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Eugene o'neill influences
Essay Tragedy And Eugene O'Neill
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Eugene O’Neill was the leading playwright in America in the first half of the 20th century. In his entire artistic career, He completed nearly 50 plays, which deal with a wide variety of subjects, concerning issues in religion, society, family and humanity. As a pioneer of modern American theatre, he made a great contribution to American drama, American culture and American ideas. The critical studies of Eugene O’Neill have long since focused in his expressionistic techniques, his tragic tensions, his tragic consciousness, and his philosophy. In fact, he possesses abundant emotional life experience, acute social observation and high artistic expressive force. He has been in pursuit of presenting a unique poetic style. Therefore, Eugene O’Neill’s plays are poetic, well rounded, and full of emotion and true beauty.
Most of O’Neill’s plays have connections to his life and his writing styles are also influenced by his experience and social observation. O’Neill always said that he never had any literary ambition until he was grown, and generally ascribed the great turning point of his life—his decision to became a writer—to a period of ill-heath. At different times he told interviewers: “I just drifted along till I was twenty-four and the I got a jolt and sat up and took notice. Retribution overtook me and I went down with T.B. It gave me time to think about myself and what I was doing—or, rather, wasn’t doing. I got busy writing one-act plays… If I hadn’t had an attack of tuberculosis, if I hadn’t been forced to look at myself, while I was in the sanatorium, harder than I had ever done before, I might never have become a playwright” (Sheafer, 72). Almost as far as back as O’Neill could remember he had always wanted to be a writer, n...
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... Night. 2nd ed. Yale University Press. 2002.
Anonymous. "Eugene Gladstone O’Neill 1888 – 1953 America’s First Major Playwright". Eugene O’Neill Foundation, Tao House. 23 March 2014.http://www.eugeneoneill.org/about/aboutEON.php
Eugene O'Neill. Eugene O'Neill Complete Plays 1932-1943. New York; Literary
Classics of the United Slates. 1988.
Richard F. Mconon, Jr. Eugene O'Neill's Century: Centennial Views on America s Foremost Tragic Dramatis. New York: Greenwood Press. 1991.
Michael Manheim. The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O'Neill. Shanghai:
Shanghai Foreign Education Press. 2000.
Eugene O'Neill. Eugene O'Neill Complete Plays 1932-1943. New York: Literary Classics of the Uniled Slates. 1988.
John H. Houchin. The Critical Response to Eugene O'Neill. Westport, Conn:
Greenwood Press. 1993.
Louis Sheafer. O’Neill: Son and Playwright. New York: Parago Home. 1968.
When Mary Zimmerman adapts a play from an ancient text her directing process and the way she engages with text are woven together, both dependent on the other. She writes these adaptations from nondramatic text, writing each evening while working through the pre-production rehearsals and improvisations during the day with the cast. The rehearsal process influences the text, and the text enriches the rehearsal process, so that one cannot exist without the other. Every rehearsal is structured the same but each production is unique because as Zimmerman states in “The Archaeology of Performance”, she is always “open to the possibilities”. The piece is open to everything happening in the world and to the people involved, so the possibilities are honest and endless.
Weales, Gerald. "Tennessee Williams' Achievement in the Sixties." Tennessee Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1977. 61-70.
As one of North America’s leading playwrights, Neil Simon has definitely been instrumental to the world of theater. He has experienced a somewhat shaky personal life, but he has found that this only adds to the texture of his work. He began his career working on radio and television, and found that writing for stage was significantly different than his previous experiences writing. His first attempts at theater were rough, but it didn’t take him long to achieve excellence. He has also achieved great success with his work in the film industry. He is very fastidious when writing his work, and also quite critical of both the final written product, as well as its resulting production. However, no matter how uncertain he is of his work, it is apparent that audiences worldwide appreciate his writings, and he has been awarded numerous times to prove it. It is quite clear Neil Simon holds a place of importance in the world of dramatic arts.
In the essay “The Man at the River,” written by Dave Eggers is about an American man who does not want to cross the river with his Sudanese friends because of the fear of getting his cut infected.
It is difficult to imagine a play which is completely successful in portraying drama as Bertolt Brecht envisioned it to be. For many years before and since Brecht proposed his theory of “Epic Theatre”, writers, directors and actors have been focused on the vitality of entertaining the audience, and creating characters with which the spectator can empathize. ‘Epic Theatre’ believes that the actor-spectator relationship should be one of distinct separation, and that the spectator should learn from the actor rather than relate to him. Two contemporary plays that have been written in the last thirty years which examine and work with Brechtian ideals are ‘Fanshen’ by David Hare, and ‘The Laramie Project’ by Moises Kaufman. The question to be examined is whether either of these two plays are entirely successful in achieving what was later called, ‘The Alienation Effect”.
Robert Frost is often known as one of the greatest American poets of all time. Although he is sometimes remembered as hateful and mean spirited, his life was filled with highs and lows. These differentiating periods are represented throughout his poetry. Frost once said that “A poem begins in delight, and ends in wisdom.” As can be seen, this quote not only reflected his poetry, but his life. Though many years of his life were troubled by misfortune, Frost always seemed to persevere. Robert Frost was a talented, thoughtful poet whose life was filled with complexity and tragedy (brainyquote.com).
Downer, Alan S. American Drama and Its Critics. Chicago, University of Chicago Press [1965]. pp. 218-239.
In Euripides’ tragic play, Medea, the playwright creates an undercurrent of chaos in the play upon asserting that, “the world’s great order [is being] reversed.” (Lawall, 651, line 408). The manipulation of the spectators’ emotions, which instills in them a sentiment of drama, is relative to this undertone of disorder, as opposed to being absolute. The central thesis suggests drama in the play as relative to the method of theatrical production. The three concepts of set, costumes, and acting, are tools which accentuate the drama of the play. Respectively, these three notions represent the appearance of drama on political, social, and moral levels. This essay will compare three different productions of Euripides’ melodrama, namely, the play as presented by the Jazzart Dance Theatre¹; the Culver City (California) Public Theatre²; and finally, the original ancient Greek production of the play, as it was scripted by Euripides.
Mackay, Constance D'Arcy. The Little Theatre in the United States. New York: H. Holt, 1917. Print.
Bradley., A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.
Miller, Arthur. Miller on America. Literary Review: An International Journal of Contemporary Writing 47.1 (2003): 13-16. EBSCO. Web. 8 Feb. 2013.
At first glance, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America appear to serve as two individual exercises in the absurd. Varying degrees of the fantastical and bizarre drives the respective stories, and their respective conclusions hardly serve as logical resolutions to the questions that both Beckett and Kushner’s characters pose throughout the individual productions. Rather than viewing this abandonment of reality as the destination of either play, it should be seen as a method used by both Beckett and Kushner to force the audience to reconsider their preconceived notions when understanding the deeper emotional subtext of the plays. By presenting common and relatable situations such as love, loss, and the ways in which humans deal with change and growth, in largely unrecognizable packaging, Kushner and Beckett are able to disarm their audience amidst the chaos of the on stage action. Once the viewer’s inclination to make assumptions is stripped by the fantastical elements of either production, both playwrights provide moments of emotional clarity that the audience is forced to distill, analyze, and ultimately, comprehend on an individual level.
---. “O’Neill Talks about his Plays.” O’Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism. Ed. Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher. New York: New York UP, 1961. 110-112.
Theater of the Absurd applies to a group of plays with a certain set of characteristics. These characteristics convey a sense of bewilderment, anxiety, and wonder in the face of an unexplainable feeling. These plays all have unusual actions and are missing a key element that would clearly define other pieces of literature. Language and actions differ from the usual and sometimes cannot be explained in the Theater of the Absurd. In the works of Albee and Ionesco language, behavior, and structure are abnormal if compared to other plays. Language is a key factor that is presented as a weak form of communication throughout “The Future is in Eggs,” “The Zoo Story,” “The American Dream,” and “The Leader.”
Jeffares, A. Norman. "Farquhar's Final Comedies." Images of Invention: Essays on Irish Writing. Gerrards Cross, England: Colin Smythe, 1996. 76-89. Rpt. in Drama Criticism. Ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 38. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 28 Mar. 2014.