If American drama was to recognize one fictional clan as first family, the Tyrones would win the title. (Granted, it would be a neck-and-neck race with the Lomans of "Death of a Salesman.") Eugene O'Neill's 1956 masterpiece, "Long Day's Journey into...
[more]If American drama was to recognize one fictional clan as first family, the Tyrones would win the title. (Granted, it would be a neck-and-neck race with the Lomans of "Death of a Salesman.") Eugene O'Neill's 1956 masterpiece, "Long Day's Journey into Night," established them as the dark alter ego of the self-respecting modern family and marked the home as a time bomb for the American Dream.
James Tyrone -- family patriarch, retired theater actor, aging alcoholic, infamous tightwad -- has two sons. The elder son is a cynical drunk and an actor like his father, but of the unaccomplished variety; he wastes what's left of his youth in saloons and whorehouses. The younger is afflicted with tuberculosis and a bad habit of romanticizing the bad habits of his brother. And then, as if the male Tyrones don't already bear more than their fair share of life's misery, there's the true albatross of the family: Mary Tyrone, wife, mother, and morphine addict. This doomed and desperate group of individuals, each seeking forgiveness for his or her part in the whole, is not simply a figment of O'Neill's imagination -- the Tyrone family is modeled after its creator's own. From the intense theatrics of his personal history, O'Neill brewed an Ibsen-like mix of high tragedy and low realism that changed the American stage.
The young O'Neill spent his youth as a seaman adventuring to exotic lands. He prospected for gold in South America, fell in with reckless drunkards, and, back at home, performed with his father's acting troupe. (Like the Tyrone patriarch, O'Neill's old man was an actor.) The playwright mirrored his life experiences in the darkly realist work he began producing around 1912, much of it set in proximity to the sea, the docks, and the waterfront pubs. "Anna Christie" (1920) exemplifies these plays in its depiction of a hapless old sailor and the daughter he abandoned to the care of relatives. Through Anna's revelation of her unhappy fate -- prostitution, despair -- O'Neill painted helplessness and bitter regret as inevitable forces of nature. Throughout the play, Anna's father curses "ole davil" sea as the cause of their misfortune.
O'Neill continually cast human beings as victims to cruel and inconquerable circumstance. Characters such as Yank in "The Hairy Ape" (1922) and Jim Harris in the "All God's Chillun Got Wings" (1924) demonstrate the struggles of men born to suffer injurious fates. Yank will never rise above poverty and Jim is doomed to watch his white wife go mad with shame over his blackness. In the ambitious 1929 trilogy of four-act plays, "Mourning Becomes Electra," the playwright once again linked fatalism to family in a ghastly partnership. Based on Aeschylus' "Oresteia," the trilogy watches the siblings Lavinia and Orin Mannon struggle with a legacy that includes murder, suicide, secrets, and treachery. Misfortune is a family inheritance, inescapable and ruinous. The playwright described the work as "primarily drama of hidden life forces -- fate -- behind the lives of characters."
O'Neill was a master at revealing the truths of social and familial identity and at exposing the role that experience and the irredeemable past plays in the future. His characters are highly sympathetic, their pain and despair palpable. Even as his plays age -- plays whose themes are sometimes borrowed from antiquity -- they remain eternally relevant.
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