Collected Shorter Plays [Paperback]

Eugene O'Neill (Author), Robert Brustein (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 28, 2007

All of O’Neill’s themes and concerns find expression in his one-act plays. They are the dramatic equivalent of short stories. Here gathered in a single volume are nine one-act plays that span the playwright’s career—from the early sea plays to the Expressionist masterpiece The Hairy Ape to the eerie nocturnal monologue Hughie.
Included in this volume: Bound East for Cardiff • Fog • Thirst • The Long Voyage Home • Ile • The Moon of the Caribbees • In the Zone • The Hairy Ape • Hughie

Editorial Reviews

Review

“[O’Neill] is the most American of our handful of dramatists who matter most.”—Harold Bloom

“[O’Neill] singlehandedly waded through the dismal swamplands of American drama, bleak, squashy, and oozing sticky goo, and alone and singlehanded bore out the water lily that no American had found there before him.”—George Jean Nathan

“O’Neill belongs to that group of American authors, which includes Farrell and Dreiser, whose choice of vocation was a kind of triumphant catastrophe; none of these men possessed the slightest ear for the word, the sentence, the speech, the paragraph; all of them, however, have, so to speak, enforced the career they decreed for themselves by a relentless policing of their beat.”—Tony Kushner

“[O’Neill] singlehandedly waded through the dismal swamplands of American drama, bleak, squashy, and oozing sticky goo, and alone and singlehanded bore out the water lily that no American had found there before him.”—George Jean Nathan

(George Jean Nathan )

“[O’Neill] is the most American of our handful of dramatists who matter most.”—Harold Bloom

(Harold Bloom )

“O’Neill belongs to that group of American authors, which includes Farrell and Dreiser, whose choice of vocation was a kind of triumphant catastrophe; none of these men possessed the slightest ear for the word, the sentence, the speech, the paragraph; all of them, however, have, so to speak, enforced the career they decreed for themselves by a relentless policing of their beat.”—Tony Kushner

(Tony Kushner )

“O’Neill was not the first American to turn to one-act plays . . . but there is no doubt that . . . he perfected the form, just as Hemingway, a few years later, was to perfect the genre of the American short story.”—from the introduction by Robert Brustein

(Robert Brustein )

Book Description

All of O’Neill’s themes and concerns find expression in his one-act plays. They are the dramatic equivalent of short stories. Here gathered in a single volume are nine one-act plays that span the poet’s career--from the early sea plays to the Expressionist masterpiece The Hairy Ape to the eerie nocturnal monologue Hughie, a play written near the end of O’Neill’s life and during the same period in which he completed Long Day’s Journey into Night and The Iceman Cometh.

Included in this volume:

Bound East for Cardiff

Fog

Thirst

The Long Voyage Home

Ile

The Moon of the Caribbees

In the Zone

The Hairy Ape

Hughie

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (February 28, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 030010779X
• ISBN-13: 978-0300107791
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #481,872 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars 8 fair to good early plays and 1 late minor classic., November 1, 2011

By 

bongo (Denver, CO USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Collected Shorter Plays (Paperback)

The contents:
1. Bound East for Cardiff
2. Fog
3. Thirst
4. The Long Voyage Home
5. Ile
6. The Moon of the Caribbees
7. In the Zone
8. The Hairy Ape
9. Hughie

1-8 are all set on the on the ocean. A couple of them are lifeboat dramas, and the rest are mostly about the crew members of 'tramp steamers' and ocean liners. O'Neil has the ship workers speak in clunky vernacular, eg, "A chanty is what you want? I'll bet me whole pay day there's not wan in the crowd 'ceptin Yank here, an' Ollie, an' meself an' Lamps an' Cocky, maybe, wud be sailers enough to know the main from the mizzen on a windjammer..." They drink and sing and argue. Sometimes they reminisce about the old days and sometimes they talk about how hard it is to be poor and having to work so hard.

9. Is a conversation between a New York gambler, Erie Smith, and the clerk at the hotel he's staying in. Hughie was the old clerk and he and the Erie were chummy. Erie tells the new clerk what Hughie was like and tells him about his own life as a gambler. It's pretty much a monologue on his part but it gives a clever, focused portrait of a wannabe big shot. A classic seedy, delusional O'Neil character. This play was written much later than the others and it shows. O'Neil's technique has been refined. It's like he's not trying too hard anymore.

I really liked Hughie, that was a home run for me. The Hairy Ape was good too, though not nearly as polished.

I was lukewarm on the others. There's generally something worthy in all of them but you have to get through a fair amount of drunken, muddled verbiage. I get that O'Neil was trying to get the right atmosphere, and sailers drink and argue and talk trash, but just because it's accurate doesn't mean it's good drama. That's what I meant by trying to hard, by the way. In the earlier plays O'Neil focuses too much on making the dialogue sound slangy and naturalistic, so to speak, and not on what the characters real motivations are. So we get caricatures more than characters.

Anyway, I don't want to sound too negative. I am an O'Neil fan. I recommend Hughie without qualification, The Hairy Ape with some qualification, and the rest have their moments.