Eugene O'Neil

I'm teaching a course on O'Neill at Sing Sing." Sing Sing? The notorious jail? Why would prisoners be interested in a playwright? "Every convict is convinced that he comes from a dysfunctional family. They all see themselves as victims of a loveless environment of indifference and deprivation."
So I was told by Stephen Kennedy Murphy, the recipient of a grant to direct readings of each and every one of O'Neill's works at Greenwich Village's Provincetown Playhouse, an institution affiliated with New York University.
Americans have been responding to the plays of Eugene O'Neill for almost a century, many no doubt believing, like those prisoners, that they will gain a better understanding of themselves by the characters' baring their souls. And well they might. O'Neill (1888-1953) — who won four Pulitzer Prizes (one posthumously) and the Nobel Prize in Literature, the only American playwright so honored in his lifetime — was undoubtedly astute regarding the personal damage wrought by familial dysfunction, illuminating Freudian concepts but also Lacanian views of humankind as forever marked by the wounds of filial separation.
But other facets of O'Neill's work resonate well in many other disciplines — classics, philosophy, history, political science, and gender studies among them.
Classicists see O'Neill as adapting the ancient themes of Aeschylus to and for an America unsophisticated about classical tragedy. When O'Neill was asked why he returned to classical antiquity to deal with modern democracy, he responded that the Greek stage allows us to look into ourselves. Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle held up reason as the highest human faculty. Rational reflection was, they taught, the key to discovering life's meaning. By grasping eternal and immutable truths, we could fathom who we are and why we exist, they believed. But ancient playwrights dealt with the emotions and passions that their protagonists themselves could barely understand or explain. Carrying forward that ancient tradition, O'Neill dealt not with the theater of truth, but with the drama of doubt, uncertainty, and questioning.
How, for instance, can there be a merciful God when the world contains such misery? O'Neill was haunted by his mother's addiction to morphine, prescribed to her to relieve the pain she suffered upon O'Neill's own birth. When years later he became aware of his mother's ailment, O'Neill, brought up a Catholic, could no longer believe in God. In Long Day's Journey Into Night, the O'Neill character (Edmund) and his brother are arguing about Friedrich Nietzsche when the father (Tyrone) suddenly breaks in to tell them both to shut up, and the sons challenge his profession of religion as he tells them he gets down on his knees and prays when he goes to Mass: