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Early on, the aspiring playwright announced his intention to become "an artist or nothing," and he never let practical concerns stand in the way of that intention. After his one-act productions proved successful, O'Neill began pushing the limits of the stage and of his producers' wallets. He reluctantly shelved an eight-act version of Marco Millions; in its shorter incarnation, the play still called for opulent sets representing scenes in Venice, Syria, Persia, India, Mongolia and Cathay. And that only took care of Act I. Lazarus Laughed required approximately 165 actors wearing a variety of masks. Strange Interlude ran an astonishing nine acts; the curtain went up at 5:15 in the afternoon, and playgoers were given a 90-minute supper break at 7:30, after Act V. This endurance test turned out to be wildly popular. The play earned O'Neill his third Pulitzer and became a best seller when published as a book. Even this acclaim did not satisfy the author. He wrote a fellow playwright: "I'd be a liar if I said the money wasn't welcome, even though I feel the play earned it under the false pretenses of a ballyhooed freak."
Ironically, O'Neill's personality, as revealed in his letters, seems unsuited to the collaborative demands of the theater. His private visions lashed him forward, but he was nearly always disappointed with what he finally saw onstage. He grew increasingly frustrated by "the inevitable compromises and distortions of production." In 1934, the Nobel Prize still two years away, he wrote a friend: "I take my theatre too personally, I guess -- so personally that before long I think I shall permanently resign from all production and confine my future work to plays in books for readers only."
The anniversary tribute that might therefore please him most is the publication of his Complete Plays (Library of America; 3,203 pages; 3 volumes, $35 each; boxed set, $100), the most thorough and accurate collection of his work ever printed. These handsome books present O'Neill's plays in the order of their composition, making it possible to trace the evolution of his skills and ideas. It is also easy, turning these pages, to see why he grew so grumpy about the restrictions of the theater. He often prefaced his plays with lengthy treatises, not only describing characters and settings in obsessive detail but providing historical or sociological information that could not possibly be conveyed in production. And his stage directions regularly ballooned beyond any possibility of being accurately mimed, or even parsed. This, from The Iceman Cometh, is typical: "Larry stares at him, moved by sympathy and pity in spite of himself, disturbed, and resentful at being disturbed, and puzzled by something he feels about Parritt that isn't right."