Eugene O'Neill and the Traditions of American Drama By: M. Korneva

أوجين أونيل وتقاليدُ المسرحِ الأمريكيِّ

Abstract

  This article was written by researcher M. Korneva, included in the first chapter of the book, American Literature in the Twentieth Century, authored by a number of writers, and issued in English by Progress Publishers in Moscow, in 1976. This article sheds some light on the beginnings of American theater, indicating the position of Eugene O'Neill's plays in it. It studies the very young American dramatic art that cannot be compared with poetry and prose dating back centuries. If the first theatrical works appeared in the New World at the end of the eighteenth century, this art is entirely a product of the twentieth century. One can set the year 1916 as the birth date of the American play, on which the first performance of O'Neill's play East to Cardiff took place. O'Neill's plays assumed an important role in the development of American theater through the American themes he drew from reality, and by adapting European theatrical forms to suit those themes. No matter how deeply we evaluate O'Neill's works, their importance to American national theatrical art cannot be measured. Even if his artistic fame fades, as happened in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when O'Neill's flaws trend became fashionable among critics, his contribution to the national stage is immense. O'Neill was not only the founder of a new form of theater in America, but he created a huge theatrical repertoire that ensured the continuity of this new form of American art. In it we can discover a mine of archetypal American conflicts and characters that continues to inspire American playwrights to the present. But the important thing is that O'Neill set the course for American theater ahead of time by emphasizing realism as its primary method, emphasizing the function of characters and giving realism the leading role in the general order of artistic system. Finally, O'Neill asserted the theater's freedom from the disciplines that determine the choice of a form of work, thus laying the foundations for stylistic diversity in American theater. In sum, we can say that what we have mentioned represents the typical features of American theatre.