About
the Play:
Eugene
O'Neill remains one of America's
greatest playwrights All of his themes and concerns
find expression in his one-act plays. They are the dramatic
equivalent of short stories. Here gathered in the single volume
Collected Short Plays are
nine one-act plays that span the Nobel Laureate and four-time
Pulitzer Prize winner's career – from the early sea plays to the
Expressionist masterpiece The Hairy Ape to
the eerie nocturnal monologue Hughie.
Included in the volume Collected
Short Plays are:
Bound East for Cardiff:
On a "foggy night midway on the voyage between New York and
Cardiff," Sailor Yank lies dying in his bunk while the others
exchange yarns and reminiscences. Yank takes a turn for the worse and
quietly rambles on, wishing he had never gone to sea. (Cast:
11 male)
Fog: Set onboard a
lifeboat drifting without oars in a dense fog off the Grand Banks of
Newfoundland, this unusual piece is about being lost in a hostile
cosmos in other words, The Human Condition. The characters, a Poet, a
Man of Business and a Polish Peasant Woman, represent diametrically
opposed Points of View about the situation. (Cast:
1
female, 2
male)
Thirst: Three
people are trapped on a life raft in the middle of the ocean after
the ship they were on sinks. Scorched alive by the sun. Desperate for
water and food. A Gentleman,
a Dancer, and a Sailor are adrift far off the normal shipping lanes,
surrounded by sharks and slowly going mad. (Cast:
1
female, 2
male)
The Long Voyage Home:
Shows a group of sailors ashore in a waterfront dive. The crew have
just been paid off. Swede
Olson, with savings in his
pocket, refuses to drink. He has for years planned to
leave the sailor life behind and return to his native homeland,
but every time he had money he squandered it. He is tricked
by a scheming couple to take a soft drink
– which is drugged. He is
then robbed, put ashore, then to another ship bound on a long voyage.
(Cast: 4
female, 6
male, 2 extras)
Ile: The
Captain of
a New England whaler is
dominated by an unconquerable pride. At the end of the two years'
period his crew has signed up for, he has only a small part of his
quota of whale oil (known to them as 'ile' in their New England
Dialect). The crew are mutinous and the Captain's wife wants him to
turn the ship around. He
consents to sail her home; but the instant whales are sighted, he
reverses his decision. (Cast: 1
female, 5
male)
The Moon of the Caribbees:
An occupied town resists its captors in spite of the fact that each
act of resistance results in more death. (Cast:
4 female, 17
male, plus extras)
In the Zone: Seamen on
board British merchant marine vessel in World War I suspect a
reclusive fellow worker of
being a spy. (Cast: 9
male)
The Hairy Ape:
Expressionistic play about Yank, a
labourer who revels in his status as the strongest coal stoker on
a transatlantic ocean liner.
But when he
is called a 'filthy beast' by the spoiled daughter of the ship's
owner who visits
the engine room for a thrill, Yank undergoes a crisis of identity and
so, starts his mental and physical deterioration. He leaves the ship
and wanders into Manhattan, only to find he does not belong anywhere
– neither with the socialites on Fifth Avenue, nor with the labour
organizers on the waterfront. One of the most striking of all the
O'Neill plays, The Hairy Ape
vividly illustrates the universal themes of human equality and the
strains placed on individuals who look and sound different than the
self-appointed elite of society. (Cast: 2
female, 6
male, plus extras)
Hughie: Erie is
a high-rolling gambler at a single-occupancy hotel. He and title
character Hughie were
confidants. Hughie admired Erie for his bold lifestyle and Erie
considered Hughie his good luck charm. When Hughie dies unexpectedly,
Erie's luck changes for the worse and he finds himself in dire
straits. Then Erie meets the new night clerk who reminds him enough
of Hughie that he takes the gamble that his luck is about to change.
Hughie is a
theatrical masterpiece that beautifully investigates the themes of
loneliness and redemption and offers a unique insight into the human
condition. (Cast: 2
male)
What people say:
"O'Neill was not the first
American to turn to one-act plays ... but there is no doubt that ...
he perfected the form, just as Hemingway, a few years later, was to
perfect the genre of the American short story." — from
the introduction by Robert
Brustein
"O'Neill belongs to that group
of American authors, which includes Farrell and Dreiser, whose choice
of vocation was a kind of triumphant catastrophe; none of these men
possessed the slightest ear for the word, the sentence, the speech,
the paragraph; all of them, however, have, so to speak, enforced the
career they decreed for themselves by a relentless policing of their
beat." — Tony
Kushner
"O'Neill is the most American
of our handful of dramatists who matter most." — Harold
Bloom
"O'Neill singlehandedly waded
through the dismal swamplands of American drama, bleak, squashy, and
oozing sticky goo, and alone and singlehanded bore out the water lily
that no American had found there before him." — George
Jean Nathan
About the Playwright:
Eugene O'Neill (1889-1953) stands as the greatest pioneer of modern
American theatre. The father of American drama, the author of 49
plays, he won four Pulitzer Prizes for drama, and is the only American
playwright to have received a Nobel Prize (1936).