Word: neill
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Great God Brown (by Eugene O'Neill) stems from the period in the '20s when O'Neill was making Broadway history as an experimenter, while sometimes running into trouble as a playwright. With Freud raising the blinds on the unconscious, and expressionism opening a crazy-shaped door on the unrealistic, O'Neill grew bolder in his broodings-and more confused. In The Great God Brown, his psychological quarry was the split personality, his technical gimmick the use of masks. Turning a masked face to the world, Dion Anthony (Fritz Weaver) seems Panlike, violent, blasphemous, sexually magnetic...
...Brown, O'Neill tackled something formidably complex: both the conflict within a divided personality and divided selves clashing with one another. The use of masks has visual value; the sudden shifts in character and the transference of personality have theatrical force. But the conflicts that concerned O'Neill are among the eternal conflicts of stage drama. They are more rewarding when the audience must distinguish the face from the mask, or when the two are not easily distinguishable. Theatrical without being dramatic, O'Neill created men with two profiles but without any face...
Look Back in Anger will go down in history for leading British drama out of the drawing room and into the rooming house, for giving it a good shot of O'Neill-Miller-Williams influence, and for varying its genteel decorum with a rude, poignant intensity and a new relevance to both current and recurrent human concerns. But the analogous revolution for British movies has already been accomplished by Room at the Top, and the film version of John Osborne's play appears as a good piece of work in an established genre of sex-and-the-class-struggle movies...
...Theatre Guild since its founding in 1919. co-director after 1939, who gave up middling playwriting and dramatic criticism to rescue the Broadway stage from commercial mediocrity in the 1920s by tenaciously putting on demanding works by such authors as G. B. Shaw, Eugene O'Neill, Robert Sherwood and William Inge, was the first to pair Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne on the stage (The Guardsman, 1924); of a heart attack"; in Norwalk, Conn. The Theatre Guild never recaptured its glories of the '205 but achieved some later notable successes. It was Theresa Helburn who sent the script...
After tracing the development of American theatre, from its Victorian basis through reforms by O'Neill until the emergence of the Group Theatre, Whitehead talked specifically about the modern American theatre and the Lincoln Square Theatre. Modern theatre, Whitehead believes, will develop new techniques, greater ranges, and more imagination in choices of topics and presentations during the next decade--if limitations are not imposed. During the past, natural talent supported the theatre; today, it is necessary to create a new heritage and tradition...