25. American playwrights. E. O’Neill, A. Miller, T. Williams.
Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953)
One of the greatest American playwrights, restless and bold experimenter, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1936. O'Neill's best-known works include Anna Christine (pub. 1922), Desire Under the Elms (pub.1924), Mourning Becomes Electra (pub. 1931), Long Day's Journey Into Night (pub. 1956), and The Iceman Cometh (prod. 1946). His 45 plays range in style from satire to tragedy. They often depict people who have no hope of controlling their destinies.
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was born in a Manhattan hotel into an Irish-Catholic theatrical family, the son of James O'Neill and Mary Ellen "Ella" Quinlan.
Once he attempted suicide, overdosing in a flophouse. He stayed with his family in Connecticut, but was then forced by the onset of tuberculosis to spend six months in a sanatorium. After recovering O'Neill began writing plays. He was enrolled in George Pierce Baker's 47A Workshop at Harvard University (1914-1915), and then joined the Provincetown Players.
"The Hairy Ape” was propaganda in the sense that it was a symbol of a man, who has lost his old harmony with nature, the harmony which he used to have as an animal and has not yet acquired in a spiritual way. Thus, not being able to find it on earth nor in heaven. he's in the middle, trying to make peace, taking the "woist punches from bot' of 'em." ... The subject here is the same ancient one that always was and always will be the one subject for drama, and that is man and his struggle with his own fate. The struggle used to be with the gods, but is now with himself, his own past, his attempt "to belong." (Eugene O'Neill in Playwrights on Playwriting, ed. Toby Cole, 1961)
In the late 1910s O'Neill dramas begun to gain recognition in New York. In 1918 he married the writer Agnes Boulton; they had two children. O'Neill's father died in 1921 from cancer, next year he lost his mother, and twelve months after that his brother Jamie, who suffered from alcoholism, died from a stroke. Eugene Jr. committed suicide in 1950, at the age of forty, by slitting his wrists and left ankle with a straight razor in his country cottage in Woodstock. Between the years 1918 and 1924 O'Neill wrote Anna Christie, finished in less than six weeks, The Emperor Jones, finished in about two weeks, The First Man, The Hairy Ape, The Fountain, and Welded. Nearly all his plays dealt either directly or indirectly with death, loss, and mourning.
During the early 1920s O'Neill formed with Robert Edmond Jones and Kenneth Macgowan, a gifted producer, a "Triumvirate" that ran the Experimental Theater at the Provincetown Playhouse. While still married to Agnes, O'Neill used the help of his friend Macgowan to send roses to the beautiful actress Carlotta Monterey. O'Neill's second marriage ended in 1929. In the same year he married Carlotta Monterey, with whom he first settled in France, then in Sea Island, Georgia, and finally in California. O'Neill saw his children infrequently. He disinherited his son Shane because he did not approve of his son's life style, and his daughter Oona, because at the age of eighteen she married Charles Chaplin, who was fifty-four. Oona was his fourth wife. The couple settled down in Vevey, Switzerland; Chaplin had eight children with her. O'Neill never met his grandchildren.
The Pulitzer winning Beyond the Horizon (pub. 1920) was O'Neill's first important play. The story depicts two brothers, Andrew, the elder a practical realist, and the younger, Robert, a poetic idealist. Robert is incapable of managing the family farm. When Andrew returns from a long voyage, successful and wealthy, he finds Robert dying of tuberculosis. On his deathbed, Robert still dreams of freedom beyond the horizon. After H.L. Mencken's criticism of Welded (1924) O'Neill wrote to the critic George Jean Nathan: "Damn that word, 'realism!' When I first spoke to you of the play as a 'last word in realism,' I meant something 'really real,' in the sense of being spiritually true, not meticulously life-like." (in Selected Letters of Eugene O'Neill, edited by Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer, 1988)
Mourning Becomes Electra, based on Aeschylus's Orestean trilogy, was O'Neill's version of the tragedy of the house of Atreus, set in 19th-century New England. The action centers around Lavinia (Electra). General Ezra Mannon, on his return from the American Civil war, is killed by his wife Christine. Lavinia avenges her father's murder by persuading her brother, Orin (Orestes), to kill her mother's lover. The death is followed by the suicide of the mother. Orin goes mad when he discovers that he has an incestuous passion for his sister. Lavinia locks herself in the family mansion, surrounded by the ghosts of the past.
In 1935 O'Neill began work on a cycle of eleven plays, with the theme of the turmoils of American materialism. The cycle was never completed – only two plays have survived. On his final productive period O'Neill wrote the autobiographical Long Day's Journey into Night, an agonized portrait of his own family, the Tyrones in the play. Again the action takes place in one room. Mary Tyrone returns to her dope addiction: "None of us can help the things life has done to us" says Mary. Edmund, based on the author himself, is stricken with tuberculosis. The play was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1957. Hughie (pub. 1959) was a story about a small time gambler, and A Moon for the Misbegotten (pub. 1952) continued O'Neill's family history of the Tyrones.
The Iceman Cometh is perhaps the finest of O'Neill's tragedies. The story is set in a dockside bar on the lower west side of New York City. It concerns a group of drunken derelicts who spend their time in the back room of Henry Hope's saloon where they discuss their hopeless lives. One man wants to get back into the police force, another to be re-elected as a politician. Their daily routines are shattered when Hickey, a salesman and the son of a preacher, appears as a messiah, and encourages them to start rehabilitation. They find out that their new hero is himself a madman and murderer, who has killed his wife, and lapse once more into their comfortable world of whiskey.
Poor health prevented O'Neill from attending the Nobel ceremonies in Stockholm, Sweden. His remaining creative years were characterized by long and rare disease that caused progressive deterioration of cells of the cerebellum. By 1943, O'Neill could no longer grasp a pencil. After a failed production of A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943), he wrote no major new plays. O'Neill became gradually paralyzed and he died on November 27, 1953 in Boston. Shane O'Neill's family biography, which came out in 1959, was entitled The Curse of the Misbegotten.
A. Miller
Arthur Miller, in full Arthur Asher Miller (born October 17, 1915, New York, New York, U.S.—died February 10, 2005, Roxbury, Connecticut), American playwright, who combined social awareness with a searching concern for his characters’ inner lives. He is best known for Death of a Salesman (1949).
Miller was shaped by the Depression, which spelled financial ruin for his father, a small manufacturer, and demonstrated to the young Miller the insecurity of modern existence. After graduation from high school he worked in a warehouse. With the money he earned he attended the University of Michigan (B.A., 1938), where he began to write plays. His first public success was with Focus (1945), a novel about anti-Semitism. All My Sons (1947), a drama about a manufacturer of faulty war materials that strongly reflects the influence of Henrik Ibsen, was his first important play. Death of a Salesman became one of the most famous American plays of its period. It is the tragedy of Willy Loman, a small man destroyed by false values that are in large part the values of his society. Miller received a Pulitzer Prize for the play, which was later adapted for the screen (1951).
Arthur Miller, photograph by Inge Morath [Credit: Magnum]The Crucible (1953) was based on the witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, a period Miller considered relevant to the 1950s, when investigation of subversive activities was widespread. In 1956, when Miller was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he refused to name people he had seen 10 years earlier at an alleged communist writers’ meeting. He was convicted of contempt but appealed and won.
A Memory of Two Mondays and another short play, A View from the Bridge (a story of an Italian-American longshoreman whose passion for his niece destroys him), were staged on the same bill in 1955. After the Fall (1964) is concerned with failure in human relationships and its consequences. The Price (1968) continued Miller’s exploration of the theme of guilt and responsibility to oneself and to others by examining the strained relationship between two brothers. He directed the London production of the play in 1969. The Archbishop’s Ceiling, produced in Washington, D.C., in 1977, dealt with the Soviet treatment of dissident writers. The American Clock, a series of dramatic vignettes based on Studs Terkel’s Hard Times (about the Great Depression), was produced at the 1980 American Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. Later plays include The Ride Down Mount Morgan (1991), Mr. Peters’ Connections (1998), and Resurrection Blues (2002).
Miller also wrote a screenplay, The Misfits (1961), for his second wife, the actress Marilyn Monroe (1926–62); they were married from 1956 to 1961. The filming of The Misfits served as the basis for the play Finishing the Picture (2004). I Don’t Need You Any More, a collection of his short stories, appeared in 1967 and a collection of theatre essays in 1977. His autobiography, Timebends, was published in 1987.
T. Williams.
American writer Tennessee Williams is famous for the plays A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Glass Menagerie, among others. He is considered one of the best playwrights in the United States since the Second World War.
He wrote powerful and involved dramas that mainly deal sensitively with emotionally damaged people trying to survive in a hostile environment. His greatest dramatic influence was Henrik Ibsen, whose Ghost was Williams' turning point when he saw the play.
Early Life of Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams was born on March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi. His family lived with his grandfather where he was brought up. When he was 12, the family moved to St. Louis. Tennessee and his sister were not happy and did not adjust to the city life. They were made fun of for their poverty and Southern accents.
When he was 18 years old, he entered the University of Missouri, but the family's lack of funds forced Williams to leave school without graduating. He eventually earned a degree in playwriting after 9 years, when he was 27.
Career as a Playwright
Williams's first play was American Blues, produced in 1939 when he was 28. His breakthrough came with The Glass Menagerie, which ran on Broadway for over a year and won him the first of his four New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards. A Streetcar Named Desire followed, with Blanche du Bois, the star of a Southern belle, whose privileged upbringing deeply conflicted with the harsh realities of life.
A Streetcar Named Desire won Tennessee Williams his first Pulitzer Prize. It was made into a memorable movie, as have many of his plays, some of them blockbusters with famous stars in the starring role, including Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman.
Most of his plays were directed by Elia Kazan, who became a close friend. Tennessee williams' prominent contemporaries include playwrights Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill.
Last Years of Williams
Williams was in poor health during the 1960s, caused by a dependence on drink and sleeping pills that led to a breakdown in 1969. He struggled to overcome his addictions. He died on February, 1983, at the age of 71.
Quoted from A Streetcar Named Desire, spoken by Blanche:
"Don't you just love these long, rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn't just an hour – but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands – and who knows what to do with it?" ~ Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
Works by Tennessee Williams
· American Blues, 1939
· The Glass Menagerie, 1944
· Battle of Angels, 1945
· A Streetcar Named Desire, 1947
· Summer and Smoke, 1948
· The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, 1950
· The Rose Tattoo, 1951
· Camino Real, 1953
· Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1955
· Suddenly Last Summer, 1958
· Sweet Bird of Youth, 1959
· The Night of the Iguana, 1961
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