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King John
Illuminating Shakespeare's complex experimentation with the dramatic genre of history, these twelve essays bring such time-honored critical methods as source study and concentration on genre, imagery and language, theme, and character together with more current techniques based on historiography, the new historicism, feminism, pragmatics, performance history, and perspectivism.
The Smoking Fifties
The years following World War II represented a turning point, both historically and personally, for a talented young photographer growing up in small-town Ohio. This collection of black and white photos from the archives of Michael Philip Manheim presents small-town life in the 1950s, as well as the start of his documentary vision. Manheim's own lucid commentary on the era accompanies the images. With sympathetic but unsentimental attention, he documents the fascinating details of street scenes, dress and customs, faces and emotions of the era. These photographs allow the viewer to enter a different world, familiar to some and new to others. Some will react with a strong sense of nostalgia. For those who did not live through that period, the photos will enable a greater understanding of a time that was simpler, but had its own complications and prejudices. In capturing the small, vital moments of an America that was struggling to find itself after the upheaval of a world war, Manheim has also depicted the beginnings of his own personal growth as an artist.
The Ecological Eugene Oäó»Neill
The dramas of Eugene O’Neill—often called America’s first “serious” playwright—exhibit an imagining of the natural world that enlivens the plays and marks the boundaries of the characters’ fates. O’Neill’s figures move within purposefully animated natural environments—ocean, dense forest, desert plains, the rocky soil of New England. This new approach to O’Neill’s dramas explores these ecological settings as crucial to his characters’ ability to carry out their conscious and unconscious desires. O’Neill’s career is covered, from his youthful one-acts, to the middle years experimental dramas, to the mature tragedies of his late period. Special attention is paid to the connection of ecology and theological quest, and to O’Neill’s persistent evocation of an exotic, natural “other.” Combining an ecocritical approach with an examination of Classical and philosophical influences on the playwright’s creative process, the author reveals a new, less hermetic O’Neill.
Last House Standing
East Boston, Massachusetts was once bucolic, a place where people would find relief from a stifling summer downtown. Wood Island Park was one of its magnets, located off Neptune Road, with acres of trees and grass, ending at the Atlantic Ocean and its ocean breezes. Wood Island Park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and treasured as one of his green spaces. In 1904 progress was represented by a subway tunnel connecting East Boston to the rest of the city. An airfield built in the early 1920s expanded into what is today's Logan International Airport. It became the 20th busiest airport in the U.S., even while lacking the land mass of other major airports. Logan is almost completely surroun...
The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O'Neill
Specially commissioned essays explore the life and work of Eugene O'Neill from his earliest writings to Long Day's Journey Into Night.
Jason Robards Remembered
Jason Robards won consecutive Oscars as best supporting actor for the films All the President's Men (1977) and Julia (1978) but he is particularly remembered for having created central roles in the later plays of Eugene O'Neill. This tribute honors Robards in two parts. Part One presents recent interviews of the late actor as well as articles by Arthur and Barbara Gelb which appeared in the New York Times on the occasions of the American premier of Long Day's Journey into Night (1956) and of the successful production of A Moon for the Misbegotten, with Colleen Dewhurst (1974). Sheila Hickey Garvey writes of the 1956 production of Iceman and gives a brief history of Robards' work with the Cir...
Home on the Stage
As a serious drama set in an ordinary middle-class home, Ibsen's A Doll's House established a new politics of the interior that was to have a lasting impact upon twentieth-century drama. In this innovative study, Nicholas Grene traces the changing forms of the home on the stage through nine of the greatest of modern plays and playwrights. From Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard through to Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, domestic spaces and personal crises have been employed to express wider social conditions and themes of class, gender and family. In the later twentieth century and beyond, the most radically experimental dramatists created their own challenging theatrical interiors, including Beckett in Endgame, Pinter in The Homecoming and Parks in Topdog/Underdog. Grene analyses the full significance of these versions of domestic spaces to offer fresh insights into the portrayal of the naturalistic environment in modern drama.
Vital Contradictions
This close study of selected plays by four of the greatest early modern playwrights, namely Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov and O'Neill, examines how these plays challenge long-standing traditions and assumptions of nineteenth-century theatre and reassert serious drama's place in great literature. The book studies the chief characters from some of the best-known plays of each playwright, recognizing that what gives them strength as artistic creations and makes them so memorable is the essential contradiction at the core of each figure. Michael Manheim explores the complexity of such characters as Ibsen's Peer Gynt and Hedda Gabler, Strindberg's Miss Julie, Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and Dr. Chebutykin, and the members of O'Neill's Tyrone family.
The Aesthetics of Failure
Critic Clive Barnes once called Eugene O’Neill the “world’s worst great playwright” and Brooks Atkinson called him “a tragic dramatist with a great knack for old-fashioned melodrama.” These descriptions of the man can also be used to describe his work. Despite the fact that O’Neill is the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and his last works are some of America’s finest, most of his published works are not good. This work closely examines how O’Neill’s failures as a playwright are inspiring and how his disappointments are reflections of his own theory that tragedy requires failure, a theory that is evident in his work. Conflicts in O’Neill’s plays are studied at the structural level, with attention paid to genre, language or dialogue, characters, space and time elements, and action. Included is information about O’Neill’s life and a chronological listing of all of his 50 plays with basic details such as production history, principal characters, dramatic action, and a brief commentary.
Vows, Veils, and Masks
Vows, Veils, and Masks offers a bold and timely approach to the plays of Eugene O’Neill with its attention to the engagements, weddings, and marriages so crucial to the tragic action in O’Neill’s works. Specifically, the book examines the culturally sanctioned traditions and gender roles that underscored marital life in the early twentieth century, and that still haunt and define love and partnership in the modern age. Weaving in artifacts like advice columns, advertisements, theatrical reviews, and even the lived experiences of the actors who brought O’Neill’s wife characters to life, Beth Wynstra points to new ways of seeing and empathizing with those who are betrothed and new possibilities for reading marriage in literary and dramatic works. She suggests that the various ways women were, and still are, expected to divert from their true ambitions, desires, and selves in the service of appropriate wifely behavior is a detrimental performance and one at the crux of O’Neill’s marital tragedies. This book invites more inclusive and nuanced ways of thinking about the choices married characters must make and the roles they play, both on and off the stage.
