Three Plays of Eugene O'Neill; Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, Mourning Becomes Electra

by Eugene O'Neill

Three major works by the greatest of American dramatists are presented in this hardcover volume. Desire Under the Elms in which O'Neill first revealed his full maturity and addressed himself to the eternal tragic problem of man which was to be his main concern as artist and thinker; the experimental and ambitious two-part plat Strange Interlude, in chich he found a technique for probing the unexpressed and inexpressible thoughts and feelings of his characters; and the trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra, consisting of 3 plays- Homecoming, The Hunted and The Haunted- in which he paralleled the structure of Aeschylus' Oresteia in the tragedy of New England.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Fiction, Classics, Theatre, Literature, 20th Century

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1931

About the author

American playwright Eugene Gladstone O'Neill authored Mourning Becomes Electra in 1931 among his works; he won the Nobel Prize of 1936 for literature, and people awarded him his fourth Pulitzer Prize for Long Day's Journey into Night , produced in 1956.

He won his Nobel Prize "for the power, honesty and deep-felt emotions of his dramatic works, which embody an original concept of tragedy." More than any other dramatist, O'Neill introduced the dramatic realism that Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg pioneered to Americans and first used true American vernacular in his speeches.

His plays involve characters, who, engaging in depraved behavior, inhabit the fringes of society, where they struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations but ultimately slide into disillusionment and despair. O'Neill wrote Ah, Wilderness! , his only comedy: all his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism.

Reviews

[Cameron Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are three prominent O'Neill plays, famous and celebrated in their time, and written before his acknowledged masterpieces that were more frankly autobiographical came out, such as Long Day's Journey into Night. Of the three plays, Mourning Becomes Electra is, in my view, the weakest and most contrived. It is not a bad play, to be clear -- O'Neill writes flawed not bad plays, such is his talent -- but it is the one most forced in its construction to drive to a tragic conclusion. The other two are more interesting and effective. Desire Under the Elms reads like a Tennessee Williams drama, and is creepily dark, except it is set in New England rather than the South. Strange Interlude is very Freudian with the characters' thoughts being 'spoken' as well as their actual words to each other. It too is very twisted and very effective in the way the flaws of the male and female characters drive them to a bizarre interdependence. All of these plays are worth reading because O'Neill is a great writer, but they are not the apotheosis of his works, though one can definitely see the themes that emerge throughout his work.

[Dara Salley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn't sure whether to rate these plays three or four stars. I picked four because I think they will stay with me, I think I'll roll them around in my head over the next few years and I think I'll want to revisit them in the future. I wasn't sure about O'Neill's treatment of his female characters. They seem problematic, but then, all of the characters are problematic. That's the point. There are violent emotions flying around in O'Neill's play and no taboo is left untouched. It makes for uncomfortable, but interesting reading. It's difficult for me to imagine how these plays could be staged. In Strange Interlude, for example, characters change weight, age and demeanor drastically from one act to the next. The stage sets are elaborate and described in detail. If I ever have the opportunity to see one of these plays live, I will certainly take it.

[John Pistelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fintan O'Toole's review of a recent biography of Eugene O'Neill is headlined "Our Worst Greatest Playwright." The critic enumerates the entwined flaws in O'Neill's art and life: a dramatist in flight from his imperious actor father's success as a star of melodrama, he abused his family in turn and marred his attempts at serious theater with ludicrous artistic excesses of his own. O'Neill's place in literary history is not exactly insecure. As America's first great playwright and second Nobel laureate, and as a dramatist whose plays are still in the theatrical repertoire, not to mention that his works are all in print, his stature seems secure, or as secure as anything else in these revolutionary times; yet he tends not to be mentioned in the same breath as his contemporaries in fiction and poetry—Faulkner, for example, or T. S. Eliot—as if he were not quite their peer. Why this mixed status, at once "worst" and "greatest"?

First, his early works like The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922) were so successful at altering the themes and techniques of the American stage that the lay reader has to take the scholar's word for it about the polite drawing-room drama these plays supplanted, since no one reads or watches this earlier material anymore. O'Neill redirected theater's focus to the lower classes—The Emperor Jones is about an African-American prison escapee who commandeers a Caribbean island before its natives overthrow him, while The Hairy Ape concerns an engine stoker who comes to consciousness of his exploited and excluded status as proletarian—while animating these social themes with Expressionistic stylings and an emphasis on symbolism over strict mimesis, as when Jones's nighttime flight through the island forest carries him through a visionary history of black America. And while these early plays are ideologically unreadable by today's standards, especially given their patronizing "dialect" dialogue, they were socially avant-garde in their own time. Jones was the first major American role written for a black actor and was acclaimed in its time by African-American critics as a serious treatment of racial themes, for example. They don't lack insight in the present either, as in the scene where O'Neill's titular laboring "ape" discovers that socialism is just another scheme to manage and organize the worker (O'Neill identified politically as an anarchist). Even the somewhat plodding realism of Anna Christie (1920) displays O'Neill's sympathetic interest in the plight of women, notwithstanding how he treated his wives. O'Neill had read Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, and more, not to mention Ibsen and Strindberg, and brought vanguard ideas and aesthetics from Europe to the American stage.

The later plays that cemented his reputation and earned him the Nobel Prize are not as overtly experimental as his earlier works, and for that reason, ironically, are harder to appreciate in the present. The Emperor Jones is an inventive enough visual spectacle, even as a reading experience, to mute O'Neill's clunky dialogue and schematic psychology. A more naturalistic play like Desire Under the Elms (1924) gives us less to look at and more to listen to, to the drama's detriment. It also shows O'Neill's turn from Expressionism to another characteristically modernist device, the mythic method: Desire relocates Euripides's Hippolytus to a stony, hardscrabble New England farm. As the transition from social problem play to mythic tragedy suggests, O'Neill became more interested in the invariables of the human condition than whatever is historically contingent in our experience. In this drama of an old man who brings a young wife back to his farm, where she falls in love with his son, O'Neill stages a confrontation of rough, solid manhood with the fluid force of vegetal female desire that threatens to undo it. His verbose and elaborate stage directions tell us almost in so many words:

Two enormous elms are on each side of the house. They bend their trailing branches down over the roof. They appear to protect and at the same time subdue. There is a sinister maternity in their aspect, a crushing, jealous absorption. They have developed from their intimate contact with the life of man in the house an appalling humaneness. They brood oppressively over the house. They are like exhausted women resting their sagging breasts and hands and hair on its roof, and when it rains their tears trickle down monotonously and rot on the shingles.

By contrast to these soft smothering tendrils, Ephraim Cabot, the farm's owner and patriarch, exclaims, "God’s hard, not easy!" His unfaithful wife Abbie hammers home the symbolism in her seductive speeches to his son, Eben, when he tries to resist her seductive wiles:

Ye don't mean that, Eben. Ye may think ye mean it, mebbe, but ye don't. Ye can't. It's agin nature, Eben. Ye been fightin' yer nature ever since the day I come—tryin' t' tell yerself I hain't purty t' ye. (She laughs a low humid laugh without taking her eyes from his. A pause—her body squirms desirously—she murmurs languorously) Hain't the sun strong an' hot? Ye kin feel it burnin' into the earth—Nature—makin' thin's grow—bigger 'n' bigger—burnin' inside ye—makin' ye want t' grow—into somethin' else—till ye're jined with it—an' it's your'n—but it owns ye, too—an' makes ye grow bigger—like a tree—like them elums—(She laughs again softly, holding his eyes. He takes a step toward her, compelled against his will.) Nature'll beat ye, Eben. Ye might's well own up t' it fust's last.

The overblown obviousness of it all, especially when its somberness is contrasted with the exaggerated Yankee dialect, is ludicrous; yet it's powerful in its very tastelessness and reminds us that "taste" is a social category, not an artistic virtue, as if Euripides himself mightn't stand accused of a sheer tacky luridness. In bringing pagan tragedy into New England, whose ancestral Puritan culture recognizes only sin and virtue, not the aesthetic sublimity of a noble collapse, O'Neill reprises the dark Romanticism of 19th-century authors like Poe and Hawthorne with their Gothic challenge to American Christianity and its meliorist liberal Transcendental counterculture. In place of the Greeks' metaphysical fate, he places the post-Darwinian, post-Nietzschean, post-Freudian destiny of a sexual desire and unconscious will that cannot be overcome by reason or morality. For all that, the characters, going through their automatic paces, lack both the depth and weight of classical dramatic roles, and when the play culminates in infanticide, it comes off as mere sensationalism.

O'Neill's next major experiment, the two-part, nine-act, five-hour, Pulitzer-winning Strange Interlude (1928), also stages men's undoing by a femme fatale. This time, thankfully, the characters belong to the educated classes, so we're not subjected to O'Neill's labored attempts to represent working-class or ethnic or regional speech. Wishing to bring the innovations of the modernist novel to the stage, O'Neill here represents his characters' words and thoughts onstage with extended stream-of-consciousness asides. I assume these monologues create an appropriately strange effect when performed, since the other actors have to sit still every time a character unspools his or her thoughts to the audience. As a literally novel dramatic technique, though, it was probably worth trying at least once. O'Neill even openly challenges the novel as a form, since one of the play's major characters is a genteel novelist; the popular stage can reach depths mainstream fiction can't, O'Neill seems to imply, as in this scene, where the novelist, Marsden, meets his romantic rival, a physician named Darrell, and they size each other up in their minds:

DARRELL This Marsden doesn't like me … that's evident … but he interests me … read his books … wanted to know his bearing on Nina's case … his novels just well-written surface … no depth, no digging underneath … why? … has the talent but doesn't dare … afraid he'll meet himself somewhere … one of those poor devils who spend their lives trying not to discover which sex they belong to! …

MARSDEN Giving me the fishy, diagnosing eye they practice at medical school … like freshmen from Ioway cultivating broad A's at Harvard! … what is his specialty? … neurologist, I think … I hope not psychoanalyst … a lot to account for, Herr Freud! … punishment to fit his crimes, be forced to listen eternally during breakfast while innumerable plain ones tell him dreams about snakes … pah, what an easy cure-all! … sex the philosopher's stone … "O Oedipus, O my king! The world is adopting you!" …

O'Neill here both parodies and owns up to all his inspirations: the novel form, Greek myth, and psychoanalytic science. This very, very long play is not itself so insightful, however, and would be unremarkable as a novel, especially if compared to, say, The Sound and the Fury or Ulysses. Strange Interlude (the title refers to life itself, though also metatheatrically to the stream-of-consciousness technique) dramatizes over several decades three men's disastrous orbiting around an intense, manipulative woman named Nina Leeds. This fatal woman's credo is metaphysical matriarchy, and though O'Neill lets her have her say in perhaps the play's most memorable speech, her erotic power spells doom for the men she comes openly to call hers and suggests overall O'Neill's skepticism about female authority:

The mistake began when God was created in a male image. Of course, women would see Him that way, but men should have been gentlemen enough, remembering their mothers, to make God a woman! But the God of Gods—the Boss—has always been a man. That makes life so perverted, and death so unnatural. We should have imagined life as created in the birth-pain of God the Mother. Then we would understand why we, Her children, have inherited pain, for we would know that our life's rhythm beats from Her great heart, torn with the agony of love and birth. And we would feel that death meant reunion with Her, a passing back into Her substance, blood of Her blood again, peace of Her peace!

Finally, the beautifully titled trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) brings O'Neill's version of the mythic method to a climax: here he adapts the Oresteia into the more modern tragedy of a powerful New England family that meets its doom after the Civil War. O'Neill's Agamemnon is Ezra Mannon, a general and heir to the stern Mannon line of puritanical businessmen; he returns from the War to his wife, Christine, who has come to loathe him and who been having an affair in his absence with a sailor named Brant. While Christine is a romantic and a sensualist, her daughter Lavinia is a severe Mannon through and through, utterly loyal to her father and contemptuous of her mother; she has discovered that Brant is the son of her father's uncle, who was cast out of the family for having an affair with a French Canadian nurse. Completing the family quadrangle is Lavinia's brother, Orin, the Orestes of the piece, who is as devoted to his mother as Lavinia is to her father, and was goaded to join the war effort, despite his pacific nature, only by Ezra and Lavinia's taunts and insistence. Readers of Aeschylus can fill in most of the plot for themselves from this premise; O'Neill's dialogue, unsubtle as ever, spells out the Freudian subtext of the renovated myth when Christine exclaims to Lavinia:

I've watched you ever since you were little, trying to do exactly what you're doing now! You've tried to become the wife of your father and the mother of Orin! You've always schemed to steal my place!

Without the Greek tragedy's theme of family vengeance versus public justice, we're left with a somewhat squalid tale of Freudian determinism, especially since O'Neill doesn't even take advantage of the Civil War backdrop to compare familial to national curses, as in Faulkner's version of American Gothic. O'Neill's portrait of Orin, his mind shattered by the violence, is one of the play's strongest elements, though, reflecting the generational experience of the Great War despite its lack of thematic weight:

It was like murdering the same man twice. I had a queer feeling that war meant murdering the same man over and over, and that in the end I would discover the man was myself! Their faces keep coming back in dreams--and they change to Father's face--or to mine— […] The next morning I was in the trenches. This was at Petersburg. I hadn't slept. My head was queer. I thought what a joke it would be on the stupid Generals like Father if everyone on both sides suddenly saw the joke war was on them and laughed and shook hands!

When Lavinia takes over from Christine as this play's seductive fatal woman—because she is doomed to become the mother she hated, as Orin likewise turns into Ezra—she attains an almost campy grandeur ("I hope there is a hell for the good somewhere!" she hilariously cries at one point) that makes her the most perfectly realized of O'Neill's villainesses.

To return to the opening question, then, how do we balance O'Neill's greatness with his badness? He's been likened to a similarly compromised canonical figure, the novelist Theodore Dreiser, who also wrote both greatly and badly. The comparison is illuminating because I think they are opposite cases. Dreiser wrote clumsy prose in received forms, but he created rich characters and issued cutting and still-relevant social commentary; his content was good, his form bad. With O'Neill it is the reverse. His dramatic structure and stage style are relentlessly inventive, as are his play's governing concepts; even the titles are unforgettable. It's only the dialogue and, therefore, the characterization that fall short. In other words, poor content, great form. I strongly suspect his plays have to be seen for their greatness to be believed, but we can more than glimpse it in the inner theater conjured on the page.

[Cymru Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review concerns Desire Under the Elms.

Just as I see the list of characters in a play as an interesting preview of where the author's head is at, so too I see a later authors' choice of play when seeking to adapt any of the many myths of yore. Choosing Hippolytus is significant. It's one of my favorites by Euripides, so the fact that O'Neill, someone who I've felt a kinship with ever since Long Day's Journey into Night first mortally wounded me in high school, shares a similar taste in the Greeks as I, well... that's precisely why I read books, to feel that kinship that transcends space and time, forming a brotherhood of the cursed which in mutual understanding of one another's hexes thereby defeat existential loneliness, comforted as we marked Orestes are by the tragic and deathly force so present and beautiful, so all-pervasive, it can only be considered God.

Do ye bear that mark of Cain? Have ye donned the unholy cloak of literature? If not, then I don't expect this play to be anything special. The New England dialect kept bringing to mind the Ying Yang Twins ("Ah-yup!) and the actions of the characters are regrettable. O'Neill's genius is adapting Greek Tragedy in such a way that his own plays are different -- he doesn't hold strict adherence to plot points, sometimes strays from themes or combines them -- but the powerful, indeed holy essence crafted centuries ago by those master playwrights is preserved and if not expanded upon, at least done worthy justice. At their best, O'Neill's adaptations have clarified their Greek predecessors in ways countless re-readings of the originals hardly could. Furthermore, given the subject matter of such tragedies -- filial duty, fate, love, sex, death -- O'Neill via the Greeks have helped me to better understand myself.

That, my friends, is the magic of literature come to life.

[Lance · Rating 5 out of 5]

Strange Interlude is very good, but Desire Under the Elms and Mourning Becomes Electra are both masterpieces. O'Neill's just a genius when it comes to displaying his characters' souls, and whether what we see is revolting or noble, there is an underlying sympathy for just about every character that he pens in the two plays.

[Sketchbook · Rating 3 out of 5]

Out of largesse, 3-stars. Life is a "pipe dream," eh, and "dere's dat ol debbil sea." O, shut the fuk up, Gene. He yanked American drama away fr mawkish mellerdramer, and introduced sex & neurosis (on an adult level), bolstered by his knowledge of Freud, Jung and himself. Today he's unreadable and almost unplayable. I'm glad bio-writers keep his name flickering, I guess, but the only work that holds up is "Long Day's etc." Despite an interesting Life, his "theatre" of the psychic and subconscious is : dated.

"I kin talk t'the cows. They know. They'll give me peace." Fr "Desire Under the Elms." Moo. He did come up with wonderful titles. Looking back over 100 years of American drama, there's - frankly - not much. Ten Williams is the one to remember and he gets into purple prose too.

[Gu Kun · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eugene O'Neill is one of those many authors you find fantastic when you're young. I saw The Iceman Cometh when in my twenties and found it so wonderful that I started on a translation and getting people together for a performance - some thirty years later I watched it again and found it ... well, quite good. As for these Three Plays, although they exude the mores of a bygone era I don't think they've aged badly - it's just that their subject matter makes me no more than lukewarm - I may have aged badly ...

[David]

“Desire Under the Elms” has brought me to a new level of self-recognition, one of which I’m not especially proud but one I’m also not likely to get over any time soon. No matter how serious or significant the subject or theme, if it is conveyed in a work of literature in “Wall, yee-haw, Hi dunno ‘bout tha’ Leeroy” dialect, I cannot take it seriously. Through most of my early years, that sort of voice was associated most often with a kind of ‘redneck,’ ignorant, likely to be prejudiced (he said, ironically) stupidity, and with relentlessly laughable characters, especially in comedies and cartoons. O’Neill may be reworking legends of Ancient Greek Tragedy into a 19th-century U.S. setting, but I just can’t take him seriously.

“Mourning Becomes Electra” was less ‘yokelly’ but more funny than tragic to me as I took the greatest delight in picking out the bits pastiched/parodied by William Gaddis in A Frolic of His Own. Again, O’Neill’s intent is quite lofty: recreate the ancient Greek tale in a New England setting, the story of a family doomed by both jealousy and obsession (if the two are, genuinely, separable).

I started the whole thing in order to re-read “Strange Interlude” which I remember loving when I first read it in the 1970s but later having doubts about from a distance on account of another comic parody—this one by Groucho Marx in the contemporaneous Animal Crackers. I have to remind myself that, in part, the dialogue and conflicts are soap-opera clichés because so many people imitated O’Neill over the intervening 90 years. Like the teenager who complained that Hamlet was nothing special—just a bunch of famous quotes strung together (New Yorker cartoon)—O’Neill has become a cliché through relentless imitation by lesser talents. Still, I think there is considerable significance in the fact that I was impressed by this play in my teens, but much less impressed in my 60s. It is, essentially, a kind of romanticized experiment which appeals to an inexperienced mind (or is such for me, anyway).

[cgiang · Rating 4 out of 5]

O'Neil is someone (actually the first one I've read) to be capable of being terribly boring and terribly good at the fucking same time. Step son smashing his step mother, yeah this ain't corn but at least they did the nasty thing under the elms (get it get it?) But yeah it gets boring at times only to make you stare blankly at the fucking sky 10 seconds later, screaming to yourself what the fuck happened in my man O'Neil life (apparently a lot happened and i dont want to talk about it). Loved him since Long Day's and love Mourning Becomes Electra too but desire under the elms is a meh for me. A big meh that left me gasping for air and spiraling into a (non-existent) religious ecstasy.

[عدنان العبار · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting collection, all linked by Freudian themes. The best play, by far, is the first, the worst the second, the third special, but in need of polishing. I would rather choose other plays with the first one than these two.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Desire Under the Elms and Strange Influence are too overwrought for me. And the descriptions – holy heck, O’Neill, just write a novel. More than one character had a twenty-plus line description: “She was willowy in a depressed, quiet sort of way. Her eyes spoke of bygone hardship and happiness, more of the former than the latter. Etc. and so on” (This is not actually O’Neill’s writing, merely my recreation of these endless descriptors). I sympathize with any casting director trying to find actors to fit these micromanaging dictates.

In comparison, Mourning Becomes Electra, perhaps because of the amount of ground O’Neill covers, is better focused. The conflict isn’t as bogged down by obsessive descriptors, and his spin on Oresteia both honors the source material and forges new ground.

Given the length of Mourning Becomes Electra – and the amount of time since it was last adapted to screen – I’d like to suggest this would make for an excellent limited series for a streaming service looking for a prestige project. Recommended.

[Elizabeth · Rating 1 out of 5]

These plays could be good if they were edited down or rewritten to make them more palatable to a contemporary audience, but as they're published here they're terrible. After reading these plays I can't help but think of O'Neill as a misogynist and that's a bit of a bummer.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

At least one of these plays is good, because it redeems this lengthy (more than 400 page) collection of drama by a lamentably overrated playwright.  And as someone who has read a great deal of the author's plays, the recipes for failure on the part of the author are definitely here in the first two plays.  Does he view most of his female characters as sluts?  Absolutely--that is the whole thrust of the first two of the plays in this collection, neither of which work particularly well.  Does he use terrible dialogue patterns as a way of making fun of others?  Yes, that is certainly the case in the first play included here, which seems to be intended as a comedy, but only if you like laughing at rural Americans, and that is not something I am particularly inclined to do.  If you like laughing at beautiful women who lead on a string of guys and who suffer mightily as a result of the strain of doing so, then at least one of these plays will be of interest.  There is, thankfully, one great play here, and it is a play where the author is inspired to write from his own New England Yankee tradition as well as reach towards the greatness of the Greek Orestia trilogy in making a classic tragedy of his own that works particularly well.  At least there is that to keep this from being a terrible collection of forgettable plays.

The first play in this collection is "Desire Under The Elms," and it tells the story of a love triangle of sorts between an old man who gets a mail order bride who ends up getting pregnant with a child by the old man's son, who is initially hostile to her in defense of his mother.  Eventually the son and the father's wife fall in love, until a truth is revealed by the father that leaves the mother to smother her young baby and face the penalty of the law along with her lover.  Here the author seems to be playing for laughs when the proper response would be one of horror.  In "Strange Interlude," we have nine scenes of drama involving a small set of characters, centered on an attractive but cold woman who marries for convenience, carries on a friendship with a confirmed bachelor who loves her but is repelled by her promiscuity, and has a long affair and bears the child of a lover who gives up a career as a doctor because of his dalliances with her and becomes a biologist in Antigua.  The play consists of interior monologues that are very fragmentary and that seek to convey the psychological state of the characters, which only makes the play more loathsome than it would have been as a mere domestic melodrama.  Fortunately, the tree plays that make up the Mourning Become Electra trilogy are a compelling tale of revenge in post-Civil War New England, and plays that deserve to be remembered as examples of O'Neill rising to the challenge of creating a compelling American tragedy to approach the heights of Greek drama.

If these plays, at least the first two, show some of the more problematic aspects of O'Neill's portrayal of characters he lacked understanding and empathy towards, there are at least a few demonstrations that at times he could be ambitious in his dramatic approach.  "Strange Interlude" is ambitious in seeking to convey fragmentary feelings and thoughts of characters which are often in conflict with what they are saying, but this was an experiment that did not work very well and the result is nowhere near as dramatically convincing as Shakespeare's use of interior monologues, for example, which are much more elevated and dignified than the panicky thoughts and fragmentary statements included in this strange play.  In the three plays, "Homecoming," "The Hunted," and "The Haunted" that make up "Mourning Becomes Electra," though, O'Neill's ambition pays off because he portrays the characters in all their pride and misery and ancestral troubles, and because the author is writing about something he knows very well--a cursed New England family that broods over the past but cannot escape it.  These plays demonstrate the way that one's own experience and the appreciation of great literature can combine into a work of great accomplishment and soaring ambition, rarely to be repeated in the author's or anyone else's writing.

[Sayeon ANSHIKA · Rating 5 out of 5]

This American classic stand as the best realistic plays till now, a genre popularised by famous Russian playwrite Antov Chekhov. It delves deep into human desire and family dysfunction, also touching sensitive topics like infanticide, alcoholism, vengeance and insect, inviting both intrigue and controversy upon its publication.

It is a great example of modern tragedy, the writers draws inspiration from Greek myths, notably the themes of Oedipus rex, and the tragedy of hippolytus, while intertwining biblical motifs, like forbidden love and garden of Eden, which add more layers on narrative and offer reader a multifaceted understanding of play's complexities.

Personally I encountered Oedipus rex through Murakami's Kafka of the shore, initially I didn't understand that, it left me perplexed, I didn't understand the point of it, to be honest to me it felt like justification of insest, however after reading this play, I understood this alot better, I can say now I have clarity about it, and I also feel ashamed about my short-sightedness; the straightforward narrative contrasted with the philosophical depth of Murakami's work, illuminating connection between the two and enhancing my comprehension of both, now I know why Murakami said that you can understand Kafka on the shore only when you read it multiple time.

While some may get triggered by the themes of incest and infanticide, but my experience with true crimes also reminds me that it's not like we are living in utopia, these things happen in our society very often, it's just we don't want to notice it, because it shatters our perception of ideal world, and at the end of the day the essence of realistic and tragic play lies in it's unflinching portrayal of human existence, or maybe you can say how far humans can go, it's far removed from the sanitization of your average smutty romance.

This play is in my sixth semester, I initially hesitated to engage with this play due to its linguistic complexities, especially as English is not my first language, it's makes reading experience very bad when you can to open dictionary on every second word. This raises the question which I always think about :- should classic novels be edited to adopt formal modern English, potentially broadening their accessibility? As a reader I feel it would be a good idea, but as a literature student, who just finished reading about various criticism I feel that would be unfair, as it might dilute the essence of these works, I also feel that their linguistic nuances are integral to their charm and depth, and also a selfish part of my want's to gate keep these books, from the people who get easily triggered.

[Michael Helm · Rating 5 out of 5]

In some ways these plays are very dated. They were barrier breakers in their day but the conventions that they were surmounting are pretty much historical. They still make for good reading and probably good shows - I'll have to check the cinematic versions.

Desire Under the Elms - this is clearly organized like a Greek tragedy (I'm told Hippolytus, but I don't know it). The 3 sons of a cruel, elderly father divide up the inheritance, but the old man has other ideas and brings home a gold-digger wife. She takes up with the one son who chooses to remain and inherit, and disaster ensues. Play is done in dialect and it's surprising how much it sounds like southern dialect when read aloud.

Strange Interlude - this longer play carries a complex family story from the "present" - about 1920 - to some time in the 1940's, long after the play was written. In this case another illicit affair results in some serious torment, but rather than a disaster in the real world, mental torture to the characters. The experimental technique of allowing the characters to voice their inner thoughts - multiple 1st person interludes in the middle of a play, always a 3rd person enterprise.

Mourning Becomes Electra- reworking of the story of Orestes and Electra. Meant to be the masterpiece, not sure about that but as it functions as a mystery have to be circumspect about the details even though the story is surely well known after 2000+ years and decades of high school teaching.

[Nathalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well in its time I think it would have been revolutionary -so it is interesting from that point of view. But for today I find it too puritanical, misogynistic, preachy, with people stuck in preconceived ideas…. But it does reflect a certain way of thinking. Interesting in what it can teach us about those days but frustrating to read because of the way the people in these stories think… not sure if I am happy to have spent the time reading them.

[Austin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange Interlude perhaps the worst play I've ever read, like O'Neill tried to break all playwriting conventions only to end up with a broken play. Flays the play of subtext for NINE interminable acts

Mourning Becomes Electra, perfect

[niya nightstar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not going to lie, took me sometime reading the book, but its a great retelling of the original Greek myth.
Mother loves son while having an affair, daughter loves father and acts as his wife.
If youre in for a mind-fuck, you should read mourning becomes electra, my favorite play out of the three.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mourning Becomes Electra would be a fiver.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life is bleak and headed for the rocks. One is pleasantly but hopelessly disillusioned to hold otherwise. Enjoy!

[Sarah Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my top five of all books I've ever read. Such an amazing parallel to Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy. Absolutely love it.

[Hristo Poparov · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good reading

[Chance Ford · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pretty good read. Compared to O’Neill’s greatest works these three don’t shine as brightly. But Strange Interlude is interesting for its experimentation and all three are deeply moving.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Life is merely a strange, dark interlude before the fireworks of God the Father's flowering presence.

[Jamie Yu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this American rendition of classical Greek tragedies. Also lots of interesting Freudian ideas to ponder upon.

[Thany · Rating 3 out of 5]

**read in response to 2023 popsugar reading challenge prompt “a book with just text on the cover”**

[Sharon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a fan. I felt like I was reading scripts for soap operas.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good plays, but a surprising amount of incest! I expected no incest! What's going on there, Eugene?

[Lady Godiva · Rating 4 out of 5]

How many more men with an Oedipal complex does this world need???

[Seth Kupchick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read "Strang Interlude" kind of by surprise at 23 years old, when I was taking myself seriously as a creative writing major, because it beat working at a bookstore. I bought a great old O'Neill compendium called "Nine Plays" I'm pretty sure, and I didn't buy it for "Strange Interlude," but "Desire Under The Elms," which I loved for its raw sensuality, and very brutal view of sex, death, and life. But "Strange Interlude" really took me for a ride and showed me what theater could be though I never saw an actual performance of it, but maybe parts of one once in the U.C.S.C. library watching videos in an age before computers. I never read a play before where the characters said one thing to each other, and then turned to the audience and said what they were really thinking, and to make it worse, the play pits a beautiful woman with many suitors longing for her dead heroic husband in the war, and all of her suitors are inferior, and she reviles men, and they revile themselves as they pursue her. I'm not sure if it sounds cliched or not by today's theater standards, but I don't remember ever feeling a play that much, nor is that to say I liked it more than, say, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" but it easily had the same devastating impact emotionally for me, and I couldn't believe O'Neill had the audacity to do it, and I'd say pull it off in spades. It makes all of his other plays look almost quaint by comparison, and yet he could do it only once, so he got all he could from the idea to expose sexually inadquate mousy men courting a ferocious woman laughingly upset by the weakness of her suitors longing for a man willing to die for a cause, a real man, and so many in between people, but what makes it really devastating is that it's not a series of soliloquies on loneliness or valor, but rather the soliloquies come in direct reference to the dialogue, so that you see everyone's mask then their real person inside and what they are thinking, however brutal, beautiful, kind, forgiving, or sad, to the person they are talking to, though their thoughts belie the conversation, and the way the two weave is incredible, not to mention the play goes on forever. I thought it was one of the most real experimental plays I'd ever read because it really scared me in an intimate way, so it wasn't removed from the understandable like many experimental works are, and yet there was nothing normal about it. O'Neill clearly had a very brutal and what many would call depressive view of life and it comes out in full splendor in a "Strange Interlude" as no one lives up to anyone's expectations, least of all their own. I should reread the play to remember the specific reactions each character invokes in the other, but everyone's internal thoughts are exactly as you'd imagine them, and I think the most pathetic character in the play is an academic poet who half heartedly tries to woo the elegant widow that is the Dean's daughter, but his attempt is so half assed he mostly wonders if he's fooling anyone but himself, and has clearly been so emascualted that he wonders if he has ever even loved a woman, leaving the reader to wonder if this is code for gay. Rather than going through all of the characters internal struggles, reflecting off their actual conversation, it's safe to say that O'Neill felt all of his character's pain and there is actually a lot of love for everyone in spite of their weaknesses and flaws.