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Strange Interlude | Introduction

Strange Interlude (1928), by American dramatist Eugene O’Neill, was a huge success when first produced by the Theatre Guild at the John Golden Theatre in New York City in 1928. It won the Pulitzer Prize and became the most successful American play to date.

The play covers a period of twenty-five years in the lives of mostly upper-middle-class East Coast characters. It centers on Nina Leeds, a passionate, tormented woman whose fiancé was killed in World War I and who spends the remainder of her life searching for an always-elusive happiness.

This is a very long play, lasting over five hours in performance. The story is not especially complex, and the length of the play derives from O’Neill’s revival of two theatrical devices that had fallen out of use for nearly a century: the soliloquy, in which a character alone on the stage speaks his or her thoughts aloud, and the aside, which enables characters to reveal their thoughts to the audience but not to the other characters on stage. These devices, which O’Neill employed at length, enabled the playwright to probe deeply into his characters’ motivations. The soliloquies and asides reveal the discrepancies between what the characters say and do, and what they really feel.

Strange Interlude was a controversial play because it dealt openly with such topics as adultery and abortion. Although it was rarely revived in the early 2000s, it was generally regarded as the first of O’Neill’s works in which he revealed his full power as a dramatist.

Strange Interlude Summary

Act 1
Strange Interlude begins in August, 1919, in the library of Professor Leeds’s home in New England. Marsden has just returned from World War I in Europe, although he did not serve in the military. He and Leeds discuss Leeds’s daughter, Nina, who has had a nervous breakdown following the death of her boyfriend, Gordon, in the war. Leeds believes that Nina has turned against him because he persuaded Gordon to postpone their marriage until Gordon had safely returned from the war. Nina informs her father that she intends to work as a nurse at a sanatorium for wounded soldiers. She still grieves for Gordon and feels this is her duty. Leeds opposes her wish and confesses that he was jealous of Gordon because he wanted to keep Nina’s love for himself. But he finally agrees to let Nina go.

Act 2
A year later, Leeds has just died and Nina returns, accompanied by Sam Evans, who is in love with her, and Ned Darrell, a young doctor friend. Evans tells Marsden, whom he regards as Nina’s guardian, that he wants to marry her, but Marsden points out that Nina still loves Gordon. Darrell confides in Marsden that Nina has a morbid love of martyrdom and has been giving herself to the wounded soldiers in the hospital. He says that the best thing for her would be to marry Evans, which would help her regain her emotional balance. For her part, Nina is scared that she is no longer able to feel anything, including grief for her deceased father. She feels guilty about the way she has been behaving, and Marsden advises her to marry Evans, even though she does not love him. She consents.

Act 3
Seven months later, Nina is pregnant, but she has not told Evans, her husband. Marsden guesses her secret but says nothing. He is jealous, since he also loves Nina. When Evans’s mother finds out that Nina is pregnant, she begs her to have an abortion. She explains the long history of insanity in the family, saying that Nina should never have a child by Evans. Instead, she should take a lover, and raise the child as if Evans were the father. Otherwise the strain of raising a child would affect Evans’s sanity. Once Nina has recovered from the shock of this information, she agrees to get an abortion.

Act 4
Seven months later, Evans is trying unsuccessfully to write advertising copy. Nina, who has been ill since the abortion, is contemptuous... » Complete Strange Interlude Summary