Eugene O'Neill's Philosophy of Difficult Theatre

Eugene O'Neill's Philosophy of Difficult Theatre PDF Author: Jeremy Killian
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000546136
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
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.

Eugene O'Neill's Philosophy of Difficult Theatre

Eugene O'Neill's Philosophy of Difficult Theatre PDF Author: Jeremy Killian
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000546136
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O'Neill PDF Author: Robert M. Dowling
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300210590
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 566

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Book Description
An “absorbing” biography of the playwright and Nobel laureate that “unflinchingly explores the darkness that dominated O’Neill’s life” (Publishers Weekly). This extraordinary biography fully captures the intimacies of Eugene O’Neill’s tumultuous life and the profound impact of his work on American drama, innovatively highlighting how the stories he told for the stage interweave with his actual life stories as well as the culture and history of his time. Much is new in this extensively researched book: connections between O’Neill’s plays and his political and philosophical worldview; insights into his Irish American upbringing and lifelong torment over losing faith in God; his vital role in African American cultural history; unpublished photographs, including a unique offstage picture of him with his lover Louise Bryant; new evidence of O’Neill’s desire to become a novelist and what this reveals about his unique dramatic voice; and a startling revelation about the release of Long Day’s Journey Into Night in defiance of his explicit instructions. This biography is also the first to discuss O’Neill’s lost play Exorcism (a single copy of which was only recently recovered), a dramatization of his own suicide attempt. Written with both a lively informality and a scholar’s strict accuracy, Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts is a biography worthy of America’s foremost playwright. “Fast-paced, highly readable . . . building to a devastating last act.” —Irish Times

Eugene O'Neill's Creative Struggle

Eugene O'Neill's Creative Struggle PDF Author: Doris Alexander
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271041021
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
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.

Hughie

Hughie PDF Author: Eugene O'Neill
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service Inc
ISBN: 9780822205432
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
THE STORY: Originally produced on Broadway, revived to sellout houses in 1996 starring Al Pacino, HUGHIE was one of O'Neill's last works. It was originally intended as part of a series of short plays, but it became the lone survivor when O'Neill de

Eugene O’Neill’s One-Act Plays

Eugene O’Neill’s One-Act Plays PDF Author: M. Bennett
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137043938
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
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.

Plays by Eugene O'Neill

Plays by Eugene O'Neill PDF Author: Eugene O'Neill
Publisher: Broadway Play Publishing
ISBN: 9780881451818
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
This collection contains Eugene O'Neill's first three full-length plays: BEYOND THE HORIZON, THE EMPEROR JONES, and ANNA CHRISTIE. BEYOND THE HORIZON: Winner of the 1920 Pulitzer Prize for Drama "...an absorbing, significant, and memorable tragedy... ...a playwright of real power and imagination... ...the play has greatness in it and marks O'Neill as one of our foremost playwrights...." Alexander Woolcott, Times "Only once or twice in the course of the dramatic season does a playof such terrific force and such simple directness award the patient theatrical chroniclers..." Robert Gilbert Welsh, Evening Telegram "...this season's most notable play of a serious theme and purpose by an American author...." World THE EMPEROR JONES: "...for strength and originality [O'Neill] has no rivals among the American writers for the stage." Alexander Woolcott, Times "An odd and extraordinary play, written with imaginative genius..." Kenneth Macgowan, Globe "...the most interesting play which has yet come from the most promising playwright in America..." Heywood Broun, Tribune ANNA CHRISTIE: Winner of the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for Drama "...a rich and salty play that grips the attention with the rise of the first curtain and holds it fiercely to the end.... A play written with that abundant imagination, that fresh and venturesome mind and that sure instinct for the theatre which set this young author apart...." Alexander Woollcott, Times

Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O'Neill PDF Author: Egil Törnqvist
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 9780786417131
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Eugene O'Neill wrote his plays for a theatre in which the playwright would take a central position. He presented himself as a controlling personality both in the texts--in the form of ample stage directions--and in performances based on these texts. His plays address several audiences--reader, spectator, and production team--and scripts were often different from the published versions. This study examines O'Neill's multiple roles as a writer for many audiences. After a description of O'Neill's working conditions and the multiple audiences of the plays, this study examines the various formal aspects of the plays: titles, settings in time and place, names and addresses, language, and connections and allusions to other works. An examination of the plays follows, with particular emphasis on Bound East for Cardiff, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and A Touch of the Poet.

Nine Plays by Eugene O'Neill ...

Nine Plays by Eugene O'Neill ... PDF Author: Eugene O'Neill
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 904

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Book Description


The O'Neill

The O'Neill PDF Author: Jeffrey Sweet
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300206933
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
"At the O'Neill, we were all engaged with full-hearted passion in sometimes the silliest of exercises, and all in service of finding that wiggly, elusive creature, a new play."—Meryl Streep "I would not be who or where I am today without the O'Neill."—Michael Douglas As the old ways of the commercial theater were dying and American playwriting was in crisis, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center arose as a midwife to new plays and musicals, introducing some of the most exciting talents of our time (including August Wilson, Wendy Wasserstein, and Christopher Durang) and developing works that went on to win Pulitzer Prizes and Tony Awards. Along the way, it collaborated with then-unknown performers (like Meryl Streep, Michael Douglas, Courtney Vance, and Angela Bassett) and inspired Robert Redford in his creation of the Sundance Institute. This is the story of a theatrical laboratory, a place that transformed American theater, film, and television.

Lazarus Laughed (1925-26)

Lazarus Laughed (1925-26) PDF Author: Eugene O'Neill
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
The story features characters and events following the raising of Lazarus of Bethany from the dead by Jesus. As Lazarus is the first man to return from the realm of the dead, the crowd reacts intently to his words. Over and over again he declares to them that there is no death, only God's eternal laughter. The more Lazarus laughs, the younger and stronger he becomes. The more he laughs, the older and weaker his wife Miriam (who trusts him but does not understand his laughter) becomes. The subsequent scenes portray a series of tests (perhaps similar to those trials of Job) by the Jews, Romans and Greeks to try the faith of Lazarus. Consequently, members of his family are taken from him, but Lazarus continues always to laugh, even as Miriam is poisoned by the Roman Emperor Tiberius and continuing on to the very end, when Tiberius burns him at the stake. --Wikipedia.com.