Shopping Cart
Your cart is empty.

        We accept PayPal, Visa & Mastercard
        through our secure checkout.

 

Mastercard                              

 

Collected Shorter Plays

Collected Shorter Plays
Your Price: $19.95 CDN
Author: Eugene O'Neill
Introduction by: Robert Brustein
Publisher: Yale University Press
Format: Softcover
# of Pages: 306
Pub. Date: 2007
ISBN-10: 030010779X
ISBN-13: 9780300107791

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 drinkwhich 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).

Related Products

O'Neill: Long Day's Journey Into Night
Your Price: $48.95 CDN
O'Neill: Long Day's Journey Into Night
Brenda Murphy
A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions
Your Price: $57.00 CDN
A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions
Eugene O'Neill
A Moon for the Misbegotten
Your Price: $18.95 CDN
A Moon for the Misbegotten
Eugene O'Neill
Beyond the Horizon
Your Price: $19.95 CDN
Beyond the Horizon
Eugene O'Neill
Long Day's Journey into Night
Your Price: $19.95 CDN
Long Day's Journey into Night
Eugene O'Neill
The Iceman Cometh
Your Price: $18.95 CDN
The Iceman Cometh
Eugene O'Neill
Ah, Wilderness!
Your Price: $18.95 CDN
Ah, Wilderness!
Eugene O'Neill