Identify and explain one of the main themes in O'Neill's play. Use text evidence to support your answer.

Explanation:

In June 1922, F Scott Fitzgerald received a letter from his friend Edmund Wilson, in which he described meeting Eugene O'Neill: "He is an extraordinarily attractive fellow," Wilson wrote. "I find with gratification that he regards Anna Christie as more or less junk and thinks it is a great joke that it won the Pulitzer prize. His genius seems to be only just becoming properly articulate." By 1922, the 34-year-old O'Neill had already won the Pulitzer prize for drama twice and done nothing less than reinvent – or rather invent – legitimate American theatre. But Wilson was, as usual, correct: O'Neill was still finding his voice; his greatest plays, The Iceman Cometh, A Moon for the Misbegotten and the magnificent Long Day's Journey into Night, which many consider the pinnacle of 20th-century American theatre, were yet to come. Audiences will soon have the opportunity to judge Long Day's Journey into Night for themselves, as a revival of O'Neill's masterpiece, starring David Suchet as the father, James Tyrone, opens in the West End next week, exactly 100 years after the play is set.

Advertisement

O'Neill is the only American playwright to have won the Nobel prize for literature, and the only dramatist to have won four Pulitzer prizes. He introduced psychological and social realism to the American stage; he was among the earliest to use American vernacular, and to focus on characters marginalised by society. Before O'Neill, American theatre consisted of melodrama and farce; he was the first US playwright to take drama seriously as an aesthetic and intellectual form. He took it very seriously indeed; one cannot accuse O'Neill of frivolity. Of more than 50 finished plays, O'Neill wrote just one ostensible comedy, Ah, Wilderness! (1933), and even its plot hinges on drunkenness, prostitution, revenge and repressed desire. Of course, most of O'Neill's plays involve drunkenness, prostitution, revenge and repressed desire; Ah, Wilderness! is the only one that manages a happy ending, although A Moon for the Misbegotten (1946) does admit the possibility of forgiveness, a conclusion that for O'Neill seems downright giddy.