The Theater: Day of Wild Wind

MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA

by EUGENE O'NEILL

Sometimes Eugene O'Neill seems like the Ancient Mariner of drama. He holds us with his glittering eye. He harangues us with his banal tongue and his repetitive nightmare about the cursed albatross that haunts his fevered imagination: his family, the restive dead. His soap-opera prose alone ought to chloroform any ghost. But somehow O'Neill slings the albatross round our necks and makes us grieve and attend to his tale of fearful woe.

Mourning Becomes Electra is like a day of wild wind and rain that finally reduces everyone and everything to a sodden, nerveless pulp. O'Neill transposed...

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