Nine Plays by Eugene O'Neill (Modern Library Series)

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Summary: The Great American Dramatic Voice of the 20th Century
Review: Most moderns tend to think of Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) as a great realistic playwright on the basis of such remarkable works as Long Day's Journey Into Night, The Iceman Cometh, and Moon for the Misbegotten. It may therefore come as shock to realize that O'Neill actually won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936--long before any of these titles were staged, much less published.

O'Neill began writing poetry at an early age but soon turned to drama. By 1916 he began to make a reputation with The Provincetown Players, and in 1917 had several one acts produced by New York City's Playwright's Theatre. His leap to fame came in 1920 and 1921, when his plays Beyond the Horizon and Anna Christie won back-to-back Pulitzer Prizes. He would reign on the New York stage as the great American playwright of serious drama throughout the 1920s.

But in the early 1930s O'Neill--who struggled against poor health, alcoholism, and a host of private demons--became reclusive and fell silent. By the time of his 1936 Nobel Prize most critics assumed he had written himself out, burned out, that his career was over. NINE PLAYS, with an introduction by Joseph Wood Krutch, was first published by Modern Library in 1941--at which time O'Neill had not offered material for either publication or production for close to a decade. In a very real sense, the public and very likely O'Neill himself considered this volume a "summing up" at the end of a distinguished career.

The titles included in NINE PLAYS were selected by O'Neill himself as representative of his work, and in an extremely brief note he indicates that his selection was based both on personal preference and critical response. The titles collected here are: The Emperor Jones, 1920; The Hairy Ape, 1921; All God's Chillun Got Wings, 1923; Desire Under the Elms, 1924; Marco Millions, 1923-1925; The Great God Brown, 1925; Lazarus Laughed, 1925-1926; Strange Interlude, 1926-1927; and Mourning Becomes Electra, 1929-1931.

The selection is interesting in a number of ways. Although O'Neill first made his reputation with realistic drama, virtually every title included here is "experimental" in some form or fashion. True enough, critics of the era fell over themselves to describe O'Neill's work with various "isms"--expressionism and naturalism among them--but in a general sense the titles here are intensely theatrical in nature, and they all broke with then-popular notions of what a play ought to be like.

The Emperor Jones contains remarkably little dialogue at all. All God's Chillun Got Wings challenges racial notions through a then-shocking tale of a love between a black man and a white woman--a subject truly taboo at the time. Desire Under the Elms seems to be realistic in tone, but in terms of visuals it is anything but. Characters literally put on and take off masks in The Great God Brown and action grinds to a halt while they speak directly to the audience in the lengthy Strange Interlude. And then there is Mourning Becomes Electra, a mixture of symbolism and melodrama that actually requires three nights to perform.

Also interesting is the fact that O'Neill includes two titles that were absolute disasters when they appeared on stage: Marco Millions and Lazarus Laughed, both of which might be described as pageant-like dramas that include choral readings in direct echo of ancient Greek dramatic forms. Clearly, O'Neill did not intend NINE PLAYS to be a sort of literary "greatest hits"--the very popular Beyond the Horizon, Anna Christie, and Ah! Wilderness are conspicuous by their absence--and at the time this volume was first published considered his more experimental work of more significance.

Casual readers will likely find O'Neill a challenge. On the page, his dialogue has an unnatural quality that doesn't exist in actual performance--but at the same time it is often extremely difficult to envision how an O'Neill script plays, how it actually lives when it is "on its feet" in front of an audience. Consequently, I do not really recommend anything by O'Neill to someone who hasn't seen much theatre or who is unaccustomed to reading playscripts. I think such readers will find it too much of leap to be enjoyable. But if you are a play reader or playgoer, you will likely find him a very rewarding experience.

Fortunately, O'Neill began to write seriously once more in the 1940s, and if anything the power of his final works is even greater than those of his earlier ones, with the posthumous 1956 Pulitzer Prize-winning Long Day's Journey Into Night considered his great masterpiece. If you are looking for an overall O'Neill collection with scholarly annotations, you would really do better with the exceptional three volume Library of America collection, which covers virtually every play he wrote from 1913 to 1943--but this less expensive volume would serve as an excellent introduction for those who aren't quite ready to make such a serious financial or academic investment. For no matter how it is published, Eugene O'Neill is still Eugene O'Neill: the great American dramatic voice of the 20th Century.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer