Eugene O'Neill

A Portrait of a Genius

One of America's finest playwrights, Eugene Gladstone O'Neill's great tragedies were greatly influenced by his own experiences with his dysfunctional family. He used these occurrences to craft one of the most successful careers in the earliest 20th century, earning countless awards including the Nobel Prize for Literature, four Pulitzer Prizes, Antoinette Perry Award and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Out of all of these Greek-like tragedies there emerged his only comedy, Ah, Wilderness!; a period piece set in his summer home of New London, CT. O'Neill referred to this play as the "other side of the coin", meaning that it represented his fantasy of what his own youth might have been, rather than what he believed it to have been (as seen in his magnum opus, Long Day's Journey into Night). These two plays are his two most auto-biographical plays, Long Day's Journey dramatizing his family, and Ah, Wilderness! paralleling it.

Born in a Broadway hotel room on October 16th, 1888, Eugene O'Neill was the second child of James and Ella O'Neill. Both Irish immigrants and devout Catholics, James was an actor most famous for his portrayal of Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo, a production that ran over 6,000 performances. He later complained that "this long enslavement to one role had kept him from binding his name to Hamlet in the memory of mankind" (Durant, 49). His brother Jamie, ten years his senior, was brilliant but erratic. His birth was a particularly difficult birth for Ella, so a doctor prescribed morphine to help with the pain. She and Eugene followed James on tour for the next several years, sometimes nursing from the wings.

In 1895 Eugene returned to New York to attend the Mt. St. Vincent boarding school and later the De La Salle Institute. During these years, his family summered at Monte Cristo Cottage in New London, Connecticut. When Eugene was 13, he discovered that his mother had become addicted to morphine due to the pain following his birth. Also, his learned of his brother was an alcoholic. These two events plagued him for years to come and greatly impacted his writing and alcohol problem later in life. At this time he also became engrossed in the controversial work of writers such as Ibsen, Shaw, Wilde, Nietzsche and Swinburne. Eugene attended Princeton University for a year, but when suspended following a drunken exploit he chose to not return to school.

In 1912 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent the next year in a half in a sanatorium, where his doctor encouraged him to write plays. When released, he briefly returned home to New London where his father paid to have a collection of Eugene's one-acts produced. He then spend the next 39 years living in pubs in bad parts of New England, Greenwich Village, and France. In his life he was married three times, and had three children, Eugene Jr., Shane and Oona. By 1923 both his mother, father and brother Jamie had all died. Eugene physical and mental health declined following him disowning Oona when she married Charlie Chaplain, a man his age and Eugene Jr. committing

suicide. In 1936 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature but could not accept the award in person due to poor health. He died on, November 27th, 1953 and was buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston. Neither of his surviving children attended the funeral.

Ah, Wilderness!, opened on Broadway in the Guild Theatre on October 13th, 1933. It received fair reviews more praise given to the strength of the actors than the actual script itself. The plot is a fairly simple one of boy rebels, boy gets caught, boy's partenta thinks it is the end of the world, everything settles naturally, the father and mother begin to remember that once they were young. However as the Times wrote:

...it hardly communicates the warmth of pity that floods through the play. He not only likes these folk, but he understands them... his recognition of the tortures of adolescence... bring him closer to most of us than any of his other plays have done. The lines that draw laughter from the audience cannot be detached from the play for isolated quotation. Part of the humor comes from the intellectual timidities that we persuade ourselves were typical of that day. If Mr. O'Neill's approach to Richard's torment of eager, youthful problems is not humorous it is fraught with humanity, and it is alternately poignant and disarming.

This story is set in a large-small town in Connecticut, most likely O'Neill's home of New London. It revolves around a second son of the Miller family, Richard and his growth out of adolescent revolt into a maturity and awareness of what love is really about. Not only does he make this breakthrough, but he also helps to remind this to his parents and his Uncle and Aunt and their long-failed relationship. Richard's reading choices include some socialist literature, which causes him to be very anti-America (fitting, seeing as how the play opens on the 4th of July). He really does not know what these books mean, but reads them more to be different. Also, every good coming-of-age story needs an infatuation. Richard is "in love" with Muriel McComber, whose father bans her from seeing him again after happening upon some indecent literature that Richard has given her such as this Swinburne poem:

That I could drink thy veins as wine,

And eat thy breasts as honey,

That from face to feet the body were abolished and consumed

And in my flesh, thy very flesh entombed (Wilderness, 29.)

Shocked by this devastating blow, Richard is driven to rebel even further, going to a "low dive" and having a few too many drinks with a woman of ill-repute. Lucky for him, the night ends there and he stumbles home. The next day he receives a letter from Muriel, begging forgiveness and to meet at the beach that night. He sneaks out again, and meets his love, where they work through their problems and share their first kiss under a full moon. After returning home he and his father share a meaningful talk about the dangers of loose women.

You can see how in this play Eugene is pulling loosely from his early life however very little is left intact; Richard is really the only character that stays true to form as a portrayal of the angst-ridden teen. I suppose if my life was as filled with tragedy as Eugene's life, this would be a vision of what I wish my life could be. I seems almost like an episode of Leave it to Beaver, where the problems are fixed too easy. In my mind I could see Nat and Richard's talk as a talk that Eugene wished he had had with his

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