Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953)

 

   Eugene O’ Neill penned plays about common people- sailors, merchants, damaged and troublesome families- all contending with life’s difficulties. He also addressed important societal subjects and individuals’ psyches, including his own, and experimented with dramatic composition and staging. O’Neill was an artist who employed the theatre “as a medium for the expression of his sentiments and his ideas on life”, according to biographer Barrett Clark. As a result, O’Neill was recognized as the “father of American theatre” and changed a significant page in the “script”. 
“To inspire an audience to leave the theatre with a joyous sensation from witnessing somebody on stage confronting life, struggling against the everlasting difficulties, not prevailing but perhaps eventually being defeated,” Eugene O’Neill remarked of his goal. The fight alone gives meaning to a person’s existence.” O’Neill was no stranger to adversity.
Eugene O’Neill was born at a hotel on Broadway in New York City in 1888. His father was a well-known traveling actor who earned a career as the Count of Monte Cristo in the theatrical play. Eugene spent a lot of time on the road and backstage as a child, learning about theatre. He believed his father had wasted his skill by emphasizing economic success above artistic greatness, a subject O’Neill would later address in Long Day’s Journey into Night.
He went to college for a few years, then moved and worked various jobs. He worked on a cattle boat, went gold hunting, and hung out with artists. Many of these encounters would later impact his writing, particularly his early sea-themes short plays.
O’Neill contracted TB in 1912. He read famous playwrights August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, and Henrik Ibsen while recovering at a state hospital. Their plays were incredibly realistic, and O’Neill was motivated to write about characters who were up against unimaginable circumstances. Popular plays that aimed for cheap laughs and shows superficial emotions offended O’ Neill. 
In fact, he termed Broadway a “show shop”, an area where he believed he could easily get such pleasure. His plays would be lyrically beautiful and emotionally realistic.
O’Neill won four Pulitzer Prizes and is the first American writer to win the Noble Prize for Literature. On November 27,1953, he passed away.
Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956)
     This autobiographical play portrays a single continuous summer day in the life of the fictitious Tyrone family, a dysfunctional family modeled on O’Neill’s own childhood family. James Tyrone, like O’ Neill’s father James, is a conceited performer and penny pincher. Mary Tyrone, like his mother Ellen, battles with morphine addiction. Jamie Tyrone, like O’Neill’s brother Jamie, is a heavy drinker. Edmund, Tyrones’ youngest son, is dying of TB.
It’s a narrative above love, hatred, betrayal, addiction, blame, and the frailty of father-son relationships. It took O’Neill two years to write, and he was virtually reliving his own tragic history as he did so. He bares his soul in the play, effectively telling the world what it was like to grow up in his own home. It’s little surprise that he referred to it as a “drama of ancient grief, written in tears and blood”.
O’Neill intended that the play not be released until 25 years after his death, in order to protect his family, the grief. Because O’Neill’s immediate family had passed him, his wife Carlotta authorized the play to be published three years after his death.