- Table View
- List View
The Emperor Jones (Dover Thrift Editions Ser.)
by Eugene O'NeillBrutus Jones, a former Pullman car porter wanted in the United States on two murder charges, has established himself as the self-proclaimed ruler of a West Indian island. Warned that his subjects are about to rebel, he flees to the jungle -- sick with fright -- where he is plagued by ghosts of the men he has murdered and haunted by visions of injustices done to his race. Powerful scenes, punctuated by beating tom-toms, suggest Jones's panic as he flees his angry countrymen and his own personal demons.First produced in 1920, The Emperor Jones helped establish O'Neill's reputation as one of America's most important dramatists. Bold and expressionistic, the play was an instant success on the stage and has remained one of the staples of the dramatic repertoire. It is now available to a wide audience in this attractive, inexpensive Dover Thrift Edition.
The Emperor Jones, Anna Christie, The Hairy Ape
by Eugene O'NeillThree plays by the Nobel Prize winner about people at the base of the social ladder suffering from grief and guilt, as all people can identify with their trials and judgment.
Exorcism
by Eugene O'NeillShortly after the debut of Exorcism in 1920, Eugene O’Neill suddenly canceled production and ordered all extant copies of the drama destroyed. For over ninety years, it was believed that the play was irrevocably lost, until it was recently discovered that O’Neill’s second wife had in fact retained a copy, which she later gave to the prolific screenwriter and producer Philip Yordan. In early 2011, Yordan’s widow discovered the typescript of Exorcism—complete with edits in O’Neill’s own hand—in her late husband’s vast trove of papers. The discovery and publication of Exorcism, a relatively early play in the O’Neill corpus, furthers our knowledge of O’Neill’s dramatic development and reveals a pivotal point in the career of this great American playwright. Revolving around a suicide attempt, Exorcism draws on a dark incident in O’Neill’s own life. This defining event led to his first serious efforts to write. Exorcism displays early examples of O’Neill’s unparalleled skills of capturing deeply personal human drama, and it explores major themes—mourning and melancholia, addiction and sobriety, tensions between fathers and sons—that would permeate his later work. According to Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library curator Louise Bernard, who acquired the play from a New York bookseller, “Exorcism might be read as a preparatory sketch that resonates powerfully with Long Day’s Journey into Night, one that brings the O’Neill family drama full circle in ways at once intimate and grandly conceived.”
The Iceman Cometh
by Eugene O'NeillA critical edition of O&’Neill&’s most complex and difficult play, designed for student readers and performers This critical edition of Eugene O&’Neill&’s most complex and difficult play helps students and performers meet the work&’s demanding cultural literacy. William Davies King provides an invaluable guide to the text, including an essay on historical and critical perspectives; extensive notes on the language used in the play, and its many musical and literary allusions; as well as numerous insightful illustrations. He also gives biographical details about the actual people the characters are based on, along with the performance history of the play, to help students and theatrical artists engage with this labyrinthine work.
The Iceman Cometh
by Eugene O'NeillEugene O’Neill was the first American playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He completed The Iceman Cometh in 1939, but he delayed production until after the war, when it enjoyed a long run of performances in 1946 after receiving mixed reviews. Three years after O'Neill's death, Jason Robards starred in a Broadway revival that brought new critical attention to O’Neill’s darkest and most nihilistic play. In the half century since, The Iceman Cometh has gained enormously in stature, and many critics now recognize it as one of the greatest plays in American drama. The Iceman Cometh focuses on a group of alcoholics and misfits who endlessly discuss but never act on their dreams, and Hickey, the traveling salesman determined to strip them of their pipe dreams.
The Iceman Cometh
by Eugene O'NeillEugene O'Neill mined the tragedies of his own life for this depiction of a seedy, skid row saloon in 1912, peopled by society's failures: drifters, whores, pimps, and informers.
Long Day's Journey into Night
by Eugene O'Neill<P>Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical play Long Day's Journey into Night is regarded as his finest work. <P>First published by Yale University Press in 1956, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 and has since sold more than one million copies. <P>This edition, which includes a new foreword by Harold Bloom, coincides with a new production of the play starring Brian Dennehy, which opens in Chicago in January 2002 and in New York in April.
The Long Voyage Home and Other Plays (Dover Thrift Editions)
by Eugene O'NeillPlaywright Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) spent his early years as a merchant seaman and drifter on the waterfronts of New York, Liverpool, and Buenos Aires. From these experiences came the inspiration and subject matter for four of his finest short plays, collected in this volume.Written between 1913 and 1917 and considered to have made O'Neill's reputation, the plays comprise a tetralogy, all concerning the same ship, the S.S. Glencairn. The plays are Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone, The Long Voyage Home, and The Moon of the Caribbees. These realistically presented melodramas depict moody, intense, and fascinating characters entrapped by larger forces, usually represented by the sea. This edition, which offers all four plays in a single inexpensive volume, provides a splendid introduction to the work of an important modern dramatist.
A Moon for the Misbegotten
by Eugene O'NeillEugene O’Neill’s last completed play, A Moon for the Misbegotten is a sequel to his autobiographical Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Moon picks up eleven years after the events described in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, as Jim Tyrone (based on O’Neill’s older brother Jamie) grasps at a last chance at love under the full moonlight. This paperback edition features an insightful introduction by Stephen A. Black, helpful to anyone who desires a deeper understanding of O’Neill’s work.
Three Great Plays: The Emperor Jones, Anna Christie and The Hairy Ape (Dover Thrift Editions: Plays)
by Eugene O'NeillWinner of the Nobel prize for literature and 4 Pulitzer prizes, Eugene O'Neill is generally acknowledged as America's greatest playwright. The Emperor Jones is an expressionistic play much-admired for its powerful psychological portrayal of brute power, fear, and madness. The Hairy Ape combines elements of class struggle and surreal tragedy. Also includes Anna Christie.
Three Plays: Desire Under The Elms, Strange Interlude, Mourning Becomes Electra
by Eugene O'NeillWinner of the Nobel Prize<P><P> These three plays exemplify Eugene O'Neil's ability to explore the limits of the human predicament, even as he sounds the depths of his audiences' hearts.<P> Eugene O'Neill was born on October 16, 1888, in New York City. His father was James O'Neill, the famous dramatic actor; and during his early years O'Neill traveled much with his parents. In 1909 he went on a gold-prospecting expedition to South America; he later shipped as a seaman to Buenos Aires, worked at various occupations in the Argentine, and tended mules on a cattle steamer to South Africa. He returned to New York destitute, then worked briefly as a reporter on a newspaper in New London, Connecticut, at which point an attack of tuberculosis sent him for six months to a sanitarium. This event marked the turning point in his career, and shortly after, at the age of twenty-four, he began his first play. His major works include The Emperor Jones, 1920; The Hairy Ape, 1921; Desire Under the Elms, 1924; The Great God Brown, 1925; Strange Interlude, 1926, 1927; Mourning Becomes Electra, 1929, 1931; Ah, Wilderness, 1933; Days Without End, 1934; A Moon for the Misbegotten, 1945; The Iceman Cometh, 1946; and several plays produced posthumously, including Long Day's Journey into Night, A Touch of the Poet, and Hughie. Eugene O'Neill died in 1953.<P> Strange Interlude was a Pulitzer Prize winner
Long Day's Journey into Night
by Eugene O'Neill Harold BloomEugene O'Neill's autobiographical play Long Day's Journey into Night is regarded as his finest work. First published by Yale University Press in 1956, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 and has since sold more than one million copies. This edition, which includes a new foreword by Harold Bloom, coincides with a new production of the play starring Brian Dennehy, which opens in Chicago in January 2002 and in New York in April.
Long Day's Journey Into Night
by Eugene O'Neill Jessica Lange William Davies KingEugene O'Neill's autobiographical play Long Day's Journey into Night is regarded as his masterpiece and a classic of American drama. With this new edition, at last it has the critical edition that it deserves. William Davies King provides students and theater artists with an invaluable guide to the text, including an essay on historical and critical perspectives; glosses of literary allusions and quotations; notes on the performance history; an annotated bibliography; and illustrations.<P> "This is a worthy new edition, one that I'm sure will appeal to many students and teachers. William Davies King provides a thoughtful introduction to Long Day's Journey into Night--equally sensitive to the most particular and most encompassing of the play's materials. "--Marc Robinson
Early Plays
by Eugene O'Neill Jeffrey H. RichardsThis volume brings to readers a selection of Eugene O'Neill's early work, written between 1914 and 1921 and produced for the stage between 1916 and 1922. Included here are: seven one-act plays, The Moon of the Caribbees, Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone, The Long Voyage Home, Ile, Where the Cross Is Made, and The Rope; and five full-length plays, Beyond the Horizon, The Straw, Anna Christie, and the classics The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape. The majority of the plays are heavily influenced by German expressionism-Freud, Nietzsche, Strindberg, and the radical leftist politics in which O'Neill was involved during his youth. Included in this unique collection is the little known and highly autobiographical play, The Straw, which draws on O'Neill's confinement in the Gaylord Farm Sanatorium.
John Singer Sargent And Madame X
by Rosary O'NeillJohn Singer Sargent And Madame X was heralded by invitation at the Actors Studio, NYC. John Singer Sargent, an up-and-coming American artist, is eager to collaborate on a portrait that would catapult him and Madame X, the most beautiful woman in Paris, to the pinnacle of society. But he falls in love with her and she tries to destroy him. Which pathway will he go down? Will he try to create the perfect painting or placate his lover? With its revelations about Madame X's identity and an eyebrow-raising cast of characters, including Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Sarah Bernhardt, and Dr. Samuel Pozzi (Madame X's notorious gynecologist/lover), this play exposes the tale of beauty, infatuation, obsession, and betrayal that lies behind Sargent's masterpiece painting, Madame X. It is based on a true-life story and set in the glamorous Belle à poque period. of Paris and England. Voluptuous characters and riveting changes of place can be created on a bare stage by shifts in lighting and/or costume pieces.
Awakening of Kate Chopin
by Rosary Hartel O'NeillKate Chopin, author of The Awakening, struggles to hold onto her marriage and her six small children as she launches her career as a novelist in 1884. Frustrating her attempts are: her wealthy next door neighbor, wanting to prove his masculinity; her jealous husband, stricken with malaria; the little sex-pot seamstress next door, the town gossip; and the bankrupt cotton business, which consumes all of her time. This crazy cacophony of personalities ends up compelling Kate toward her goal of becoming a famous author.
Beckett at Greystones Bay
by Rosary Hartel O'NeillShort Play, DramaCharacters: 1 male. One exterior set or bare stage. A young writer faces love, death, and the challenges of creating a joyful life. Setting: Rocky coast of Ireland in the 1930's.
Black Jack
by Rosary Hartel O'NeillFull Length, Southern Comedy CharacterS: 2 male, 4 female. Unit Set. Blackjack follows an eccentric Southern family as it is squeezed into the close quarters of a Mississippi cruise ship for the New Year's holiday. Kaitlyn is convinced that she is channeling the poet Baudelaire, and certain that her husband is having an affair with a larger-than-life ship entertainer. Irene, the matriarch of the family, suspects a rift in her daughter's marriage. Her sexy maid sets her sights on the grandson, a successful Southern rock star. Everyone dons costumes for New Year's Eve, casting off their old identities and trying on new loves. . Also available in A Louisiana Gentleman and other New Orleans Comedies
Degas in New Orleans
by Rosary Hartel O'NeillCharaters: 3 male, 6 female . One Interior/Exterior Set . A historical drama that explores Edgar Degas' scandalous visit to New Orleans in 1872. Edgar Degas, the French Impressionist painter, is torn between helping his relatives in America and pursuing a career as a painter. Fame and family obligations come to a head when he discovers he is still in love with his sister-in-law, who is now pregnant and blind. As Edgar struggles with his own ethical conundrum, he discovers that his aggressively charming brother has gone through all the family money in an attempt to save his uncle's sugar business.
A Louisiana Gentleman
by Rosary Hartel O'NeillFull Length, Southern ComedyCharacters: 1 male, 3 female. Unit Set. Blaine Ashton, a medical student in his mid-twenties from a prominent New Orleans family, has fallen in love with a middle-aged actress and is getting married, much to the chagrin of his mentally disturbed sister and his eccentric, alcoholic old Aunt. His Aunt forces him to take care of his sister after he's married and all the southern belles in the household are almost too much to bear. The histrionics never stop as the women compete for Malter's love and attention. Ultimately, an uneasy truce is called once a baby is born and Christmas rolls around, but continued craziness is undoubtedly in their future. Especially powerful roles for women. . Also available in A Louisiana Gentleman and other New Orleans Comedies
Marilyn/God
by Rosary Hartel O'NeillCharacter: 1 femaleIn this play, Marilyn confronts voices in her head to validate her life as an actress. She finds in the afterlife that she must audition and interview to get into heaven and that her judges are her enemies and aborted children. Along the way she is confused and intrigued by the signs she must follow to climb her way into heaven. The play explores the multi-levels of complexity of cult goddess Marilyn Monroe--her vulnerability, anger, and loneliness and the ways that American culture and the worship of beauty and fame shaped, aborted and forwarded her rise to stardom. In the afterlife she relives three painful scenes from her life and a life review and strains to justify her choices to male unsympathetic judges as well as shocking people from her past.
Property
by Rosary Hartel O'NeillFull Length, Southern ComedyCharacters: 2 male, 3 female. Unit set. Property is a contemporary romantic comedy set in a Garden District mansion in New Orleans. Rooster Dubonnet, a young artist suffering from a terminal disease, is dazzled by love. Raised by an imperious society-driven mother, he has fallen in love with a New-Age nurse. Set during Mardi Gras--when a whole tradition of fun, revelry, and prestige seizes the city-- Rooster is caught between his dedication to his family's past (and "property") and his own very different future. . Also available in Ghosts of New Orleans.
Rhapsodies
by Rosary Hartel O'NeillWings of Madness:Short Play, Southern DramaCharacters: 1 female. Interior Set. Set in a tacky funeral parlor on a highway outside New Orleans, a murdered beauty taunts the audience, exposing her bare unshrouded back, and explaining why she was murdered. Other imaginary characters--her husband and daughter--add an eerie quality to her already surreal tale.Turtle Soup: Short Play, Southern Comedy. Characters: 1 male, 1 female. Interior Set. A young woman fights for her inheritance. Her "dying" uncle mocks her life, as well as that of her actor husband. A tirade occurs over Turtle Soup that culminates in its spillage and her Uncle's guffaws over his prank. He reminds her that it's April first --All Fools Day--and he is playing a joke on her.
Uncle Victor
by Rosary Hartel O'NeillFull Length, Historical Comedy Characters: 3 male, 4 female. Interior. Uncle Victor is a historical comedy inspired by the classic Russian play, Uncle Vanya, by Anton Chekhov. In this version O'Neill takes the structure of Uncle Vanya and some characters and places them on Waverly Plantation in 1899 Louisiana. While the dialogue and characters are typically Southern, the Louisiana story perfectly parallels the situation of turn-of-the century Russia, where a new urban economy was destroying the country's agrarian base. While Russians were suffering from typhoid and peasants were going hungry, Southerners were dying from yellow fever and displaced farmers were starving. In Uncle Victor, the Mallory family, running Waverly Sugar Plantation, confronts a totally changed Louisiana.. Also available in Ghosts of New Orleans.
White Suits in Summer
by Rosary Hartel O'NeillFull Length, ComedyCharacters: 2 male, 2 female. Unit Set. This contemporary Southern romance set in the topsy-turvy world of art. Celebrity artist Susann is determined to reclaim her lost love, Blaise, now married to a sedate New Orleans socialite. Convinced that she cannot live without him, Susann arranges an exhibition of her works to be held in his new house. Susann's readiness to sacrifice her career, his new wife, and her Mama's boy manager leave Blaise both angry and aroused. Theatrical excitement abounds in this comedy of love vs. duty. . Also available in A Louisiana Gentleman and other New Orleans Comedies.