Named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year 2018
*
The Theatre of Eugene O'Neill* offers a new comprehensive overview of
O'Neill's career and plays in the context of the American theatre.
Organised thematically, it considers his modernist intervention in the
theatre, offers readers detailed analysis of the plays, and assesses the
recent resurgence in his reputation and new approaches to staging his
work. It includes a study of all his major plays--The Emperor Jones,
The Hairy Ape, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night,
A Moon for the Misbegotten and Desire Under the Elms--besides
numerous other full length and one act dramas.
Eugene O'Neill is generally credited with inventing modern American
drama, in a time of cultural ferment and lively artistic and
intellectual change. Yet O'Neill's theatrical instincts were always
shaped by American stage traditions that were inextricable from his
sense of himself and his own national culture. This study shows that his
theatrical modernism represents not so much a break from these
traditions as a reinvention of their scope and significance in the
context of international stage modernism, offering an image of national
culture and character that opens new possibilities for the stage while
remaining rooted in its past.
Kurt Eisen traces O'Neill's modernism throughout the dramatists's work:
his attempts to break from the themes, plots, and moral conventions of
the traditional melodramatic theatre; his experiments in stagecraft and
theme, and their connection to traditional theatre and his European
modernist contemporaries; the turn toward direct and indirect
self-representation; and his critique of the family and of American
'pipe dreams' and the allure of success.
The volume additionally features four contributed essays providing
further critical perspectives on O'Neill's work, alongside a chronology
of the writer's life and times.
