If playwright Eugene O'Neill had lived today, he might have been on TMZ as often as Charlie Sheen. O'Neill's relationship status on Facebook would have said "complicated." Married three times, the Nobel laureate struggled with addiction and other issues. He contracted syphilis from a prostitute as a teenager and often was overwhelmed by alcoholism.
What sets him apart in history is how he used his and his family's dysfunction as source material for a body of work that transformed a whole field.
"It is not excessive to write that O'Neill created serious American drama," Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner wrote in an essay. "His project [was] the creation of a national dramatic identity."
That project, which began with a drama course at Harvard in which his professor encouraged O'Neill to write about his life, reaches its poignant apotheosis in "Long Day's Journey Into Night." The four-act masterwork, which garnered O'Neill his fourth Pulitzer Prize, opens Friday at the Guthrie Theater, directed by Joe Dowling and starring Helen Carey and Peter Michael Goetz. Amazingly, the Guthrie, which has an image of O'Neill etched into its building's exterior, never has staged "Journey."
O'Neill wrote this autobiographical drama in 1941, but stipulated that it not be performed until 25 years after his death. He succumbed in 1953. His widow, Carlotta Monterey, gave permission, and "Long Day's Journey" premiered in 1956 in Sweden. It was staged the same year on Broadway, a production hailed by Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times as a work that "restores ... theater to [the realm of] art."
That estimation has not dimmed.
"It is, I think, America's greatest play," said former New York Times managing editor Arthur Gelb, who, with his wife, Barbara Gelb, wrote "O'Neill: Life with Monte Cristo," the authoritative biography of the dramatist. "The play tells you not only about O'Neill but about the philosophy he had that greed destroyed this country, that the hunger to possess everything too soon led us astray."
The Gelbs are finishing a new book, "By Women Possessed," to be published next year, that chronicles O'Neill's complex relationships with his mother, wives, longtime mistress, and his disowned daughter, Oona Chaplin, who, at 18, wed screen icon Charlie Chaplin, then 54.