{"content":[{"text":"The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT)","bbox":{"left":0.071429,"top":0.016045,"width":0.42650899999999997,"height":0.018096000000000004}},{"text":"https://jadtjournal.org","bbox":{"left":0.071429,"top":0.04697,"width":0.146067,"height":0.015844999999999998}},{"text":"The Theatre of Eugene O'Neill: American Modernism on the \n World Stage","bbox":{"left":0.071429,"top":0.089616,"width":0.786129,"height":0.056337}},{"text":"The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen \n Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv.","bbox":{"left":0.071429,"top":0.161315,"width":0.810299,"height":0.037558000000000036}},{"text":"Kurt Eisen’s excellent The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage appears \n as part of the Methuen Drama Critical Companions series, a series that “covers playwrights, theatre \n makers, movements and periods of international theatre and performance” and gives “attention to both \n text and performance” in critical surveys of the work of individual authors. Other contributions to the \n series include books on Beckett and Tennessee Williams and on the American stage musical and \n twentieth-century verse drama in England. Eisen here gives a succinct but rich account of O’Neill’s \n plays, captures well the breadth and range of O’Neill’s achievement, outlines key thematic concerns, and \n opens up interesting questions for both established scholars and those new to O’Neill’s vast, endlessly \n intriguing body of work. Essays by William Davies King, Alexander Pettit, Katie Johnson and Sheila \n Hickey Garvey offer additional and complementary critical perspectives. A comprehensive bibliography \n identifies all the major critical works and also points towards useful further reading. In other words, the \n book is a fine addition to the large volume of material in print on O’Neill as well as a suitable beginning \n point for students and scholars.","bbox":{"left":0.071429,"top":0.214374,"width":0.847654,"height":0.23281899999999994}},{"text":"From the beginning, Eugene O’Neill took himself and the American theatre seriously: one is struck, in \n placing O’Neill in the company of other Modernists, by how little mischief there is in O’Neill and how \n lacking the work is in frivolity. Every play appears to have been mined from the earth through earnest \n labor and is presented with the utmost sincerity, and it is this purposeful determination to shape a modern \n American theatre from the ground up, play by play, that defines his contribution. Even O’Neill’s \n apprentice works, many of them terrible, show serious intent. These early failures (such as Thirst, Fog, A \n Wife for a Life, ‘Ile) were attempts to “sort out themes and situations that interested him dramatically” \n (25), says Eisen in an exemplary examination of O’Neill’s work to 1920 and, to some extent, these \n themes and situations interested him throughout his career. Revisiting the early plays having read Eisen, \n one is struck by how much of the master-works (The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, A \n Moon for the Misbegotten) are contained within these trial pieces. Eisen convincingly frames a \n consideration of these lifelong themes and situations around a distinction between “modernity” and \n “modernism”, the latter “both an expression and critique” of the former. O’Neill’s restless \n experimentation was part of his search for “a unifying principle in the absence of a guiding theology or \n traditional values adequate to prevailing conditions of American modernity.” In the end, O’Neill \n “affirmed the American theatre as a heterotopian counter-site where one can more powerfully imagine \n other lives and the otherness of one’s own life” (69), defining through his will alone the modern \n American stage as something more than the “hateful theatre of my father,” as he famously described the \n nineteenth-century American stage.","bbox":{"left":0.071429,"top":0.463813,"width":0.849952,"height":0.339721}},{"text":"We follow this “modernity-modernism” thread through a series of linked, themed essays, an approach \n that allows the reader to draw from disparate and separate phases in O’Neill’s work very profitably. The \n themes—they may be summarised as: America, gender, race, family—are helpful in identifying all sorts of \n possibilities for more detailed conversation and research. In the chapter called “New Women, Male \n Destinies: the ‘Woman Plays’”, Eisen gives careful consideration to, amongst others, Anna Christie,","bbox":{"left":0.071429,"top":0.820154,"width":0.8627520000000001,"height":0.09028199999999997}},{"text":"1 / 2","bbox":{"left":0.878309,"top":0.965537,"width":0.029868000000000006,"height":0.015844999999999998}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}