Word: neill
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
AUTHOR: EUGENE O'NEILL...
...REPUTATION OF EUGENE O'Neill occupies the American stage the way your grandparents' sofa might dominate your living room. The thing is dark, overstuffed, too big and too long. Its style affronts modern taste; it has an odor that lingers somewhere between musty and musk. Yet you're afraid to toss the thing out because you've been told it's a valuable antique. And some people do say they feel comfortable sitting...
...people are actors; they find great scenes between the cushions of O'Neill's rhetoric. This is why dramas like Anna Christie -- ponderous artifacts stocked with sullen, logorrheic characters -- are so often revived, with such imposing casts. Jason Robards has long fanned the flame on Broadway, / and London has seen many winning revivals: the Glenda Jackson Strange Interlude, Desire Under the Elms with Colin Firth and Carmen Du Sautoy, A Touch of the Poet with Timothy Dalton and Vanessa Redgrave. Actors love digging to the core of a role, no matter how long it takes; and O'Neill's plays...
...begins with a scene between the father James Tyrone (Jack Aranson) and the mother Mary Cavan Tyrone (Patricia Conolly). The actors' forced voices and exaggerated facial expressions at first mislead the audience into thinking that they are watching a high-society comedy or drama instead of anything resembling O'Neill...
...Huntington's production is not unconvincing, but director Gilbert's failure to very the onstage mood makes for three hours of restless seat-sliding. Perhaps a more traditional interpretation would have been more successful than the Huntington's, whose only connection with O'Neill is the occasional blast of the fog horn that reminds the audience of the setting...