LIFE AND WORKS OF EUGENE O, NEILL .
Eugene O Neill waa the aon of an actor whose work meant tha the family led a difficult life on the road O’Neill would later deepiy resent his insecure childhood, pinning the family’s many problem, including hia mother’s drug addiction, on his father. Educated a boarding schools O’Neill gained admission to Princeton Universit, but left after only ane year to go to sea. He spent his early twentie living on the docka of Buenos Aires Liverpool and New York into an alcoholism that brought him to the point of suicide Stow ly O Neill recovered from his addiction and took a job writing for a newspaper. A bout of tuberculosis left him incapacitated and he was consigned to a sanitarium for six months. While in recovery O Neill decided to become a playwright.
O Neill wrote his first play, Bound East for Cardiff, in 1916 premuering it with a company in Province MA that took it to New York that same year. In 1920 ONeill’s breakthrough came with his play Beyond the Horizon. Historians of drama identify its premuere as a pivotal event on the Broadway stage, one that brought a new form of tragic realism to an industry almost entirely overrun with stock melodramas and shallow farces. O’Neill went on to write over twenty innovative plays in the next twenty years, to steadily growing acclaim. The more famous works from his early period uxclude The Great God Brown (1926), a study in the conflicts between tdealism and materialism, and Strange Interlude (1928), an ambitious 36-hour saga on the plight of the every woman. His late career brought such works as his masterpiece, The Iceman Cometh (1946), an Ibsenian portrait of man’s hold on his pipe dreams, and A Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956), the posthumously published and painfully autobiographical tragedy of a family haunted by a mother’s drug addiction.
Neill wrote morality plays and experimented with the tragi¢ form. O’’Neill’s interest in tragedy began as early as 1924 with hi Desire Under the Elms infanticide and fateful retribution but would come to maturity with his monument revision of Aeschylus Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) O’Neill chose Electra because he felt that her tale had been lef incomplete. More generally as his diary notes indicate Nell understood his exercises in tragedy as an attempt to find a modert snalogue to an ancient mode of experience.Modern psychological approximation of the Greek sen pf fate in a time in which the notion of an inescapable and
tedemptive determinism is incomprehensible. Setting of the trilogy the American Civil War springs from Neills attempt to negotiate the chasm between ancient and modern. For Neill the Civil War provided a setting that would allow audiences to locate the tragic in their national history and mythology while retaining enough distance in time to lend the tale its required epic proportions. Mourning also provided: Neill with an occasion to abandon the complex set design of the Art Theatre, which he had long bemoaned as a constraint on the playwright’s creative freedom.
SUMMARY OF THE PLAY
It is late spring afternoon in front of the Mannon house. The master Of the house, Brigadier-General Ezra Mannon, is soon to from war. Lavinia, Ezra’s severe daughter, has just come, like per mother Christine, from a trip to New York. Seth, the gardener, gakes the anguished girl aside. He needs to warn her against her would-be beau, Lavimaa stiffens. If Peter is proposing to her again, he must realize that she cannot marry anyone because Father needs her.
Lavinia asks Seth to resume his story. Seth asks if she has not noticed that Brant looks just like her all the other male Mannons. He believes that Brant is the child of David Mannon and Marie Brantome, a Canuck nurse a couple expelled from the house for fear of public disgrace. Suddenly Brant himself enters from the drive. Brant explodes and reveals his heritage. Lavinia’s grandfather loved his mother and jealously cast his brother out of the family.
After a moment Lavinia appears inside her father’s study. Christine enters indignantly why Lavinia has summoned her. Lavinia reveals that she followed her to New York and saw her kissing Brant. Christine defiantly tells Lavinia that she has long hated Ezra and that Lavinia was born of her disgust. She loves her brother Orin because he always seemed hers alone. Lavinia coldly explains that she intends to keep her mother’s secret for Ezra’s sake. Chnstine must only promise to never see Brant again. Christine agrees tn Lavinia’s terms. Later the proposes to Brant that they poison Ezra and attnbute hus death ta his heart trouble.
