By the time Desire Under the Elms closed in the fall of 1925, Eugene O'Neill was firmly established as the leading artistic playwright of the American theatre. The “Triumvirate” of O'Neill, Kenneth Macgowan and Robert Edmond Jones had successfully reorganized the Provincetown Players into The Experimental Theatre, an off-Broadway company ready to stage virtually anything which O'Neill could conceive. Guided by the tenets of the Art Theatre movement which Macgowan promoted, O'Neill indulged his imagination, composing the historical extravaganzas “Marco Millions” and Lazarus Laughed and the allegorical The Great God Brown, and sketching out two studies of modern bourgeois America, Strange Interlude and Dynamo, as well. But Marco, Interlude and Dynamo were not produced by the Triumvirate but the Theatre Guild, a prestigious Broadway company whose embrace of O'Neill signalled his arrival as a popular dramatist.