Eugene O'Neill

Early in his career, Eugene O'Neill (1888–1953) wrote a series of plays revolving around characters obsessed with the sea. This period culminated in the 1922 production of Anna Christie, a Pulitzer Prize–winning drama of social realism that was among the first of the author's plays to explore characters searching for their own identities. Centering on the reunion of a barge captain and his daughter after a twenty-year separation, the play derives...

Although one of his lesser-known one-act plays, "The Hairy Ape," written in 1922, followed the success of his first two Pulitzer Prize-winning plays. This drama follows the disturbing dehumanization of Yank, a ship's fireman and a representation of the lower class. He feels superiority from his brute strength until he meets Mildred, the well-intentioned daughter of an extremely wealthy steel magnate. She initiates Yank's uncertainty and disillusionment...

Excerpt: "Scene-A small, barren coral island on the southern fringe of the Malay Archipelago. The coral sand, blazing white under the full glare of the sun, lifts in the right foreground to a long hummuck a few feet above sea-level. A stunted coco palm rises from the center of this elevation, its bunch of scraggly leaves drooping motionlessly, casting a small circular patch of shadow directly beneath on the ground about the trunk. About a hundred...

Excerpt: "The kitchen of the Carmody home on the outskirts of a manufacturing town in Connecticut. On the left, forward, the sink. Farther back, two windows looking out on the yard. In the left corner, rear, the icebox. Immediately to the right of it, in the rear wall, a window opening on the side porch. To the right of this, a china cupboard, and a door leading into the hall where the main front entrance to the house and the stairs to the floor above...

Contained within this volume are some of the best of O'Neill's early one-act plays, which foreshadowed the longer plays that have given this dramatist his most enduring fame. "Beyond the Horizon" was the first of O'Neill's three Pulitzer Prize-winning plays. It follows the disappointed dreams of two brothers on their family farm. "The Emperor Jones" is an expressionistic transformation of a black man named Brutus Jones. In fleeing from his rebelling...

The Classic Collection of Eugene O'Neill brings together a compelling anthology of some of the playwright's most renowned works. Spanning a variety of themes and emotions, this collection showcases O'Neill's masterful storytelling and deep exploration of the human experience. From the heart-wrenching tale of love and sacrifice in "Beyond the Horizon" to the psychological journey of power and identity in "The Emperor Jones," O'Neill's timeless dramas...

The groundbreaking, Pulitzer Prize–winning drama following the private life of a professor's daughter, by the playwright famed for The Iceman Cometh.   Nina Leeds, the daughter of a classics professor at a New England college, has had her dreams shattered by the Great War, in which her fiancé perished. In her grief, she sets out on an aimless path of sordid affairs while rejecting a devoted admirer. When she finally does marry, it is to a...

A superb Long Wharf Theatre Company production of Eugene O'Neill's nostalgic paean to the rites of adolescence. This affectionate comedy presents a 17 year old boy's coming of age during a summer in 1906 New England where he experiemnts with his first romantic crush, poetry, politics, wicked women and alcohol.

This magnificent autobiographical account of Eugene O'Neill's early years tells the story of a mother with a drug addiction, an embittered alcoholic father, and two maladjusted brothers. Based on Eugene O'Neill's play "Long Day's Journey into Night."