Eugene O'Neill: An Evaluation by Fellow Playwrights

EUGENE O'NEILL: AN EVALUATION BY FELLOW PLAYWRIGHTS PAUL GREEN Certainly [Eugene O'Neill] has stimulated me a lot, as any worker in a medium is inspired by a fine worker in that medium. I remember when the Emperor Jones first appeared in Theatre Arts magazine . I picked it up at the university library here, read it through, walked around the building all excited, returned to the reading room and went through it again. Later, when I was working on a Negro play of my own entitled In Abraham's Bosom, I no doubt still kept some of the feeling I had first felt for O'Neill's piece. THORNTON WILDER Have not felt any particular influence from O'NeiB's plays though I saw many of them in early showings. Have always admired the realistic O'Neill above the philosophizing and "expressionistic." SEAN O'CASEY Before [Eugene O'Neill], the Theater had been the place of thirdclass jugglers & thimble-riggers, and it wasn't till O'Neill came in (Like Christ in the Temple) with the whip of his plays &, drove these trafficers out, that Comedy & Tragedy took their places before the Theater's highest altar. . . . Of course, he's left an impact on the Theater of today as Shaw has: neither the English nor the American Theaters can ever be quite the same since these giants lepped on to the stage to conquer or to die: it was the others who died, however. ... I've one reproach only to make of him-that he didn't use his gift for comedy oftener, as shown, richly, in "Ah, Wilderness!" ,. ,. . The world's stage has lost a towering figure in O'Neill.-not the U.S.A. only. He acted his part fearlessly & splendidly on life's stage of darkness & of light. His voice will be heard for a long, long time. ARTHUR MILLER O'Neill's influence. I don't know. Certainly on the contemporaneous writers, it is not visible. Where is his dedication, his fanatic insistence upon his own vision? Who works out his spiritual life through his plays? Who dares challenge the audience as he did? Who 239 240 MODERN DRAMA December dares use whatever form seems suitable to his life at the moment? A few. Nevertheless, it is possible that he was a kind of conscience to many writers, even to some who were and are hardly aware of him anymore . He reached, you see. He strove with himself, he insisted. I know that this fanatic quality always attracted me to him even as so much of his work seemed mawkish, self-consciously spiritualized, and some of it over-complicated for what it was driving at. It was easier to write knowing that such a man existed. He struck upon issues th&t were worth failing at. Above all, he knew how to tell the audience to go to hell. . . . I remember now only the great shadow of his presence; it was a kind of reassurance to me in that here stood a man who sought prophecy, the ultimate fate, the last word. CLIFFORD ODETS As for personal influence, O'Neill gave me a "feeling" as a young man, not content or techniques. It is as if, permit me to say, Sulfa drugs are invented and the whole stir & feeling for anti-biotics are in the air-the man who, finally, discovers the mycin group has little to do with the inventor of the sulfa group-and yet the influence is there. But, of course, if O'Neill had not come along when he did, when the U.S. was rolling over from perhaps, a long provincial sleep-we should have had to invent him, I'm afraid. EDWARD T. HERBERT ...