O’Neill is obsessive love, love that drives a person without reason and beyond conscience, love that does not heal but smothers and destroys. Although Christine and Lavinia Mannon inMourning Becomes Electra are prime examples of this obsession, characters in Beyond the Horizon, The Great God Brown, Desire Under the Elms, and Strange Interlude are also consumed by their passions.

O’Neill explored the notion that there are many facets of personality and that people rarely reveal themselves unmasked to others—or even to themselves. When they do, they discover that others are presenting only masks in return, a response that can be disappointing and even frightening. While Shakespeare could use asides and soliloquies, O’Neill sought other methods to reveal the psyche. In The Great God Brown, he uses actual masks, which actors don and remove; in Strange Interlude, he uses interior monologues. Somewhat controversial, these theatrical devices underscore the theme of the evasive nature of humanity.

A corollary theme concerns the need for illusion. O’Neill states that human beings often behave from a network of illusions that they have created about themselves and about others. In Anna Christie, Chris Christopherson believes that he hates “dat ole davil, sea”; his daughter Anna insists that all men are worthless. These illusions are shattered by events in the play and replaced by a better reality.

In The Iceman Cometh, written twenty years later, O’Neill draws characters surviving upon their “pipe dreams”: They believe that they will leave Harry Hope’s saloon in the near future and lead productive lives. When they are forced to face their illusions, they seek death.

As might be expected, O’Neill is not universally admired. His principal detractors find his style crude, his language clumsy, and his plays in need of editing. Concerning style, one must remember that O’Neill was blazing a path separate from the contrivances of the romantic “well-made play.” Aside from the early The Hairy Ape, there are few overheard or misinterpreted conversations and few traditional happy endings with all threads resolved. As for language, on the printed page the dialogue may look stilted and unbelievable, but in the mouths of talented stage professionals, it rings true. Finally, as with the works of Shakespeare, judicious editing may be desirable, but the powerful experience provided by the plays in performance is undeniable.

The Emperor Jones

First produced: 1920 (first published, 1921)

Type of work: Play

A greedy, materialistic ruler is stripped of his pretensions and pursued to his death.

The Emperor Jones, which ran for 204 performances at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village, represented the first major success by a black actor on the American stage; it also made O’Neill famous.

Almost medieval in structure, this long one-act play in eight scenes details the fall from power of a corrupt ruler, former Pullman porter Brutus Jones, who has made himself emperor of a West Indian island and greedily exploited the natives. As the play opens, the populace has revolted, and Jones realizes he must flee. In his egocentricity, he believes that the legend he has created—that he can be killed only with a silver bullet—will protect him and that his planned escape route through the forest will take him to a waiting ship and safety with the riches intact that he has extorted from the people.

As Jones travels through the forest, he is stripped physically, mentally, and emotionally of the trappings of civilization and forced back through his racial memory to a tribal past, where, naked and hysterical before the Crocodile God, he uses his silver bullet to reject the possessive god as the natives approach to kill him, ironically, with their own silver bullets. The play permits several levels of interpretation. Socially, a proud, greedy, corrupt ruler is deposed by the downtrodden people. Psychologically, a person regresses through individual memory to his racial unconscious. Philosophically, a human being fights the inevitable losing battle with the forces of the universe. Theologically, one denies a possessive god and is sacrificed to it.

Equally significant are the expressionistic devices that O’Neill has incorporated. In the middle of the first scene a tom-tom “exactly corresponding to normal pulse beat—72—to the minute—[begins] and continues at a gradually accelerating rate from this point uninterruptedly to the very end of the play.” Realistically, the drumbeats represent the natives communicating with one another as they pursue Jones. On the nonrealistic expressionistic level, they represent Jones’s heartbeats as his anxiety increases and he regresses to a tribal past. When the drums stop, the audience knows that Jones is dead.

Another device is the gradual stripping of clothes, which is both physical and psychological: Jones begins in his emperor’s robes and ends in a tattered loincloth, as he regresses from a civilized to a savage state. Finally, daylight contrasts with moonlight (a device O’Neill also uses in Long Day’s Journey into Night and The Iceman Cometh). Day represents harsh reality, where no illusions can survive; moonlight is illusion. The play begins at 3:30 in the afternoon, when the sun “still blazes yellowly.”

The scenes pass through nightfall into darkness, at nine, eleven, one, three, and five o’clock, ending at dawn, and they parallel Jones’s progress through the increasing darkness of his mind to his death in the bright light of day.

The play prefigures the basic theme of O’Neill’s last plays, which is that one cannot live without illusions. Jones believes that he has manipulated and outwitted the natives’ superstitions for his own ends. His great illusion is that he can deny his illusionary past, his humanity, and his need for a god force stronger than himself.

Desire Under the Elms

First produced: 1924 (first published, 1925)

Type of work: Play

The passionate desires of father, stepmother, and son result in a triangle of tragedy and retribution.

Banned in Boston and England, narrowly escaping a ban in New York, and its Los Angeles cast arrested for obscenity, Desire Under the Elms, with incest, adultery, and infanticide openly treated, brought O’Neill into conflict with various censors and brought much of the public to the box office. It ran for 208 performances on and off Broadway and may be the first important American tragedy.

The play demonstrates O’Neill’s exploration of Greek theater. It does not derive directly from any particular play, but its material echoes Hippolytus and Medea, which contain incest and infanticide. The inhibited, puritanical society of New England in 1850 seemed to O’Neill appropriate for the epic Greek quality he sought. A further debt to the Greeks occurs in the sense of an inevitable fate awaiting the participants, Ephraim Cabot, his son Eben, and Ephraim’s new wife, Abby Putnam.

The desire of Eben and Abby for each other is apparent from the moment she steps into the house, although it is masked by Eben’s antagonism and her caution. He is loyal to the memory of his dead mother, whom he feels was robbed of her land and worked to death by Ephraim. The farm is his, he believes, and Abby is an intruder, seeking to steal his inheritance. She, in turn, has learned to fight for what she wants, and now she seeks security and a place of her own.

If Eben were not there, quite likely Abby would have made a good wife for Ephraim as long as he lived; however, the mutual physical attraction of Abby and Eben cannot be resisted. In a powerful scene in which Abby lures Eben into the parlor and declares her love, promising that she will take the dead mother’s place, “with a horribly frank mixture of lust and mother love,” the adultery is consummated.

One psychoanalytic critic noted that the play seems to have been written by someone in “intense mourning for his mother” (O’Neill had lost both his mother and brother in the previous two years). Certainly the yearning for the nurturing, protective mother permeates the work, not only in Eben’s speeches about his love for his mother and in his incestuous love for the wife of his father, but also in Abby’s speeches about her willingness to substitute for the mother. Further, both Abby and Eben strongly desire the land, which belonged to the mother, and which represents the same nurturing, protective qualities. This motif is further emphasized in O’Neill’s specific directions for the visual effects of the setting, in which he calls for two elm trees on each side of the house with “a sinister maternity . . . like exhausted women resting their sagging breasts and hands and hair on its roof.”

The Oedipal conflict of father and son for superiority, through possession of the woman, underlies the action of the play. Ephraim’s superior maleness will be demonstrated unequivocally with the birth of a son by Abby. Eben’s secret knowledge that Abby’s son is his secures his male superiority as well as his claim to the farm. When Eben becomes jealous of Ephraim’s possessiveness of the baby, Abby, literally accepting his cry that he wishes the baby had never been born, murders the child to prove her love. She readily acknowledges her crime, Eben accepts his responsibility, and both resign themselves to punishment. Ephraim must remain on the farm. “God’s hard,” he says, believing that a force beyond himself has guided events.

The structure of the play is one of O’Neill’s tightest; its three acts are economical and swiftly moving. O’Neill’s innovative set design of the original production made use of a house exterior and interior: When a scene occurred in one room, the exterior wall could be removed, and scenes set in different rooms could be viewed simultaneously. This allowed for an easy flow from one scene to another. The lighting also contributed, providing a contrast between the brightly lit exterior and the dim, shadowy interior.

O’Neill’s use of language is masterful; the Yankee words and phrases such as “Ayeh,” “purty,” and “I love ye, Abby,” and the biblical passages recited by Ephraim, arise naturally but effectively from the characters. The character of Eben is the key to the essence of the play. Of a sensitive nature, like the author himself, the weak, questing son is a figure O’Neill used many times. Here his love of the land, his awareness of its beauty, and his need for love infuse the play with poetry and elevate it above the level of simple realism into poignant tragedy.

The Great God Brown

First produced: 1926 (first published, 1926)

Type of work: Play

The rivalry of the artist in conflict with himself and a materialistic society results in his self-destruction.

“I love that play,” O’Neill declared of The Great God Brown, which remained one of his favorites. Perhaps his fondness derived from the subjective, autobiographical nature of Dion Anthony, one of the characters, who expresses O’Neill’s search for spiritual certainty, as well as his physical qualities and his bitterness. Perhaps O’Neill’s liking sprang from the expressionistic device of the masks, which makes the play one of his strangest and most experimental. Although the critics did not share O’Neill’s feeling, the public was fascinated by the play, which ran for more than 280 performances.

The plot, which is somewhat obscure, involves two young men, friendly rivals from childhood, Dion Anthony and Billy Brown. Dion, an artist, should become a painter, but his father refuses to send him to college. Billy, the stereotypical ideal American boy, goes to college, becomes an architect, and joins his father’s firm. It is Dion who wins the girl, Margaret, despite Billy’s love for her.

Seven years pass. The marriage of Dion and Margaret is unsuccessful: “We communicate in code—when neither has the other’s key!” says Dion, drinking and gambling his inheritance away. Billy, now successful, employs Dion at Margaret’s request, and uses Dion’s creativity to enhance his own designs. Their career rivalry extends to Dion’s friend, the prostitute Cybel, whom Billy keeps as a mistress. The play’s events are understandable, almost banal, until the end of act 2, when Dion suddenly accuses Billy of being unable to love and trying to steal Margaret and Cybel out of envy. Billy admits his love for Margaret; Dion replies, “with a terrible composure”: “No! . . . [Billy] loves me! He loves me because I have always possessed the power he needed for love, because I am love!”

Dion then dies of his alcoholism, but his final wish is for Billy to assume the Dion Anthony identity through the device of the mask. Billy accedes, even playing husband to Margaret. The masquerade cannot be maintained, however, and he is shot as the supposed murderer of Dion.

The interest of the play lies not in the plot outline but in the way O’Neill has developed the characters and themes. The principal device is the use of the mask, a legacy from the Greek theater, which forcefully makes the statement that humans present images to one another, that they rarely expose the truth of themselves. Characters don and remove masks at significant moments: When Dion, in desperation, drops his mask before Margaret to beg for her love, she is so frightened she faints. Billy also drops his mask before Margaret to declare his love for her; she remains masked and rejects him. The expression of the masks changes as the characters alter, age, and experience emotion. The only relationship presented in which the participants are unmasked is that of Dion and Cybel. They are honest together. A masked drama is valuable, according to O’Neill, because it provides “a fresh insight into the inner forces motivating the actions and reactions of men and women.”

The statement of the play, however, is not clear. As representative of American greed and materialism, Billy Brown is an unusually sympathetic character. He is a “good loser” with Margaret, and his success has fallen upon him without aggression on his part. Billy’s assumption of Dion’s identity in the third act, which apparently O’Neill intended to demonstrate the isolation and torment of the artistic psyche, leads to a confusing, almost farcical switching of masks. At one moment Billy, in his own mask, speaks to his employees as “Mr. Brown,” then he runs offstage, returning almost immediately in Dion’s mask to encounter Margaret.

Finally, the interest of the audience lies not with Billy, who hardly seems the “great god” of the title, but with Dion, O’Neill’s artist surrogate, whose dark passion is sometimes narcissistic and self-pitying, sometimes poetic and touching. His torment results from his inability to be an artist and to win the approval of God. Instead, he must relinquish his creative ideas to another man and remain anonymous. Those familiar with O’Neill’s history will recognize both the determined “I want to be an artist or nothing” that informs much of his work and the pain accompanying that desire. The Great God Brown is a flawed play, infrequently revived, but it merits study for its use of the masks and for its exploration of identity.

Mourning Becomes Electra

First produced: 1931 (first published, 1931)

Type of work: Play

The Mannon family, seemingly cursed in its relationships of love and hate, commits adultery, murder, and incest through three generations.

O’Neill conceived of creating a modern psychological drama rooted in Greek legend in the spring of 1926, but Mourning Becomes Electra was not completed until the spring of 1931. Actually a trilogy of three full-length plays, it opened in October and was deemed a masterpiece by more than one critic. O’Neill said: “By the title Mourning Becomes Electra I sought to convey that mourning befits Electra; it becomes Electra to mourn; it is her fate; black is becoming to her and it is the color that becomes her destiny.”

The Greek source for O’Neill was the Oresteia of Aeschylus, from the fifth century b.c.e., the trilogy detailing the relationships of the house of Atreus. In the first play, after the siege of Troy, Clytemnestra murders her husband, the victorious Agamemnon; in the second, their son Orestes, with his sister Electra, murders his mother and her lover Aegisthus; in the third, Orestes is hounded by the Furies for matricide but is eventually freed from his guilt and acquitted of the crime. O’Neill reworked much of this story; he also drew upon the versions of Electra by Sophocles and Euripides, which focus upon the daughter, a haunted woman, torn by hate and love and never at peace.

The Mannon family (the name may be associated with “mammon” and the family’s materialism) is the center of O’Neill’s play, which is set in New England immediately after the Civil War. The house is described in the stage directions as resembling a white Greek temple, with six columns across the front porch. In the first play, The Homecoming, Christine Mannon (Clytemnestra) has taken a lover, Adam Brant (Aegisthus), while her husband, Ezra (Agamemnon), has been fighting in the war. Daughter Lavinia (Electra) is jealously aware of the affair and threatens her mother with exposure. In this section, mother and daughter are rivals for the love of Ezra and Adam.

When Ezra returns, Lavinia desperately tries to win his love and attention from her mother, as Ezra makes an impassioned effort to communicate with Christine, begging her to love him. Thinking only of her lover, she rejects him, and when he has a heart attack, she administers poison rather than medicine. In his death throes, he reveals Christine’s crime to Lavinia.

The triangular structure of the second play, The Hunted, includes Lavinia, Christine, and the newly returned battle-scarred Orin (Orestes). Each woman is seductive and persuasive with him, but Lavinia is victorious in convincing him that Christine killed Ezra and that he should avenge their father’s murder by killing Adam Brant. He accomplishes the act, which drives Christine to commit suicide and leads to Orin’s mental deterioration through his burden of guilt. In the final play, The Haunted, both Lavinia and Orin struggle to transcend their past crimes, first through incestuous love of each other, then through relationships outside the family. When this is impossible, Orin commits suicide, and Lavinia secludes herself in the Mannon mansion.

Although the plot represents another reworking of the O’Neill family drama, with the author infusing autobiography into both Lavinia and Orin, it is also faithful to the Greek legend. In addition, O’Neill borrowed other elements from the Greeks. He adopted the form of the trilogy, and he created the character of Seth to function as the leader of the chorus. The townspeople act as that chorus. Most important, O’Neill sought to find an equivalent to the Greek sense of fate, the inescapable destiny toward which the characters rush, which the Greeks achieved through their culture’s belief in gods and goddesses and in their shared morality.

Such a climate was difficult to approximate in a modern culture that does not believe in such external forces. To solve the problem, O’Neill set the play in a Puritan-derived New England culture, similar to that of Desire Under the Elms, a culture which insisted upon personal responsibility and which offered no easy absolution or forgiveness. The sense of fate surrounds the past, present, and future of the family, as the past sins of the father (and mother) are redressed by the children with greater sins, for which they in turn must suffer in the future. “I’m the last Mannon,” says Lavinia as she imprisons herself in the mansion. “I’ve got to punish myself.” The tragic destiny of the Mannon family is oblivion.

The sense of fate is further reinforced by the use of the mask concept. O’Neill, still fascinated by the device, wrote one draft of the play with characters donning and removing masks, as in The Great God Brown; he soon rejected the device, although not its significance. Instead, he enlisted the actors’ skills to create expressions on the faces of the Mannon family like “life-like masks.” These emphasize the family similarity and the ties of blood that bind them together. In the final section, both Lavinia and Orin are altered in appearance and resemble their parents even more closely, a reminder that despite all resistance, heredity is destiny.

This view corresponds to that of the Darwinian naturalists, who describe humanity as the product of heredity and environment; thus, human beings are victims of forces beyond their control. Indeed, the play has links with the naturalistic theater. Where the naturalists claim that because of these forces people are not responsible for their actions, however, the Puritan mind claims that people should suffer guilt and be punished. Perhaps it is significant that in the Greek play Orestes is forgiven by the Eumenides and Electra is married to Pylades, a prince of Phocis, but in O’Neill’s puritanical play there is no such mercy.

Once again, in Mourning Becomes Electra there is no moral message, only intense experience. The family is depicted in a tortured web of dependencies, jealousies, hatreds, and loves, which O’Neill describes without judgment. Reading the play later, he declared himself satisfied with its “strange quality of unreal reality.” Finally, if Mourning Becomes Electra is not the artistic equivalent of the Oresteia, it is the closest example that twenty-five hundred years of theater have produced.

The Iceman Cometh

First produced: 1946 (first published, 1946)

Type of work: Play

The salesman Hickey tries to shatter the “pipe dreams” of his friends in Harry Hope’s saloon, but he succeeds only in proving that pipe dreams are necessary, even for himself.

With The Iceman Cometh, O’Neill discarded the literary sources and devices with which he had been experimenting for so long, as if they were pipe dreams of his own that protected him from the pain of reality, to concentrate upon realistic material and characters whom he had known firsthand. He set the action of the play in 1912, probably the most important year of his life, when he returned from South America, penniless and despondent, and landed at Jimmy-the-Priest’s in New York.

In the play, Jimmy-the-Priest’s becomes Harry Hope’s saloon, where whiskey costs five cents a shot and where a month’s room and board, including a cup of soup, is three dollars. Of the nineteen characters O’Neill shapes—bartenders, pimps, whores, ne’er-do-wells, retirees—most are based on the assorted derelicts and homeless people O’Neill encountered at that low period of his life. The Iceman Cometh is a naturalistic drama of “the lower depths,” a genre displaying life at the extremities as more real, elemental, and meaningful than that of the pretentious, artificial middle class. Thus, the characters are the dregs of society, with few resources and fewer opportunities. Their heredity and the environment have victimized them.

Almost classical in its adherence to the unities of time and place, the play is structured like a musical theme and variations. Each character seeks an escape through alcohol from the pain of living. Each maintains an existence through a “pipe dream” he or she has created, an illusion surrounding the self that allows a continuance of the lifestyle cultivated at Harry Hope’s. This motif is announced early in Larry Slade’s response to Rocky’s joking remarks that Harry is going to demand payment from everyone—tomorrow. Larry says:I’ll be glad to pay up—tomorrow. And I know my fellow inmates will promise the same. They’ve all a touching credulity concerning tomorrows. Their ships will come in, loaded to the gunwales with cancelled regrets and promises fulfilled and clean slates and new leases!

The theme is developed through repetition by each character of a particular dream—some comic, some serious, but all illusory.

Into this milieu of fantasy comes Hickey, the charismatic drummer (salesman), on his annual birthday visit. He is eagerly awaited by Harry’s denizens, but this year he is somehow different; instead of settling down to his customary binge, he refuses alcohol, and he talks strangely about ridding himself of pipe dreams and helping Harry’s regulars to rid themselves of theirs and find peace.

At first they think he is joking, that he is initiating a new game, but as he continues to goad, taunt, and ridicule, they become uneasy, irritated, and finally hostile. One by one he forces them to act upon their pipe dreams, to leave the comfort and security of their womblike existence, and to face their fantasies in the world beyond. These encounters with reality do not bring peace. As the fourth act begins, the characters have returned to their former places and seek oblivion in alcohol with even greater determination. The atmosphere is funereal, and O’Neill’s principal statement, that human beings cannot survive without illusions, is underscored.

The only two characters who remain in the saloon are Larry Slade, who manages to withstand Hickey’s campaign, and his young acquaintance Don Parritt, a newcomer from the West Coast, whose illusion is that he betrayed his anarchist mother to the police out of patriotism and love. Hickey recognizes that somehow he and Parritt are “members of the same lodge.” Their similarities become evident as the play progresses.

The climax of the play is reached not only through action but also through revelation, as each act brings new information about Hickey: the first, that he wants to bring peace to his friends; the second, that his wife, Evelyn, is dead; the third, that she was murdered; and the fourth, that he is her murderer. Hickey’s illusion parallels Parritt’s, that he killed out of love—to bring his wife peace—but Parritt interrupts Hickey’s confession to blurt out the truth about the betrayal of his mother. “It was because I hated her.” Hickey, reliving his speech to the body of Evelyn, virtually echoes him: “Well, you know what you can do with your pipe dream now, you damned bitch!” Evelyn’s pipe dream was a faith in Hickey’s reform, a faith which resulted in his guilt and resentment. The reality of his hatred of Evelyn can be faced only for an instant; Hickey immediately insists that because he loved Evelyn, he must have been insane when he killed her. This is a new illusion, and it reinforces the illusions of the others: If Hickey is insane, all his urgings of their finding peace through discarding their pipe dreams must be false. They can comfortably return to their fantasy lives.

For Parritt, however, a return to fantasy is not possible; the guilt that his confession evoked cannot be denied, and he seeks punishment. Led away by officers Lieb and Moran, whose names bring associations with love and death, Hickey also seeks punishment. Parritt, with Larry’s encouragement, commits suicide, and Larry is left without illusion, resigned to his humanity and his sympathy for both Hickey and Parritt, awaiting death.

A complex and disturbing play that runs about four and a half hours in performance, its greatness lies not in theatrical innovation but in psychological truth. Sharing the tedium and pain of this existence, the audience is also forced to face the necessity for illusion in their own lives. Although the play was not successful in its original Broadway production in 1946, the Off-Broadway revival at the Circle-in-the-Square ten years later drew audiences for almost two years and sparked renewed interest in the O’Neill canon.

Long Day’s Journey into Night

First produced: 1956 (first published, 1956)

Type of work: Play

The Tyrone family struggles to cope with the mother’s drug addiction, the father’s miserliness, one son’s tuberculosis, the other’s profligacy, and, above all, the complexity of their feelings for one another.

By 1940, O’Neill had won three Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize in Literature, but the work for which he is remembered and praised and revered as America’s foremost dramatist is Long Day’s Journey into Night, his autobiographical work dealing with the torment of his own family. It earned for him a final Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1956. In the dedication of the play to his wife Carlotta, O’Neill says:I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play—write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.

O’Neill was fascinated with the family unit and with the effects of heredity as well as relationships upon the generations. If one generation is poor, the second becomes miserly, and the third contemptuous, what remains for the fourth generation? O’Neill’s outlined cycle of plays, which he was never to complete, explored the past and future of a single family through three hundred years and many generations. Long Day’s Journey into Night also expresses the idea that bonds of blood are inextricable. Each of the characters is in conflict over the role of the independent self and the role of dependent family member. In their ambivalence, feelings of love and hate surface and clash. The family unit is confined, a self-contained universe, and beyond is only the void.

In this family drama the O’Neills become the Tyrones: father James, a famous actor known for his role as the count of Monte Cristo; mother Mary, a thinly disguised portrait of Ellen Quinlan O’Neill; and the two sons Jamie and Edmund, mirrors of Eugene’s brother Jamie and the playwright himself. Set in New London, Connecticut, the time is 1912, the year of O’Neill’s suicide attempt and his brush with tuberculosis.

Like The Iceman Cometh, the structure is classical; the events are compressed into one August day. The first act occurs in the morning, the second before and after lunch, the third at 6:30 p.m., and the fourth at midnight. There are five characters (including the maid Cathleen), a shared past, and individual guilt. The action unfolds through psychological revelation. The past is revealed through the dialogue, the guilt through the relationships of the four family members.

The catalytic agent is Mary’s morphine addiction, which she believes occurred after Edmund’s birth when James hired a “quack doctor” to treat her, a belief that arouses guilt in both Edmund and James and encourages resentment in Jamie. In the first act she is supposedly “well” again, and the facade of a happy family can be maintained. Edmund is ill, however, probably with tuberculosis (in that period usually fatal), and concern for him provides Mary an excuse to return to her habit.

The first to perceive that her latest cure is not successful is Jamie, who reveals his suspicions to Edmund. Soon all three men recognize that Mary’s rambling complaints about their home, the servants, James’s frugality, and Edmund’s drinking are signs of her addiction. Each tries to persuade her not to succumb. Tyrone pleads brokenly, “Dear Mary! For the love of God, for my sake and the boys’ sake and your own, won’t you stop now?” She responds vaguely that they should not “try to understand what we cannot understand, or help things that cannot be helped—the things life has done to us we cannot excuse or explain.”

After lunch, the men escape into town, leaving Mary alone. She begins to return to the past, or the past returns to her. With Cathleen imbibing Tyrone’s liquor freely, Mary recalls her early days in the convent, her first meeting with James Tyrone, and her lost faith. When Edmund returns with confirmation of his tuberculosis, Mary refuses to listen and angrily cries, “I hate you when you become gloomy and morbid.” Edmund bitterly retorts, “It’s pretty hard to take at times, having a dope fiend for a mother!”

The last act unites the three men at midnight in drunken misery around the dining room table. First, James and Edmund alternate between bickering over the use of electricity and accusations of each other’s culpability in Mary’s addiction. Then each reveals a part of his real self: Tyrone’s regrets about his wasted career and Edmund’s love of the sea. Jamie arrives home, extremely drunk, to express in a moment of truth his hatred of Edmund. In the final moments, with the foghorn sounding in the background and the men in a drunken fog, Mary descends the stairs, in the deepest fog of all, trailing her wedding dress, and remembering how happy she had once been. Little hope remains.

The play is not totally autobiographical. O’Neill has exaggerated some aspects of his situations and omitted others. His father was not so miserly, nor his mother so emotionally dependent, nor he quite so blameless. Nevertheless, the skill with which complex relationships are developed and projected is masterful, and the truth of the family’s conflicts is shattering.