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Eugene O'Neill, America's greatest playwright, "The Father of the American Theatre," and the 2nd US Nobel Laureate (and only playwright to be so honored), will be featured in a special St. Patrick's Day A & E Biography, "Eugene O'Neill: A Haunted Life," tonight(3/16) at 8 pm and again at 12 midnight EST. VCR Alert!


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I found this documentary to be a commendable effort. Still, it's difficult to totally examine the complexity of this man's life and art in a two-hour presentation. There were some glaring omissions. But, all in all, I'm satisfied with the production, and that O'Neill is finally getting some of the extra-attention he so richly deserves. I just wish A&E had done his bio earlier in the show's history when folks who were intimately inolved with his work and some of the historic productions of his plays, like Jason Robards, were still alive.

For more information on O'Neill go to http://eOneill.com, the O'Neill Archives, it's all there. And the story of my association with O'Neill is on the discussion forum there, too!



#61469 03/17/02 01:44 PM
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"I love life. But I don't love life because it is pretty. Prettiness is only clothes-deep. I am a truer lover than that. I love it naked. There is beauty to me even in its ugliness. In fact, I deny the ugliness entirely, for its vices are often nobler than its virtues, and nearly always closer to a revelation....

To me, the tragic alone has that significant beauty which is truth. It is the meaning of life--and the hope. The noblest is eternally the most tragic. The people who succeed and do not push on to a greater failure are the spiritual middle-classers. Their stopping at success is the proof of their compromising insignificance. How petty their dreams must have been!"

--Eugene O'Neill, from the biography by Barbara and Arthur Gelb





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-- from his play Long Day's Journey Into Night -- Edmund Tyrone's monologue in conversation with his father, James Tyrone (note: Edmund is sick with tuberculosis):

EDMUND

You've just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine? They're all connected with the sea. Here's one. When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself--actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. Then another time, on the American Line, when I was lookout on the crow's nest in the dawn watch. A calm sea, that time. Only a lazy ground swell and a slow drowsy roll of the ship. The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me. Dreaming, not keeping lookout, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which slept together. Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came. The peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men's lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see--and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand let's the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!
He grins wryly
It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!

TYRONE
Stares at him--impressed.
Yes, there's the makings of a poet in you all right.
Then protesting uneasily
But that's a morbid craziness about not being wanted and loving death.

EDMUND
Sardonically
The makings of a poet. No, I'm afraid I'm like the guy who is always panhandling for a smoke. He hasn't even got the makings. He's got only the habit. I couldn't touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That's the best I'll ever do. I mean, if I live. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.

(c) 1955 by Carlotta Monterey O'Neill, All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.









#61471 03/17/02 06:18 PM
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Do you ever feel like we are talking to ourselves?


#61472 03/17/02 06:44 PM
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Do you ever feel like we are talking to ourselves?

Yes...and not a Whit of Whit!



#61473 03/17/02 06:44 PM
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Do you ever feel like we are talking to ourselves?


I dunno. Do you? LMAO!


#61474 03/17/02 07:42 PM
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#61475 03/17/02 08:02 PM
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Yes, Sweet juan, please do...


#61476 03/17/02 08:38 PM
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for its vices are often nobler than its virtues, and nearly always closer to a revelation....

Well, I think it speaks for itself, Max...but in my humble attempt to qualify the words of O'Neill, here goes:

To perservere while enduring, or indulging in, the dregs of life requires and engenders more of a nobility of spirit that to cruise through an ideal existence. The truth lies in the reality of life, not in some idealized confection. There may be more inspiration gained by examining the life of a prostitute than that of a virgin (or happily married woman), through whatever spirit it is that propels her and enables her to slog through each day of her seemingly mundane existence. Remember, O'Neill was a student of Nietzsche who said, "Man must overcome himself." IMHO

From notes on Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Tad Beckman:

"Nietzsche has also framed this concept in his image of the "übermensch," or "overman." In this vision, man is a temporary creature, a "crossing over." Just as an individual must overcome himself, man himself must be overcome. The overman is not man as we know him; it is a new being, perhaps, unthinkably beyond us and living with new values in the spirit of Yes-saying to life."

(übermensch, of course, has been misinterpreted as superman rather than overman by the Nazis and others for propaganda purposes).

And who's Juan?






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