Early Plays

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

THE MOON OF THE CARIBBEES - A PLAY IN ONE ACT

BOUND EAST FOR CARDIFF - A PLAY IN ONE ACT

THE LONG VOYAGE HOME - A PLAY IN ONE ACT

IN THE ZONE - A PLAY IN ONE ACT

ILE - A PLAY IN ONE ACT

WHERE THE CROSS IS MADE - A PLAY IN ONE ACT

THE ROPE - A PLAY IN ONE ACT

BEYOND THE HORIZON - A PLAY IN THREE ACTS

THE STRAW - A PLAY IN THREE ACTS

THE EMPEROR JONES

ANNA CHRISTIE - A PLAY IN FOUR ACTS

THE HAIRY APE - A COMEDY OF ANCIENT AND MODERN LIFE IN EIGHT SCENES

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PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS

EARLY PLAYS OF EUGENE O’NEILL

Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) is one of the most significant forces in the history of American theater. With no uniquely American tradition to guide him, O’Neill introduced various dramatic techniques, which subsequently became staples of the U.S. theater. By 1914 he had written twelve one-act and two long plays. Of this early work, only Thirst and Other One-act Plays (1914) was originally published. From this point on, O’Neill’s work falls roughly into three phases: the early plays, written from 1914 to 1921 (The Long Voyage Home, The Moon of the Caribbees, Beyond the Horizon, Anna Christie); a variety of full-length plays for Broadway (Desire Under the Elms; Great God Brown; Ah, Wilderness!); and the last, great plays, written between 1938 and his death (The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, A Moon for the Misbegotten). Eugene O’Neill is a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1936.

Jeffrey H. Richards, professor of English at Old Dominion University, teaches early American literature and early through contemporary American drama. He is the author of Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor of the World Stage, 1607-1789, and Mercy Otis Warren, and most recently the editor of Early American Drama, published in Penguin Classics.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editor wishes to thank the graduate students in his O’Neill seminar at Old Dominion University, John Seelye, and Michael Millman for their critique and encouragement of the project; research assistants Ruth Barrineau Brooks and Elisabeth Simmons for their invaluable sleuthing of bibliographical items; and Stephanie Sugioka, Aaron Richards, and Sarah Richards for their unfailing support.

INTRODUCTION

The fame accorded to Eugene O’Neill lies largely with his late plays, especially The Iceman Cometh (1940) and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1941), as well as those of his middle period, including Desire Under the Elms (1924), The Great God Brown (1925), and Strange Interlude (1927). Those plays were only made possible, of course, by the work he produced between 1913 and 1922, the first phase of his career as a playwright. For the most part, scholars have examined these early plays as material to be considered as predictive of the later, in the way that New Testament theologians often read the Old. Certainly, such reading of early into late is inevitable for readers of the whole corpus of O’Neill’s work: one cannot help, for instance, but connect the barroom scene in Anna Christie to that in Iceman or see the family conflicts in Beyond the Horizon as harbingers of the Tyrones’ troubles in Long Day’s Journey. Unfortunately, such readings often obscure what O’Neill was doing when plays like Ile or Moon of the Caribbees were the newest things he wrote, and critics were hailing him as the most innovative playwright in the American theater.

This volume brings to readers a selection of O’Neill’s early work, written between 1914 and 1921 and produced for the stage between 1916 and 1922. The last play printed here, The Hairy Ape, was O’Neill’s forty-first written drama—an enormous output of something like four plays a year from 1913. Indeed, by the time he wrote Bound East for Cardiff (1914), the earliest play in this Penguin edition, he had already written seven plays; the next earliest in this book, In the Zone (1917), was O’Neill’s twenty-first. The point of such numbers is to suggest that even with much of his early work, O’Neill was a practiced playwright, not simply an apprentice waiting to write A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943). Rather, he was a late Victorian who took the theater of his day and wrestled it into modes as yet unexploited or unexplored, producing dramas that still have the power to move and provoke. The challenge for readers and scholars of American drama is to be able to see these plays as something more than a source of motifs for the dramas of O’Neill’s last years.

LIFE

Eugene Gladstone O’Neill was born in a hotel in New York on October 16, 1888, the third child of Mary Ellen Quinlan and James O’Neill. His father, a noted actor, had been born in Ireland and was making his career as the star of a vehicle play, Monte Cristo. His mother, daughter of an Irish-American merchant family from Cleveland, had difficulties during Eugene’s birth and began taking morphine. She soon became addicted, unbeknownst to Eugene until he was a teenager, and only overcame the habit in 1914. A brother, Edmund, had died of measles before Eugene was born. His oldest brother, James Jr. (Jamie), became a member of his father’s acting company and took other bit roles in theatrical performances but led a dissolute life before dying in late 1923, at age forty-five. The transience of a life on the road with his father, the tensions in the family occasioned by his mother’s addiction, and his brother’s failure to make his mark would profoundly influence Eugene’s dramatic thinking in later years.

O’Neill’s scholastic career was checkered. Much of what he learned he picked up from acquaintances in New York City, including the radical politics of socialists and anarchists; the philosophy of Nietzsche; drama by Ibsen and later Strindberg; and poetry by the decadent writers Baudelaire, Dowson, Swinburne, and Wilde. Suspended after one year at Princeton University, O’Neill lived a bohemian existence. An affair with Kathleen Jenkins in 1909 led to a secret marriage, then O’Neill’s sudden departure on a mining trip to Honduras.