"...where truth might live."

Eugene O'Neill.

Today, the American theatre is not willing and prepared to embrace such heavyweights. And that is sad. Times have changed, and any creation that represents real value and meaning are ideas and feelings that live in the past. Present society, as a whole, is nervous and scared to take a long, hard look at the truth, and as a result, theatre producers are unsure about taking chances on new, interesting, unique work, people, and voices. And this stifles the creative process and our chances of positively changing and progressing humanity. Eugene O'Neill, as great as his work and contributions, would have never made it in 2012. And it is sad that today's artist is not given the same opportunity to grow, evolve, and make a difference.

In the July/August 2012 issue of AMERICAN THEATRE magazine, Wendy Smith wrote an article titled "From Sea-Chanties to the Moon: A spate of intense new productions shows how Eugene O'Neill's theatrical vision deepened as his canvas tightened." Here are a few highlights from the article that inspire me and capture what O'Neill left behind. And as a result, I make the choice to not bend or brake when it comes to creating what is in my heart. I will continue to think, feel, explore and present the truth even if most of society feels it necessary to turn away as a result of fear.

"EUGENE O'NEILL TOWERS OVER THE AMERICAN STAGE THE WAY SHAKESPEARE TOWERS over the english: He virtually invented our national drama, forcing a juvenile theatre to grow up just as America was facing the political, social and spiritual challenges of maturity. No truly ambitious actor can shirk the challenge of his soul-exposing roles, and no one who cares about the theatre wants to miss out on the key entries in his exhausting yet exhilarating canon.

An evening of O'Neill can be exhausting and exhilarating for the same reason: He never settles for less than the most the theatre has to offer. He disdains cheap laughs, easy emotions and comforting nostrums-all the facile tricks of the "show shop," as he sneeringly called Broadway. He demands of his audiences the same stern willingness to look at life whole and without flinching that he demands of himself, and he expects them to sit still for as long as that look takes.

O'Neill sometimes failed to achieve his titanic ambitions, but he never compromised them. Toward the end of his life, as he gained perspective on the nightmarish family drama that shaped his dark view of the world and humanity's place in it, his work became more personal and also more universal. There are no greater American plays than THE ICEMAN COMETH, LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT and A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN, yet they came after nearly three decades of game-changing achievement that included such other seminal pieces as ANNA CHRISTIE, DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS and MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA. Familiarity with O'Neill's entire body of work merely makes those final masterpieces more astonishing: How could he have given so much and yet still have more to give?...

O'Neill was the first great American playwright in large part because he was the first to challenge audiences with a genuinely tragic vision of the human condition-a vision that consistently presents death as the only lasting peace achievable.

O'Neill's quest to present onstage life in its unvarnished reality led him to experiment with new forms for the very beginning...

It's a young man's play, sometimes crude and schematic, and O'Reilly had the good sense to encourage the Irish Rep's capable actors...not to be embarrassed by the flaws in the text. They embraced O'Neill's unrelenting pessimism and played the human particulars in which he always embeds his philosophical points. O'Reilly's thoughtful interpretation illuminated BEYOND THE HORIZON as the unjustly neglected culmination of O'Neill's apprenticeship years.

STRANGE INTERLUDE is a characteristic work of O'Neill's middle period, the decade and a half of furious creativity during which he wrote 20 plays and pressed against the realistic theatre's constraints...

Some of the humor in the play is intentional, but much is not; O'Neill's ultra-Freudian insights, considered terribly bold and risque in 1928, seem terribly obvious to a modern audience. But people are obvious sometimes, and one of this production's great strengths was the willingness of the actors to let both kinds of laughs happen. They were relaxed about STRANGE INTERLUDE'S excesses, so the audience could relax and enjoy the play on several levels.

"It's just a giant soap opera!" said a woman next to me on line at the first intermission. Indeed, promiscuity, hereditary insanity, abortion, adultery and deaths both natural and unnatural are among the plot developments O'Neill doles out with a generous hand as his angst-ridden heroine, Nina Leeds..., finds that she needs the love of three men-and the son on whom she obsessively dotes-to make up for the fiance she lost in World War I. Despite his contempt for the phony, sentimental fare of his father's generation, O'Neill shared its relish for high drama, and he imbibed an enormous amount of theatrical know-how during those miserable childhood years being carted from town to town on James O'Neill's endless national tours. He thought and wrote naturally in units of acts and scenes, expressing character development through dialogue and stage action, even as he stretched the theatre to encompass greater metaphysical depth and psychological complexity. 

O'Neill's famously detailed stage directons express these boundary-stretching intensions-and his mistrust of those executing them on stage. They describe scenery in terms of its emotional impact and its relationship to the progression of the story; they give in-depth psychological portraits as well as physical descriptions of characters; and they frequently indicate precisely how a line should be spoken and the action that should accompany it...

He was seldom happy with productions of his plays and considered the published scripts, in which he restored cuts made for performance, to be the truest versions.

In fact, O'Neill was in his lifetime one of Random House's best-selling authors, and he is among the most readable of playwrights, thanks in part to those evocative stage directions. If he had not been so irrevocably committed to the theatre, he might have been a great American novelist.

STRANGE INTERLUDE is O'Neill's attempt to write a novel as a play, covering 27 years over 9 acts. In the original production, his sprawling script took four-and-a-half hours to perform, plus a 90-minute dinner break in lieu of intermissions. With the permission of the O'Neill estate, Kahn cut the running time to slightly over three hours, including two intermissions. I have usually found it a mistake to eliminate the deliberate repetitions with which O'Neill orchestrates his themes; I've seen two heavily cut productions of THE ICEMAN COMETH, both fragmentary and oddly dull, whereas the Almeida Theatre's 1999 production, anchored by Kevin Spacey's scarifying Hickey, gripped me for every minute of its more than four hours. Goodman Theatre's recent production, directed by Robert Falls, was similarly uncut, and judging by the glowing reviews, it too lived up to O'Neill's epic demands; plans for a Broadway run may well have been announced by the time this issue is printed...

He wrote many great roles for women, and plenty of speeches that express a character's effort to find meaning in human suffering...

Kahn and his accomplished cast realized that these lovely, quiet moments couldn't be disentangled from the busy plot and facile Freudianism that make STRANGE INTERLUDE rather dated, albeit a surprising amount of fun; they struck every note in O'Neill's discordant symphony with equal deftness...

A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN shares with LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT and THE ICEMAN COMETH a simplicity and economy that reveal the playwright working at the deepest levels of his art. The urgency of what he needs to communicate precludes the restless experiementation that marked his work in the '20s and early '30s. A single set and a single day suffice as O'Neill uses unadorned, naturalistic speech to strip away his characters lies and force them to confront who they are and what they've done...

A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN shows us people capable of delight (not something you see a lot of in O'Neill) once again shipwrecked on the shoals of the past. What makes O'Neill's perennial theme so heartbreaking here is that it isn't Josie's past; she makes the mistake of falling in love with someone whose course in life was set long before she knew him: haunted James Tyrone Jr....

O'Neill brought the character based on his brother back from LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT because he felt he'd failed to do justice to Jamie O'Neill's profound love for their mother, and May's interpretation movingly conveyed that love. Robards's final monologue was one long howl of outrage, abandonment, self-hatred and the most dreadful, desolate kind of self-knowledge. It's one of the few times in the theatre when I have felt in my bones the catharsis through pity and fear that Aristotle defined as the purpose of tragedy.

Greek tragedy was one of O'Neill's touchstones, not only in his understanding of theatre but of life itself. Depicting a world in which human beings commit crimes without intending to, driven by forces they cannot control but may at last come to comprehend, the ORESTEIA and OEDIPUS REX provided a philosophical frame that could encompass the guilt and grief of a teenager wracked with the knowledge that his birth had been the cause of his mother's morphine addiction.

But if O'Neill's embrace of the Greeks' tragic ethos quite possibly saved him from following the suicidal path of his nihilistic brother, he found no way to voice it in his own plays until he discovered his second touchstone: the revolutionary drama of Ibsen and his peers. Seeing Alla Nazimova's HEDDA GABLER in 1907, he remarked, "gave me my first conception of a modern theatre where truth might live." More than 100 years later, sampling key works from his staggering output, we can see that what HEDDA gave O'Neill is what he gave the American theatre: the beliefs that it was a place where truth might live."