Anna Christie - Episode 2

Ask anyone familiar with theater for a thumbnail sketch of Eugene O'Neill, and they'll probably talk about social and psychological realism, of tormented, tragic characters, of guilt, and of damaged people forced to endure long, dark nights of the soul.

You'll see this most clearly in the plays that come after Anna Christie, perhaps most famously in Long Day's Journey into Night, which was produced posthumously in 1956, or in 1939's The Iceman Cometh, often cited as his finest work, in which he ponders humanity's need for illusion and hope when faced with despair.

It's not hard to trace the source of this torment to O'Neill's own life.

He was born in New York in 1888.

It was a very difficult birth.

His mother was prescribed morphine for the pain, and she became addicted.

Professor Robert M.

Downing is O'Neill's biographer.

That is where the addiction began, was at his birth, so he felt profound guilt about that, but then he also felt guilt because, a kind of survivor's guilt, because his older brother, who at about two years old was being looked after by their grandmother, the oldest brother had contracted measles.

The grandmother told him not to go into the room with the baby.

He did anyway, and the baby was dead within a week, and his mother never truly forgave him for that.

Those two moments, in many ways, sparked all the tragedy to come.

O'Neill's father, James, having risen out of poverty, became a highly regarded Shakespearean actor.

So O'Neill was immersed in both theater and tales of hardship from the start of his life.

Perhaps most significantly, he was witness to a mind plagued by internal conflict.

His father sought credibility and became more and more tormented as he took on more popular, financially lucrative work.

In 1883, James took the lead role in The Count of Monte Cristo, an historical melodrama which audiences loved, though critics did not.

O'Neill's father played the role more than 6,000 times over the course of his career, but towards the end of his life told his son how much he regretted selling out.

He had given up this incredible talent for Shakespearean theater, made a lot of money, and was enormously despondent by the end of his life that he had made such a decision.

O'Neill was already well into his playwriting career but still in the early stages.

This is 1918.

He said that that was the moment that made him decide that he would never sell out, that he would never conform to social demands.

He would never conform to critical demands, and he didn't.

In his 20s, O'Neill became a seaman, joining the Merchant Navy, and that, combined with his theatrical background, his knowledge of parental torment, his first-hand view of addiction, and his love of striving for extremes of experience, all of that became the clay from which the playwright was forged.