O'Neill believed that the theatre should be taken as serious art rather
than pleasant diversion. He wanted to pull in his audiences, make demands
on them, and commit them to the experience. He freely used experimental
techniques to do so, but always in the service of a fundamental realism.
From the start, O'Neill was interested in the inner drama of his characters
more than their physical or social world, and he evoked psychological states
through powerful metaphorical settings. His innovations and revivals of
ancient techniques were legion: masks and other expressionist devices,
great length, the casting of black actors, taboo subject matter, extended
asides with the action frozen, and serious dramatic treatment of the poor
and powerless.
Today the Eugene O'Neill NHS barn has been converted to a modest thetatre, which houses several perforances annualy such as Sea Chanties. |
O'Neill s experiments, his unblinking look at raw sometimes-ugly truths were theatrical blows in a broader Cultural Revolution. He worked during a time of radical change and cross-fertilization in the arts, sciences, and social thought. Modernists like Brecht and Artaud in the theatre; Joyce, Woolf, and Eliot in fiction and poetry, Stravinsky and Schoenberg in music and Picasso and Kandinsky in painting were breaking with ancient assumptions and conventions O’Neill was in the thick of this movement to, in Ezra Pound s words, "Make it new."
Above all, O'Neill aspired to the tragic. He was challenged by Greek
and Elizabethan tragedy and by what he termed the "first theater that sprang,
by virtue of mans imaginative interpretation of life, out of his worship
of Dionysius." His great achievement, in plays like Desire Under the
Elms and Mourning Becomes Electra, was to forge native materials
into true American tragedy.
| Morning Becomes Electra |
1930
|
 Charles
Gilpin was the first black actor given a serious role in an American play.
His starring role in The Emperor Jones was later played by notable theater
and film great Paul Robeson. |
For all O'Neill's disdain for his father's theatre, the ''tricks-1he
had absorbed in his youth continued to emerge in his mastery of staging
and his adaptability to the practical demands of the theatre. Even some
of what he considered the less desirable characteristics of the old school
colored his work. In critic Heywood Broun's words: "I many external things,
O'Neill is a pioneer ... But he is still the true son of the man who played
The
Count of Monte Cristo more than a thousand times.... Heredity has left
in O'Neill the actor's greediness for every last potential twist and turn
in any given situation.'' O'Neill himself said of the leading role in A
Touch of the Poet: ''What that one needs is an actor like Maurice Barrymore
or James O'Neill, my old man. One of those big-chested, chiseledmug, romantic
old boys ..."
 O'Neill's
father, James in his most famous role, The Count of Monte Cristo, in 1900.
After seeing Eugene first play, he said, "Yes, yes I think the boy has
something in him."
-New York Public Library
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