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On the Late Plays of Eugene O‘Neill

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2022

Tom F. Driver
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Extract

Death has not lessened Eugene O’Neill’s dominance over the serious American theatre. He towers over other American dramatists with a gigantism almost equal to that with which his characters tower over ordinary mortals. He died in 1953 at the age of 65, having had only one Broadway production in nineteen years, and none thoroughly successful in twenty years. Yet anyone who would evaluate the American theatre since the second World War is obliged to reckon with Eugene O’Neill, and that hardly at all because of the 1946 production of The Iceman Cometh but rather because of the amazing concentration of his works which began to be produced in 1956. In May of that year, the off-Broadway group at The Circle-in-the-Square gave The Iceman Cometh its first successful performance in New York.

Type
Research Article
Information
Tulane Drama Review , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , December 1958 , pp. 8 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © 1958 The Tulane Drama Review

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References

Footnotes

1 The Nation, CLXXXII, 9 (March 3, 1956) p. 182.Google Scholar

2 The Theatre Book of the Year, 1946-1947. Knopf, Alfred A. (New York, 1947), p. 95.Google Scholar

3 The Theatre in Our Times. Crown Publishers (New York, 1954), p. 256.Google Scholar

4 Introduction to Nine Plays by O’Neill, Eugene. Modern Library (New York, 1941), p. xxi.Google Scholar

5 All quotations from Long Day’s Journey into Night are from the edition published by Yale University Press (New Haven, 1955.Google Scholar

6 This aspect of Greek drama is analyzed in detail in my book, The Sense of History in Greek and Shakespearean Drama, to be published in 1959 by Columbia University Press.Google Scholar

7 Partisan Review, XIII, 5 (November-December, 1946), pp. 577-579.Google Scholar

8 Jones, Ernest, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Basic Books (New York, 1953-1957), vol. 3, p. 273.Google Scholar

9 The Saturday Review. November 24, 1956, pp. 30-31.

10 Harvard University Press (Cambridge, 1953).

11 P. 297.

12 Ibid.

13 P. 298.

14 P. 299.

15 P. 296.