honor of him (in 1936) … but he wrote his speech out, and had James E. Brown read it for him. Here it is in its entirety, but I liked this part especially:
This thought of original inspiration brings me to what is, for me, the greatest happiness this occasion affords, and that is the opportunity it gives me to acknowledge, with gratitude and pride, to you and to the people of Sweden, the debt my work owes 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. If there is anything of lasting worth in my work, it is due to that original impulse from him, which has continued as my inspiration down all the years since then – to the ambition I received then to follow in the footsteps of his genius as worthily as my talent might permit, and with the same integrity of purpose.
Of course, it will be no news to you in Sweden that my work owes much to the influence of Strindberg. That influence runs clearly through more than a few of my plays and is plain for everyone to see. Neither will it be news for anyone who has ever known me, for I have always stressed it myself. I have never been one of those who are so timidly uncertain of their own contribution that they feel they cannot afford to admit ever having been influenced, lest they be discovered as lacking all originality.
No, I am only too proud of my debt to Strindberg, only too happy to have this opportunity of proclaiming it to his people. For me, he remains, as Nietzsche remains in his sphere, the Master, still to this day more modern than any of us, still our leader. And it is my pride to imagine that perhaps his spirit, musing over this year’s Nobel award for literature, may smile with a little satisfaction, and find the follower not too unworthy of his Master.
Oh, and naturally, because I must:
Eugene O’Neill wrote Long Day’s Journey Into Night (what a title) in 1939, but it was never performed in his lifetime. His wife remembered the summer he wrote it. He would stay in his study all day working, and emerge in the evening, with his eyes puffed up and red from weeping. He wrote and wept. He wept and wrote. All day long, in his study, emerging as though from a nightmare every night, before going back in to face it every day. And damn, you can tell that from the language in that play that he had ripped out a piece of his own heart in writing it. An astonishing and painful exorcism has taken place. It’s a bleak play. If you find the hope in it, lemme know, would ya?
On his twelfth wedding anniversary with his wife Carlotta, O’Neill gave her the script of the play with this note:
For Carlotta,
on our 12th Wedding Anniversary
Dearest: I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood. A sadly inappropriate gift, it would seem, for a day celebrating happiness. But you will understand. I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enable me to face my dead at last and write this play, write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.These twelve years, Beloved One, have been a Journey into Light, into love. You know my gratitude. And my love!
Gene
Tao House
July 22, 1941
The haunted Tyrones. O’Neill knew what it would take to get that story out of him. Naturally, he put it off. A couple of his plays (Moon for the Misbegotten and Long Day’s Journey) had their major ground-breaking productions after O’Neill’s death. It is not that his success was posthumous, that is obviously not the case … but his stature has just grown over the years. To me, even with the Tennessee Williams’ and the Arthur Miller’s … he is THE American playwright. In many ways, his work paved the way for the others.
So happy birthday, “Gene”. Thank you for “facing your dead” at last, and putting that to paper.
EXCERPTS FROM O’NEILL’S WORK
Moon of the Caribees
Bound East for Cardiff
The Long Voyage Home
In the Zone
Ile
The Iceman Cometh
Anna Christie
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
