The Father of American Theater

Eugene O’Neill wrote plays about regular people—people like him, like people he knew—sailors, bartenders, and troubled families—all dealing with life’s everyday hardships. He also experimented with dramatic composition and staging, and explored serious social themes and human psyches, including his own. According to biographer Barrett Clark, O’Neill was an artist who used the theater “as a medium for the expression of his feelings and his ideas on life.” And by doing so, O’Neill turned an important page in the “script” and became forever known as the “father of American theater.”

Writing with Emotional Honesty

Eugene O’Neill said that his goal was “to get an audience to leave the theatre with an exultant feeling from seeing somebody on stage facing life, fighting against the eternal odds, not conquering but perhaps inevitably being conquered. The individual life is made significant just by the struggle.” Struggle was a familiar subject to O’Neill.

Eugene O’Neill was born in 1888 in a New York City hotel right on Broadway. His father was a famous traveling actor who made his living playing the lead role in the melodramatic play, The Count of Monte Cristo. The young Eugene spent a lot of time on the road and backstage, learning about theater (and becoming disillusioned with the light, frothy plays that made his father’s career). He felt that his father had wasted his talent by choosing commercial success over artistic excellence—a point that O’Neill addressed later in Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

He attended college for a short time, then traveled, and took up odd jobs. He worked on a cattle boat, prospected for gold, and spent a lot of time with artists. Many of these experiences would eventually influence his work, especially his early short plays about the sea.

In 1912, O’Neill got tuberculosis. During his recovery in a sanitarium, he read the great playwrights August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, and Henrik Ibsen. Their plays were highly realistic and inspired O’Neill to write about characters facing impossible odds. O’Neill disliked popular plays that went for cheap laughs and portrayed shallow emotions. In fact, he referred to Broadway as a “show shop,” a place where he felt it was easy to find such entertainment. His plays were going to be poetically beautiful and emotionally honest.

O’Neill was awarded four Pulitzer Prizes and is still the only American playwright ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died on November 27, 1953.

Walk along Broadway in New York City’s Times Square, and you’ll notice this plaque marking the site of Eugene O’Neill’s birthplace.

The Visionary

Have you ever seen a play where the dialogue sounded as real as everyday speech? Or where the set looked exactly like a location in real life? Have you seen characters onstage who seemed to be as real and complex as your friends and family? If so, you can thank Eugene O’Neill. He introduced American audiences to Realism—the idea that a play should look and sound as much as possible like real life.

But O’Neill also tried out other ideas and techniques:

• He experimented with using simultaneous action onstage.
• He used the “aside,” a way for characters to reveal their true thoughts by speaking directly to the audience.
• He used masks—an unusual technique to include in contemporary drama.

Long Day's Journey Into Night

This autobiographical play depicts one long, summer day in the life of the fictional Tyrone family, a dysfunctional household based on O’Neill’s immediate family during his early years. James Tyrone is a vain actor and penny pincher, as was O’Neill’s father James. Mary Tyrone struggles with a morphine addiction, as did his mother Ellen. The fictional son Jamie Tyrone is an alcoholic, as was O’Neill’s brother Jamie. And the Tyrones’ younger son Edmund is deathly ill with tuberculosis. (O’Neill himself suffered and recovered from a mild case of tuberculosis.)

It’s a story of love, hate, betrayal, addiction, blame, and the fragility of family bonds—particularly between fathers and sons. O’Neill took two years to write it, essentially reliving his own painful past as he wrote about it. In the play, he bares his soul and essentially tells the world what it was like to grow up in his own house. No wonder he called it a “play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood.”

Eugene, Jamie, and James O’Neill in 1900 on the porch of their summer home, the staged setting for Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

In order to spare his family from pain, O’Neill requested that the play not be published until 25 years after he died. In 1956, three years after O’Neill’s death, his widow Carlotta allowed the play to be published since the immediate family had predeceased the playwright.  

Why the Play Endures: Story

It’s an August morning at the summer home of James and Mary Tyrone. James (also called Tyrone) is an aging actor, and even though he has done well financially, he’s a miser. Mary has recently returned from a sanatorium for her addiction to morphine. Their older son Jamie is out of a job and has moved back home for the summer. Their younger son Edmund is very ill.

Breakfast has just ended, and a day of discord is just beginning. It’s obvious that Mary has started taking morphine again. It’s also clear that Edmund has tuberculosis, but the men try to shield Mary from the truth, making her think that Edmund has a bad cold. Jamie accuses Tyrone of sending Edmund to a cheap and terrible doctor and suggests that Edmund would be in better health if Tyrone weren’t so cheap. As the day goes on, a thick fog surrounds the house. Secrets are revealed and old emotional wounds are reopened.

It seems that Tyrone caused Mary’s morphine addiction when he refused to pay for a good doctor to treat Mary’s pain after Edmund’s birth. Mary refuses to believe that she’s an addict, even as she continues to take morphine just to get through the day. The three men drink heavily as the hours pass…to the point where Tyrone and Jamie are barely functioning as night settles in. The literal fog outside the house and the metaphorical fog of addiction have overtaken the family.

As the Tyrones refight their old battles and repeat the same arguments, it’s pretty apparent that this day is not all that different from the many other days in the family’s life. They relive old hurts and blame each other for their failures. By the end of the play, the audience is left to wonder: What happens to us when we are unable to let go of the past? What happens to a family that lives in denial of its problems? Is it ever okay to lie to someone to spare their feelings? What is it like to feel lost without any hope?

Defending his mother, Edmund (left) strikes his brother James for sneeringly calling her "Ophelia" when, half-crazed, she wanders in with her wedding gown. At the play's somber end she sinks into a reverie about her girlhood. Carl Mydans - The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

Why the Play Endures: Production

Long Day’s Journey Into Night is considered to be O’Neill’s greatest play not only for its story and characters but also because of its inventive, theatrical elements including:

• The play’s form and structure. The play tells the story of one family over the course of one day. O’Neill shows us the passage of time in a particularly heartbreaking way: through the family’s addictions. As the day progresses, Mary becomes more and more affected by the morphine that she takes. And the men become increasingly drunk. Though we see the men drink, O’Neill never shows us Mary using morphine; we only see the affect that it has on her. Why do you think that is?
• Stage directions. O’Neill’s stage directions are precise. For example, his description of the set—down to the type of books that are on the family’s bookshelves—reveals as much about the characters as do the descriptions of the characters themselves.
• Lighting. O’Neill’s description of the lighting is another way that he shows us the passage of time. When the play begins (in the morning), he tells us that “sunshine comes through the windows.” At the beginning of Act Two (early afternoon), he tells us that “no sunlight comes into the room…outside the day is still fine but increasingly sultry, with a faint haziness in the air which softens the glare of the sun.” And so it goes—with the light changing—to the end of the play. Through the lighting design, we actually see the “long day’s journey into night.”
• Language. The characters in the play speak like real people speak. And the characters sound differently as the day goes on. As the men drink and Mary uses morphine, their language changes as a result of their being under the influence.
• Metaphor. The fog that eventually overtakes the house is a metaphor (or symbol) for something else. O’Neill shows us that the literal fog represents the fog of addiction. No one is able to escape.
• Theme. O’Neill addresses tough, real-life issues of addiction, guilt, and betrayal. When the play appeared on Broadway, nothing like it had been seen before. The play forced audiences to grapple with difficult issues. It exposed the deep psychological traits of its main characters—and by extension, the audience.

The pitiful mother, her hands crippled with rheumatism and half dazed with dope, offers whisky to th emaid in order to win her companionship. Carl Mydans - The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

Enter, Stage Right

O’Neill was as famous for writing long, intricate stage directions as he was for writing dialogue. In fact, if you pick up a script of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, you’ll read several pages of stage directions before you even get to the play’s action! O’Neill had very particular ideas about what the stage set should look like…and he had equally strong opinions about what his characters should look like. 

Here is just a small excerpt describing James Tyrone:

“…About five feet eight, broad-shouldered and deep-chested, he seems taller and slenderer because of his bearing, which has a soldierly quality of head up, chest out, stomach in, shoulders squared…He has never been really sick a day in his life. He has no nerves. There is a lot of stolid, earthy peasant in him, mixed with streaks of sentimental melancholy and rare flashes of intuitive sensibility.”

Once you read past the introductory stage directions, you’ll see that pretty much every line of dialogue is preceded by a description of how the actor should act the line. Actors are directed to say their lines “almost resentfully,” “with satisfaction,” or in a “mechanically rebuking” way. It’s typical O’Neill, and is something that playwrights these days tend to avoid doing. Why do you think that O’Neill was so precise and exact in writing stage directions?

Eugene O’Neill’s plays still move audiences today, nearly 60 years after his death. Here are some places to learn more about O’Neill, about Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and about his theatrical style:

• Check out the PBS American Experience site for their in-depth supporting materials for the documentary Eugene O'Neill
• Check out some vaudeville to get an idea of what American theater was like before Eugene O’Neill (but don’t bother to turn up your speakers! This film is silent.)