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Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the U.S. the drama techniques of realism, earlier associated with Chekhov, Ibsen, and Strindberg. The tragedy Long Day's Journey into Night is often included on lists of the finest U.S. plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. He was awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. O'Neill is also the only playwright to win four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama.
The Emperor Jones is a 1920 tragic play by American dramatist Eugene O'Neill that tells the tale of Brutus Jones, a resourceful, self-assured African American and a former Pullman porter, who kills another black man in a dice game, is jailed, and later escapes to a small, backward Caribbean island where he sets himself up as emperor. The play recounts his story in flashbacks as Brutus makes his way through the jungle in an attempt to escape former subjects who have rebelled against him.
Mourning Becomes Electra is a play cycle written by American playwright Eugene O'Neill. The play premiered on Broadway at the Guild Theatre on 26 October 1931 where it ran for 150 performances before closing in March 1932, starring Lee Baker (Ezra), Earle Larimore (Orin), Alice Brady (Lavinia) and Alla Nazimova (Christine). In May 1932, it was unsuccessfully revived at the Alvin Theatre with Thurston Hall (Ezra), Walter Abel (Orin), Judith Anderson (Lavinia) and Florence Reed (Christine), and, in 1972, at the Circle in the Square Theatre, with Donald Davis (Ezra), Stephen McHattie (Orin), Pamela Payton-Wright (Lavinia), and Colleen Dewhurst (Christine).
Anna Christie is a play in four acts by Eugene O'Neill. It made its Broadway debut at the Vanderbilt Theatre on November 2, 1921. O'Neill received the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for this work. According to historian Paul Avrich, the character of Anna Christie was based on Christine Ell, an anarchist cook in Greenwich Village, who was the lover of Edward Mylius, a Belgian-born radical living in England who libeled the British king George V.
Long Day's Journey into Night is a play in four acts written by American playwright Eugene O'Neill in 1939–1941 and first published posthumously in 1956. It is widely regarded as his magnum opus and one of the great American plays of the 20th century. It premiered in Sweden in February 1956 and then opened on Broadway in November 1956, winning the Tony Award for Best Play. O'Neill received the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Drama posthumously for Long Day's Journey into Night. The work is openly autobiographical in nature. The "long day" in the title refers to the setting of the play, which takes place during one day.
Jason Nelson Robards Jr. was an American actor. Known for his roles on stage and screen, he gained a reputation as an interpreter of the works of playwright Eugene O'Neill. Robards received numerous accolades and is one of 24 performers to have achieved the Triple Crown of Acting having earned competitive wins for two Academy Awards, a Tony Award, and an Emmy Award. He was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1979, earned the National Medal of Arts in 1997, and the Kennedy Center Honors in 1999.
Katherine Marie Helmond was an American actress. Over an acting career spanning six decades, she was best known for her starring role as Jessica Tate on the sitcom Soap (1977–1981) and her co-starring role as Mona Robinson on Who's the Boss? (1984–1992). Helmond also played Doris Sherman on Coach (1995–1997) and Lois Whelan on Everybody Loves Raymond (1996–2004). She also appeared as a guest on several talk and variety shows.
The Iceman Cometh is a play written by American playwright Eugene O'Neill in 1939. First published in 1946, the play premiered on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theatre on October 9, 1946, directed by Eddie Dowling, where it ran for 136 performances before closing on March 15, 1947. It has subsequently been adapted for the screen multiple times. The work tells the story of a number of alcoholic dead-enders who live together in a flop house above a saloon and what happens to them when the most outwardly "successful" of them embraces sobriety.
Louis Robert Wolheim was an American actor, of both stage and screen, whose rough physical appearance relegated him to roles mostly of thugs, villains and occasionally a soldier with a heart of gold in the movies, but whose talent allowed him to flourish on stage. His career was mostly contained during the silent era of the film industry, due to his death at the age of 50 in 1931.
Ah, Wilderness! is a comedy play by American playwright Eugene O'Neill that premiered on Broadway at the Guild Theatre on October 2, 1933. It differs from a typical O'Neill play in its happy ending for the central character, and depiction of a happy family in turn-of-the-century America. It is O'Neill's only well-known comedy.
Broadway Bound is a semi-autobiographical play by Neil Simon. It is the last chapter in his Eugene trilogy, following Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues.
Desire Under the Elms is a 1924 play written by Eugene O'Neill. Like Mourning Becomes Electra, Desire Under the Elms signifies an attempt by O'Neill to adapt plot elements and themes of Greek tragedy to a rural New England setting. It was inspired by the myth of Phaedra, Hippolytus, and Theseus. A film version was produced in 1958, and there is an operatic setting by Edward Thomas.
Joe Turner's Come and Gone is a play by American playwright August Wilson. It is the second installment of his decade-by-decade chronicle of the African-American experience, The Pittsburgh Cycle, also known as The Century Cycle. The play was first staged 1984 at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, and opened on Broadway on March 27, 1988, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre—running for 105 performances. Directed by Lloyd Richards, the cast included Delroy Lindo as Herald Loomis and television and future movie star Angela Bassett, as Loomis's wife, Martha. A Broadway revival directed by Bartlett Sher opened at the Belasco Theatre on March 19, 2009 in previews and officially on April 16, closing June 14 after 69 performances. It was performed at the Mark Taper Forum in 2013. A new production opened at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago on April 13th, 2024.
Agnes Ruby Boulton was a British-born American pulp magazine writer in the 1910s, later the wife of Eugene O'Neill.
Strange Interlude is an experimental play in nine acts by American playwright Eugene O'Neill. It won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Strange Interlude is one of the few modern plays to make extensive use of a soliloquy technique, in which the characters speak their inner thoughts to the audience.
A Moon for the Misbegotten is a play in four acts by Eugene O'Neill. The play is a sequel to O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, with the Jim Tyrone character as an older version of Jamie Tyrone. He began drafting the play late in 1941, set it aside after a few months and returned to it a year later, completing the text in 1943 – his final work, as his failing health made it physically impossible for him to write. The play premiered on Broadway in 1957 and has had four Broadway revivals, plus a West End engagement.
All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924) is an expressionist play by Eugene O'Neill about miscegenation inspired by the old Negro spiritual. He began developing ideas for the play in 1922, emphasising its authenticity in his notes: "Base play on his experience as I have seen it intimately." O'Neill wrote the play in the autumn of 1923 and revised the text only slightly for its 1924 publication. Arguably one of his most controversial of plays, it starred Paul Robeson in the premiere, in which he portrayed the Black husband of an abusive White woman, who, resenting her husband's skin colour, destroys his promising career as a lawyer.
Tobacco Road is a play by Jack Kirkland first performed in 1933, based on the 1932 novel of the same name by Erskine Caldwell. The play ran on Broadway for a total of 3,182 performances, surpassing Abie's Irish Rose to become the longest-running play in history at the time. As of December 2024, it was still the 21st longest-running Broadway show in history, as well as being the second-longest running non-musical ever on Broadway.
The Great God Brown is a play by Eugene O'Neill, first staged in 1926. O'Neill began writing notes for the play in 1922 – "Play of masks – removable – the man who really is and the mask he wears before the world" – and wrote the play between January and March 1925. Noted for its use of masks the play was included in Burns Mantle's The Best Plays of 1925-1926. The original Broadway production was directed by James Light.
George Gaul was an American stage actor in the first half of the 20th century. As far as is known Gaul never appeared in motion pictures but was one America's most successful stage actors in the 1920s. He was born in Philadelphia to John Gall and his wife Rebecca. He was educated at Lawrenceville Preparatory School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey and made his Broadway debut in 1909. Over the course of his career he toured with Billie Burke, Otis Skinner and Charles Coburn. In the 1920s he appeared in the Theatre Guild's The S.S. Tenacity and Back to Methuselah. He's best remembered for originating the part of Chico in the original Broadway production of Seventh Heaven in 1922. One of his last plays was Eugene O'Neill's Dynamo (1929). Gaul made his last stage appearance in 1932.
References
- ↑ O'Neill, Eugene. Complete Plays 1920-1931. Travis Bogard, ed. New York: Library of America, 1988, p. 1081. ISBN 0-940450-49-6.
- ↑ Dynamo at Internet Broadway Database