The importance of O’Neill’s work was appreciated by his contemporaries, and it is no accident American theater historians link the emergence of modern theater in the United States with 1920 – the time of the first production of O’Neill’s multi-act play “Over the Horizon.
The famous writer Sinclair Lewis commented on the importance of O’Neill’s work: “His merit to the American theater is merely that in a matter of 10 or 12 years he has transformed our drama, which was a neat and deceitful comedy and has revealed to us … a terrible and grandiose world.
Eugene O’Neill, son of the famous American actor James O’Neill, from childhood was familiar with the atmosphere and order prevailed in the national theater. This fact predetermined his negative attitude to the commercial theater.
In the life of the famous playwright, not always everything was smooth: after a year at Princeton University, he was forced to go to work (was a clerk in a trading firm, a reporter, an actor, a sailor and even a gold digger), but a serious illness forced him to change the occupation. Soon O’Neill wrote his first, far from perfect, play.
In 1914, wanting to master all the mysteries of European drama, the young man began attending lectures on the history of drama by Harvard University professor J. P. Baker. In the same year O’Neill published his first dramatic collection entitled Thirst, which included numerous one-act plays depicting the realities of modern life.
However, no theater dared to put on their stage works O’Neill, which are in great demand among readers. Only in 1916, drawing closer to the Provincetown Theater, which will be discussed below, a talented playwright was able to stage almost all of his one-act dramas.
The heroes of O’Neill’s works were sailors and dockers, fishermen and farmers, stokers and gold diggers – people of different social backgrounds, with different skin colors, and the prototypes of these characters were real people.
One of the most successful plays of the young O’Neill is “Whale oil” (1916), the action unfolds on board a whaling ship, lost in the ice. The crew of the ship, dissatisfied with their fruitless two-year voyage across the vast ocean, asks the captain to turn the ship home, and his wife begs him to do the same. But Captain Keeney is unforgiving; something in his mind compels him to keep on going, overcoming all obstacles.
Gradually the playwright is moving from a one-act to a multi-act play, allowing to give a broader picture of real life. O’Neill’s first multi-act work was the play “Beyond the Horizon” (1919), which marked the beginning of a new phase in the work of a talented playwright. The playwright often said: “Theater for me – this is life, its essence and explanation. Life is what interests me above all…”
During this period, Eugene wrote a number of realist and expressionist plays (these two areas in harmony in the work of a talented playwright, which was a characteristic feature of O’Neill′s works in the 1920s): “Emperor Jones,” “Gold,” “Anna Christie” (1921), “The Cosmic Monkey” (1922), “Wings Given to All Children of Man” (1923), “Love Under the Elms,” etc.
In his expressionist plays (The Shaggy Monkey, Wings Are Given to All Children of Man, etc.) O’Neill touched on the acute social problems of the modern world, while striving to fully reveal the characters of his characters. The main thing that the playwright praised the expressionism – dynamism, rapid development of events, keeping the audience in constant tension.
An interesting innovation of O’Neill was the use of masks in productions, with which the necessary effects were achieved, demonstrated the contradictions between the true nature of the hero (face for himself) and his external face (mask for others).
In the period from 1934 to 1946, none of O’Neill’s works were staged at American theaters, nevertheless the playwright worked extensively and productively. At this time he had written a philosophical and symbolic dramatic parable “The Ice Seller is Coming” (1938), autobiographical plays, “Long Journey Into Night” and “Moonlight for the stepchildren of fortune,” a philosophical cycle of works “The Story of the owners who robbed themselves, from which only two plays remain – “The Soul of a Poet” (1935-1939) and the unfinished work “The magnificent buildings. This cycle was the embodiment of the main theme of the playwright, which is present in his entire creative heritage – the rule of money and property, which results in a loss of spiritual purity and moral values.
Eugene O’Neill’s work has had a great influence on both new American and world drama. In 1936 O’Neill was awarded the Nobel Prize for dramatic works full of vitality, intensity of feelings and marked by an original concept of tragedy, thereby receiving recognition for his services in the field of stage art.
