Dynamo | |
---|---|
Written by | Eugene O'Neill |
Date premiered | 1929 |
Place premiered | United States |
Original language | English |
Genre | Drama |
Dynamo is a play in three acts, written by Eugene O'Neill in 1927 and 1928; after its premiere in 1929, O'Neill revised the text for publication. [1]
The play, starring Glenn Anders and Claudette Colbert, opened on Broadway on February 11, 1929 and closed in March, after 50 performances. [2] The play was considered a failure for O'Neill, whose other plays of the 1920s played for much longer runs, and the play is rarely revived.
The characters comprise two families and one extra:
Who live next door to:
Jennings, who does not appear until the final act, is an operator at the plant.
In the first act, O'Neill establishes a conflict between the Lights and the Fifes that is marked by their religious differences and has soured into personal hatred. Reuben, however, loves Ada. And Ada, described as a flapper or 'modern woman,' likes Reuben enough to run around with him, but teases him for being weak. Throughout the play, however, she affectionately calls him "Rube," which means 'dunce.'
The Lights are superstitious and shudder at lightning. On a stormy night, Fife tricks Reuben and his father into falling for a joke because they hadn't read the newspaper.
Angry at having been fooled, Reuben runs away from home. He only corresponds with his parents by sending mocking postcards that he has electrocuted their god. When he does return, he is stronger, colder, and sharply rational. He ravages Ada unemotionally and repeatedly claims that electricity is the god of everything.
Upon returning home, he is distraught to learn that his mother had died just before he arrived. Guilty and somewhat disillusioned, he turns to the dynamos in the hydro-electric plant for answers. He sees them as motherly, and tries to get them to forgive him. Eventually, he brings Ada to the dynamos to convert her. When he feels the dynamos have rejected her (remembering that his own mother called Ada a harlot) he shoots Ada, climbs up to the dynamo's brushes, and electrocutes himself. The play closes in Mrs. Fife's helpless expression of distress at the dynamo's treatment of them all.
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the U.S. the drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. The tragedy Long Day's Journey into Night is often numbered on the short list 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.
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 original of Anna Christie was Christine Ell, an anarchist cook in Greenwich Village, who was the lover of Edward Mylius the English radical 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 1941–42, first published in 1956. The play is widely considered to be his magnum opus and one of the finest 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.
Katherine Marie Helmond was an American actress. Over her five decades of television acting, she was known for her starring role as ditzy matriarch Jessica Tate on the sitcom Soap (1977–1981) and her co-starring role as feisty mother Mona Robinson on Who's the Boss? (1984–1992). Helmond also appeared in a 1993 episode of The Upper Hand, the British version of Who's the Boss?. She also played Doris Sherman on Coach and Lois Whelan on Everybody Loves Raymond. 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.
Louis Robert Wolheim was an American actor, of both stage and screen, whose rough physical appearance relegated him to roles mostly of thugs or villains 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 untimely death at the age of 50 in 1931.
Ah, Wilderness! is a comedy 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.
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.
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. O'Neill began work on it as early as 1923 and developed its scenario in 1925; he wrote the play between May 1926 and the summer of 1927, and completed its text for publication in January 1928, during the final rehearsals for its premiere performance. Strange Interlude opened on Broadway on January 30, 1928, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Lynn Fontanne originated the central role of Nina Leeds on Broadway. It was also produced in London at the Lyric Theatre in 1931. It was included in Burns Mantle's The Best Plays of 1927-1928. Because of its length, around five hours if uncut, the play has sometimes been produced with a dinner break or on consecutive evenings. The play's subject matter, a woman's sexual affairs, was very controversial for the 1920s. It was censored or banned in many cities outside New York.
A Moon for the Misbegotten is a play 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 1947 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, emphasizing its authenticity in his notes: "Base play on his experience as I have seen it intimately." O'Neill wrote the play in the fall 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 color, destroys his promising career as a lawyer.
Ernest Bretaigne Windust was a United States-based French-born theater, film, and television director.
Beyond the Horizon is a play written by American playwright Eugene O'Neill. Although he first copyrighted the text in June 1918, O'Neill continued to revise the play throughout the rehearsals for its 1920 premiere. His first full-length work to be staged, Beyond the Horizon won the 1920 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
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 2018, it was still the 19th 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.
Carlotta Monterey was an American stage and film actress. She was the third and final wife of playwright Eugene O'Neill.
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.