Eugene O‘Neill and Tennessee Williams

EugeneO‘Neill andTennessee Williams

Main Content American Drama Eugene O’Neill Tennessee Williams

I. American Drama A. Beginning Ye Bareand Ye Cub (1665) by William Darby and other two author-performers. The Contrast by Royall Tyler(1757-1826), the first American comedy and first played in New York City in 1787.

B. Drama in the 19th Century Western expansion (1814 ～1824 )She Would Be a Solider (1819)byMordecai Noah The Plains of Chippewa(1819) by James Nelson Barker. Poetic plays were very popular in the first half of the 19th century. Move in the direction of realism and domestic melodrama.

C. Drama in the 20th Century 1920s: Little Theatre Movement began after 1912, Washington Square Players, Provincetown Players （New York City, Greenage Village）. They are freed from the conventional theatre and can be as experimental as they like. 1930s: Eugene O’Neil, Clifford Odets Post-war: second climax of American drama, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller 1960s: Theatre of the Absurd, Edward Albee

II. Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) Introduction Literary Career Characteristics Comment Masterpieces

(І) Introduction Eugene (Gladstone) O'Neill was born in a Broadway hotel room in New York City on October 16, 1888. O'Neill won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1936, and Pulitzer Prizes for four of his plays: Beyond the Horizon (1920); Anna Christie (1922); Strange Interlude (1928); and Long Day's Journey Into Night (1957). He is regarded as America's premier playwright.

(Ⅱ) Literary Career A variety of one-act plays describing the way an individual willfully connives at his or her own doom. 1913～1914: wrote nine one-act plays. 1914～1915: attended George Pierce Baker’s “47 Workshop” at Harvard University. 1916～1917: wrote six more one-act plays. 1918: fourone-act plays. 1920: his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon; Became known throughout the country.

Totality indicatechaos and hopelessness. Late1930s: withdrew into retirement and seclusion. Early 1940s: suffer from a nervous disease 1946: reemerged;The Iceman Cometh. 1953: died. Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956) revived worldwide interest in his work.

(Ⅲ) Characteristics Introduced the European theatrical trends of realism, naturalism, and expressionism to the American stage as devices to express his comprehensive interest in his life and humanity. Ignored normal play divisions of scenes and acts, paid little attention to the expected length of plays, made his characters wear masks, split one character between two actors, reintroduced ghosts, chorus, monologue, and direct addresses to audience.

Employed sets, lighting, and sounds to enhance emotion rather than to represent a real place. He represent the new trend on the stage by introducing modern and timely content. He grounded his works in personal experience. His works reflect the life of his country and his time. He was able to do this,not merely because he had a talent for theater but because he was good at using the modern themes and styles developed abroad,and making them serve his own purpose.

(Ⅳ) Comments O’Neill was no doubt the greatest American dramatist of the first half of the 20th century. He was the first playwright to explore serious themes in the theater and to carry out his continual, vigorous, courageous experiments with theatrical conventions. His plays have been translated and staged all over the world.

(Ⅴ)Masterpieces 1. Desire Under the Elms The last of O‘Neill’s naturalistic plays with the starkness of Greek tragedy. Drawing upon Euripides' Hippolytus（希波吕托斯） and Jean Racine's Phèdre (both of which feature a father returning home with a new wife who falls in love with her stepson. )

A. Characters Ephraim Cabot Abbie Eben Simeon & Peter

B. Structure Abbie kills the baby Abbie seduces Eben; Abbie falls in love with Eben; Abbie has a baby Neighbour mock at Cabot Eben denounces Abbie to the sheriff They face their judgement together They return P & S go to California

C. Themes 1. Desires: Freudian treatment of sexual desires and desires for properties 2. Alienation D. Techniques: symbolism, use of dialect Symbolism 1. The elms of the title are supposed to dominate the scene with "a sinister maternity." (Eben’ s dead mother)

2.The land 1) Most essential asset to the family 2) The object of greed: for Ephraim Cabot, his son Eben, and his new wife Abbie 3) Maternity 4) Beauty 3.Stones 1) Hard farm work and also toughness of the father 2) The stone walls: confinement and imprisonment for Peter and Simon

Expended Reading2. Long Days Journey into Night A. Summary The play is set in the summer home of the Tyrone family, August 1912. The action begins in the morning, just after breakfast. We learn as the first act unravels that Mary has returned to her family recently after receiving treatment in a sanatorium for morphine addiction. Edmund, meanwhile, has in recent weeks begun to cough very violently, and we learn later on in the play that, as Tyrone and Jamie suspect, he has tuberculosis.

The gradual revelation of these two medical disasters makes up most of the play's plot. In between these discoveries, however, the family constantly revisits old fights and opens old wounds left by the past, which the family members are never unable to forget.

B. Analysis a. Long Day's Journey into Night is undoubtedly a tragedy--it leaves the audience with a sense of catharsis, or emotional rebirth through the viewing of powerful events, and it depicts the fall of something that was once great. b. The play is largely autobiographical; it resembles O'Neill's life in many aspects. O'Neill himself appears in the play in the character of Edmund, the younger son who, like O'Neill, suffers from consumption.

c. The play also creates a world in which communication has broken down. One of the great conflicts in the play is the characters' uncanny inability to communicate despite their constant fighting. d. The play is all the more tragic because it leaves little hope for the future; indeed, the future for the Tyrones can only be seen as one long cycle of a repeated past bound in by alcohol and morphine.

Ⅲ. Tennessee Williams(1911-1983) 1. Themes: desire, isolation, loneliness, frustration 2. Subject: violence, sex, murder, rape, drugs, incest, nymphomania 3. His defense for himself: “Desire is deep-rooted in a longing for companionship, a release from the loneliness that haunts every individual”

4. Characters are fascinating who have strong feelings, lonely searching characters (influence from Chekhov and Lawrence) 5. Theatrical devices (like O’Neill, very experimental) screened projections, lighting effect, music, special settings, 6. Artistic feature symbolism: verbal, visual, sound symbolism (poetic realism) common speech, colloquial southern speech coarseness+poetry (subject is coarse; technique is poetic)

7.A Streetcar Named Desire Blanche Dubois Stanley Kowalski Stella Kowalski Allen Grey Mexican woman A. Themes 1) Loneliness and alienation 2) Illusion and reality 3) Passion, sex and death

4) Conflict between Old South and North (destruction of South) 5) Conflict of sensitive female and coarse male (destruction of the weak femininity) B. Artistic feature: symbolism Streetcar named Desire Elysian Fields Belle Reve ( "beautiful dream" ) Blanche's white suit False purity and innocence with which she masks her carnal desire and cloaks her past

Also her vulnerability (e.g. the image of her as a white moth) Blanche's frequent bathing: attempt to wash away her past life bright light penetrating gaze of truth Stanley An Old English name meaning stone field Also sound symbolism

Homework Write a comment on desire by using O’Neill and Williams’ dramas as examples.

The End

Eugene O‘Neill and Tennessee Williams