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A collection of essays about the works of Eugene O'Neill.
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.
To Act, To Do, To Perform is the first inclusive study of dramatic action since Francis Fergusson's The Idea of a Theater. This challenging and insightful book uses drama to elucidate philosophical questions and simultaneously demonstrates how drama offers something of its own to questions in literary theory and philosophy. The book will interest specialists as well as anyone intrigued by the recent popularity of "performance" as a critical and cultural metaphor.
A Study Guide for Eugene O'Neill's "Beyond the Horizon," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
Eugene O’Neill wrote his most enduring and important plays after he won international acclaim as the first and only American playwright to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936. In the midst of the Great Depression, with his health failing and spirits sunk, he and his third wife, former actress Carlotta Monterey, moved to California to escape the materialism and commercialism of a declining “West,” and they built a new home called Tao House. A reasonably good translation of tao is “the way,” and in this house, which was largely the creation of Carlotta, he found the way to his most famous play, Long Day’s Journey Into Night. As an unusually explicit autobiographical drama...
A Moon for the Misbegotten is one of Eugene O'Neill's most frequently revived works, and major American revivals of the play have been instrumental in securing its esteemed position in theater history. While the play's landmark production in 1973 is largely regarded as the moment when it finally achieved greatness, its 60-year production history also includes several regional productions and Broadway revivals. This work provides a production history of A Moon for the Misbegotten in the United States, from the play's original Theatre Guild production in 1947 to its Broadway revival in 2007. Throughout the study, the author provides the inside story on the play's often rocky transition from the page to the stage, including detailed looks at initial casting difficulties and several controversies over censorship.
Eugene O'Neill, Nobel Laureate in Literature and Pulitzer Prize winner, is widely known for his full length plays. However, his one-act plays are the foundation of his work - both thematically and stylistically, they telescope his later plays. This collection aims to fill the gap by examining these texts, during what can be considered O'Neill's formative writing years, and the foundational period of American drama. A wide-ranging investigation into O'Neill's one-acts, the contributors shed light on a less-explored part of his career and assist scholars in understanding O'Neill's entire oeuvre.
Taking its cue from Eugene O'Neill's questioning of «faithful realism», voiced by Edmund Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night, this book examines the distant legacy of the Irish American playwright in contemporary multiethnic drama in the U.S. It explores the labyrinth of formal devices through which African American, Latina/o, First Nations, and Asian American dramatists have unconsciously reinterpreted O'Neill's questioning of mimesis. In their works, hybridizations of stage realism function as aesthetic celebrations of the spiritual potentialities of cultural in-betweenness. This volume provides detailed analyses of over forty plays authored by such key artists as August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, José Rivera, Cherríe Moraga, Hanay Geiogamah, Diane Glancy, David Henry Hwang, and Chay Yew, to give only a few prominent examples. All in all, Labyrinth of Hybridities invites its readers to reassess the cross-cultural patterns characterizing the history of twentieth century American drama.
Based on years of research as well as interviews conducted with Circle in the Square's major contributing artists, this book records the entire history of this distinguished theatre from its nightclub origins to its current status as a Tony Award-winning Broadway institution. Over the course of seven decades, Circle in the Square theatre profoundly changed ideas of what American theatre could be. Founded by Theodore Mann and Jose Quintero in an abandoned Off-Broadway nightclub just after WWII, it was a catalyst for the Off-Broadway movement. The building had a unique arena-shaped performance space that became Circle in the Square theatre, New York's first Off-Broadway arena stage and current...