Eugene O’Neil ( 1888 – 1953)
O’Neil is very important for the GRE. He is very likely to show up for a few questions. Two plays not represented here are Desire Under the Elms and The Hairy Ape, which are minor compared with the three presented here.
an American playwright. More than any other dramatist, O’Neill introduced the dramatic realism pioneered by Chekhov, Ibsen, and Strindberg into American drama. Generally, his plays involve characters who inhabit the fringes of society, where they struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations but ultimately slide into dillusionment and despair.
“Mourning Becomes Electra (1931)”
Mourning Becomes Electra updates the Greek myth of Orestes to the family of a Northern general in the American Civil War. Agamemnon is now General Ezra Mannon, Clytemnestra is his second wife Christine, Orestes is his son Orin, and Electra is his daughter Lavinia. As an updated Greek tragedy, the play features murder, adultery, incestuous love, and revenge, and even a group of townspeople who function as a kind of Greek chorus. Though fate alone guides characters’ actions in Greek tragedies, O’Neill’s characters have motivations grounded in 1930s-era psychological theory as well. The play can easily be read from a Freudian perspective, paying attention to various characters’ Oedipus complexes and Electra complexes.
It is divided into three plays of four to five acts each. In order, the three plays are titled Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted. However, these plays are never produced individually, but only as part of the larger trilogy. Mourning Becomes Electra is thus extraordinarily lengthy for a drama, and in production is often cut down. Also, because of the large cast size, it is not performed as often as some of O’Neill’s other major plays.
“The Iceman Cometh”
The Iceman Cometh stages the story of the whiskey-soaked and disillusioned denizens of Harry Hope’s saloon and the upheaval caused by the newly sober salesman Hickey, who — with all the annoying zeal of a recent convert — urges his former drinking companions to give up their “pipe dreams.”
“Long Day’s Journey Into Night”
Long Day’s Journey Into Night covers a fateful, heart-wrenching night at the seaside Connecticut home of the Tyrones (the autobiographical representations of O’Neill himself, his brother, and their parents): James Tyrone Sr., an Irish-born retired actor who squandered his considerable gifts as a classical thespian to make a career playing one particular role in a commercially successful but artistically unfulfilling play; Edmund, the younger and more poetically inclined son, suffers from a respiratory condition and a deep disillusionment with the world around him after sailing the world as a deck hand; the elder son James Jr. (“Jamie“), an affable alcoholic and the object of stubborn repeated attempts by his father to be set up in business, despite his status as a confirmed ne’er-do-well; and the wife and mother of the family, Mary Cavan Tyrone, who lapses between self-delusion and the haze of her morphine addiction – the result of the shoddy ministrations of a quack doctor during her difficult labor and delivery of Edmund twenty-three years prior.
Vade Mecum 