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Significant is the O'Neill treatment of the theme: simple, straightforward. Spectators who came expecting asides, theatrical tricks such as those employed in Strange Interlude were disappointed. Spectators who hoped to see an elaborate job of mental vivisection, such as Playwright O'Neill displayed in Strange Interlude, were disappointed, too. Prime point of criticism of Mourning Becomes Electra is its bareness. Six hours is a long time to have to sit and watch a family obliterate itself, motivated by unrelieved hatred and lust.
Playwright O'Neill, an experimenter at heart, seldom uses exactly the same method twice. He is voracious. Life, and life as portrayed in the theatre, is a business that must be attacked on many fronts. The only thing that serious Mr. O'Neill can inevitably be counted on to avoid is a touch of humor. Like his fellow-Hibernian Synge, he loves "all that is salt in the mouth, all that is rough to the hand, all that heightens the emotions by contest, all that stings into life the sense of tragedy."
The record of Playwright O'Neill easily establishes him as the nation's greatest. The tom-tom which thudded through The Emperor Jones (1920) sounded a new pulse on the U. S. stage. With Beyond the Horizon (1919), Anna Christie (1921) and Strange Interlude (1929) he has thrice won the Pulitzer Prize. His published works number 28. If you would like a copy of Thirst & Other One-Act Plays, his first printed volume, it will cost you $75.
The most important epoch in Eugene O'Neill's life is not his dismissal from Princeton in 1907 for hijinks, not the period in which he bummed about on ships, not even his long association with the Provincetown Players. It begins on Christmas Eve, 1912, when drink and irregular habits sent him into the Gaylord Farm (Wallingford, Conn.) sanitarium, a tuberculous patient. His biographers note that he went in a boy and came out a man. At least, that was where he started writing seriously. Up to that time his sorely-tried father, Actor James O'Neill, thought his son was just "crazy." Eugene O'Neill had been a beachcomber at Buenos Aires, a seaman, a reporter on the New London Telegraph, had trouped with the parental Monte Cristo road company.
Mourning Becomes Electra was largely written last year at his house near Tours, France. Returned to the U. S. this summer for rehearsals, seven weeks of them, he said he would never live abroad again. He has three children: Eugene Jr., who won a Latin prize at Yale last year (TIME, June 8) of which his father is very proud, Ona and Shane. He is also attached to a Dalmatian named Blemie.
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill can afford to relax his stern face occasionally and smile on life. Equipped with proven genius, he is comparatively a young man. Money rolls in from Strange Interlude, still on the road. The kudos he has received may be only a sample of what is to come. Above all a living writer, he looks steadfastly to the future, scorns any present estimate of his work, explains: "It seems to me that there is too damned much of that sort of thing being done in America."