Eugene Oneills Philosophy Of Difficult Theatre

Through a close re-examination of Eugene O’Neill’s oeuvre, from minor plays to his Pulitzer-winning works, this study proposes that O’Neill’s vision of tragedy privileges a particular emotional response over a more “rational” one among his audience members. In addition to offering a new paradigm through which to interpret O’Neill’s work, this book argues that O’Neill’s theory of tragedy is a robust account of the value of difficult theatre as a whole, with more explanatory scope and power than its cognitivist counterparts. This paradigm reshapes our understanding of live theatrical tragedy’s impact and significance for our lives. The book enters the discussion of tragic value by way of the plays of Eugene O’Neill, and through this study, Killian makes the case that O’Neill has refused to allow Plato to define the terms of tragedy’s merit, as the cognitivists have. He argues that O’Neill’s theory of tragedy is non-cognitive and locates the value of a play in its ability to trigger certain emotional responses from the audience. This would be of great interest to students and scholars of performance studies, literature and philosophy.

divEugene O’Neill’s autobiographical play Long Day’s Journey into Night is regarded as his masterpiece and a classic of American drama. With this new edition, at last it has the critical edition that it deserves. William Davies King provides students and theater artists with an invaluable guide to the text, including an essay on historical and critical perspectives; glosses of literary allusions and quotations; notes on the performance history; an annotated bibliography; and illustrations. "This is a worthy new edition, one that I'm sure will appeal to many students and teachers. William Davies King provides a thoughtful introduction to Long Day's Journey into Night—equally sensitive to the most particular and most encompassing of the play's materials."—Marc Robinson/DIV

Eugene O'Neill, Nobel Laureate in Literature and Pulitzer Prize winner, is widely known for his full length plays. However, his one-act plays are the foundation of his work - both thematically and stylistically, they telescope his later plays. This collection aims to fill the gap by examining these texts, during what can be considered O'Neill's formative writing years, and the foundational period of American drama. A wide-ranging investigation into O'Neill's one-acts, the contributors shed light on a less-explored part of his career and assist scholars in understanding O'Neill's entire oeuvre.

Eugene O'Neill, Nobel Laureate in Literature and Pulitzer Prize winner, is widely known for his full length plays. However, his one-act plays are the foundation of his work - both thematically and stylistically, they telescope his later plays. This collection aims to fill the gap by examining these texts, during what can be considered O'Neill's formative writing years, and the foundational period of American drama. A wide-ranging investigation into O'Neill's one-acts, the contributors shed light on a less-explored part of his career and assist scholars in understanding O'Neill's entire oeuvre.

In Eugene O'Neill's Creative Struggle, Doris Alexander gives us a new kind of inside biography that begins where the others leave off. It follows O'Neill through the door into his writing room to give a blow-by-blow account of how he fought out in his plays his great life battles&—love against hate, doubt against belief, life against death&—to an ever-expanding understanding. It presents a new kind of criticism, showing how O'Neill's most intimate struggles worked their way to resolution through the drama of his plays. Alexander reveals that he was engineering his own consciousness through his plays and solving his life problems&—while the tone, imagery, and richness of the plays all came out of the nexus of memories summoned up by the urgency of the problems he faced in them. By the way of O'Neill, this study moves toward a theory of the impulse that sets off a writer's creativity, and a theory of how that impulse acts to shape a work, not only in a dramatist like O'Neill but also in the case of writers in other mediums, and even of painters and composers. The study begins with Desire Under the Elms because that play's plot was consolidated by a dream that opened up the transfixing grief that precipitated the play for O'Neill, and it ends with Days Without End when he had resolved his major emotional-philosophical struggle and created within himself the voice of his final great plays. Since the analysis brings to bear on the plays all of his conscious decisions, ideas, theories, as well as the life-and-death struggles motivating them, documenting even the final creative changes made during rehearsals, this book provides a definitive account of the nine plays analyzed in detail (Desire Under the Elms, Marco Millions, The Great God Brown, Lazarus Laughed, Strange Interlude, Dynamo, Mourning Becomes Electra, Ah, Wilderness!, and Days Without End, with additional analysis of plays written before and after.

 The plays of Eugene O'Neill testify to his continued search for new dramatic strategies. The author explores the Nobel Prize winner's attempts at creating a new Modern play. He shows how, moving away from melodrama or "the problem play," O'Neill revisited the classical frames of drama and reinvented theater aesthetics by resorting to masks, the chorus, acoustics, silence or immobility for the creation of his dramatic works.

The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas is the first edited collection to discuss the performance of Greek drama across the continents and archipelagos of the Americas from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. The study and interpretation of the classics have never been restricted by geographical or linguistic boundaries but, in the case of the Americas, long colonial histories have often imposed such boundaries arbitrarily. This volume tracks networks across continents and oceans and uncovers the ways in which the shared histories and practices in the performance arts in the Americas have routinely defied national boundaries. With contributions from classicists, Latin American specialists, theatre and performance theorists, and historians, the Handbook also includes interviews with key writers, including Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, Charles Mee, and Anne Carson, and leading theatre directors such as Peter Sellars, Carey Perloff, H?ctor Daniel-Levy, and Heron Coelho. This richly illustrated volume seeks to define the complex contours of the reception of Greek drama in the Americas, and to articulate how these different engagements - at local, national, or trans-continental levels, as well as across borders - have been distinct both from each other, and from those of Europe and Asia.

In the face of seemingly relentless American optimism, Eugene O'Neill's plays reveal an America many would like to ignore, a place of seething resentments, aching desires, and family tragedy, where failure and disappointment are the norm and the American dream a chimera. Though derided by critics during his lifetime, his works resonated with aud...

This study explores the personal, historical, and artistic influences that combined to form such dark and influential American masterpieces as 'The Iceman Cometh', 'The Emperor Jones', 'Mourning Becomes Electra', 'Hughie', and - arguably the finest tragedy ever written by an American - 'Long Day's Journey into Night'.