Tennessee Williams

EUGENE GLADSTON O’NEILL

1888-1953

Eugene O’Neill was one of the greatest playwrights in American history. He is the founder of modern American drama, an outstanding figure in the new American drama. Four times he captured the Pulitzer Prize and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1936. Through his experimental and emotionally probing dramas, he addressed the difficulties of human society with a deep psychological complexity.

Born in a hotel on Broadway in 1888, Eugene O’Neill was the son of Ella Quinlan and the actor James O’Neill. Eugene spent the first seven years of his life touring with his father’s theater company. These years introduced O’Neill to the world of theater and the difficulties of maintaining artistic integrity.

O’Neill spent the next seven years receiving a strict Catholic education before attending a private secular school in Connecticut. Though a bright student, he was already caught up in a world of alcohol and prostitutes by the time he entered college. He studied at Harvard, worked as a sailor, clerk, actor, reporter. After a year at Princeton University he shipped to sea, lived a derelict’s existence on the waterfronts of Buenos Aires, Liverpool and New York City, submerged himself in alcohol, and attempted suicide.

In 1909, he set out on a gold-prospecting voyage to Honduras – only to be sent home six months later with a tropical fever. While recovering from tuberculosis at a sanatorium in Wallingford, Conn., he began to write plays. During the period that followed, he spent time working as a stage manager, an actor, a tramp, and a reporter. He also tended mules on a cattle steamer and set out on several other voyages as a sailor. It was here that he came in contact with the sailors, dock workers and outcasts that would populate his plays, the kind of characters the American theatre had heretofore passed over in silence.

In 1910 he fell in love with and married the first of three wives, Kathleen Jenkins. Soon after, however, O’Neill left his wife for the adventures of traveling. In Honduras he contracted Malaria, and returned to find Kathleen pregnant with his child. Without seeing the boy (Eugene O’Neill, Jr.), O’Neill shipped out again, this time for Buenos Aires, and later for England. In 1912, Kathleen filed for divorce and soon after, plagued by illness, O’Neill returned to his parents’ home.

O’Neill spent the next five years working primarily on one-act plays. In 1918 he married Agnes Boulton, and with her had two children. He continued to publish and produce his one-acts, but it was not until his play "Beyond the Horizon" (1920), that American audiences responded to his genius. The play won the first of three Pulitzer Prizes for O'Neill. Many saw in this early work a first step toward a more serious American theater.

Following the success of "Beyond the Horizon", O’Neill went into an incredibly productive period, writing many of his greatest plays. "The Emperor Jones" (1920) and "The Hairy Ape" (1922) follow the lives of two men through personal struggles and their search for identity. Received well, these two established O’Neill as a master of the craft.

With plays such as "Desire Under the Elms" (1924) and "Morning Becomes Electra" (1931), O’Neill uses the moral and physical entanglements similar to Greek drama to express the complexities of family life.

O’Neill’s final years were spent estranged from much of the literary community and his family. O'Neill became gradually paralyzed and he died on November 27, 1953 in Boston. He wrote 45 plays. By the time of his death in 1953, O’Neill was considered one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.

“BEYOND THE HORIZON” (1918)

In this drama Eugene O’Neill showed the theme of a tragic discord of a beautiful dream with the “gray” reality. This drama brought him a wide fame and the Pulitzer Prize.

The play is set in an American farm on the Atlantic East. The farm is sited in a beautiful location and belongs to farmer Mayo. There are two boys in his family: Andrew and Robert. Andy is a practical young fellow who runs the farm efficiently. In contrast to the energetic Andrew is the delicate Robert, an ailing young man who from his boyhood has dreamed of beauty and happiness, which he hopes to find beyond the hills of his father’s farm. He has been to college; he likes poetry best of all. He wants to leave home and go somewhere where he can find the poetry of life. His parents arrange that his uncle who is captain of a ship would take him on a voyage.

Both boys are secretly in love with a young girl, Ruth, a friend of the family. Robert thinks that his brother Andrew is a better match for her than he is. This is one more reason why he wants to leave home – he doesn’t want to be in the way. But Ruth prefers Robert to Andrew. On the day he is to leave for the voyage she tells him of her love for him and implores Robert to stay home. Robert gives up his plans. They announce their engagement to the family. Andrew decides to go to sea with his uncle instead of Robert, and Robert marries Ruth and stays at the farm: this is the mistake of his life.

Act II shows the young couple at the same farm three years later. They have a little daughter, Mary, but they are no longer happy. Ruth wear a sullen look, she has tremendously aged; so has Robert. Ruth’s mother and Robert’s mother are talking about what has happened since their marriage. The father who had been furious with Andrew for having given up farming fell ill and died. Robert who has had no experience in farming is unable to make both ends meet. He is held up to scorn by the neighbours. Ruth regrets that she didn’t marry Andy though she doesn’t want to admit it. She is getting quarrelsome. But Robert guesses the truth. Robert catches her reading and rereading Andy’s letters. The entire family is waiting for Andy’s return. If he doesn’t help them with money, the farm will have to be mortgaged because Robert won’t be able to get through the harvest. The mowing machine[1] does not work; Robert can’t fix it himself. Ben, the farm-hand, refuses to work for Robert as he is a complete failure.

The quarrels between Ruth and Robert become intolerable. Ruth says to Robert, “You think you’re so much better than other folks with your college education where you never learned a thing, and always reading your stupid books instead of working. It’s a pose. You think I ought to be proud to be your wife – a poor ignorant thing like me! But I’m not. I hate it! I hate the sight of you!”

Robert regrets that he has stayed at the farm and envies his brother. Ruth tells him that he is free to go where he likes. The farm will be better off without him, because he does everything wrong. In the middle of the row Andy comes back unexpectedly. He is surprised to see the young couple in such a state. Ruth hopes he will stay to better the farm but Andy leaves again, this time for Buenos Aires where he is sure to make a lot of money.

Act III takes place three years later. Robert is ill with tuberculosis. His mother is dead, and from the conversation he has with Ruth we learn that their little daughter Mary has also died. With the death of their sickly child Robert loses his last interest in life. Robert has ceased to struggle with misfortune and has left things go from bad to worse on the farm. Ruth has written to Andrew to bring a doctor and they arrive only to tell Ruth that the case is hopeless. Andrew arrives just before Robert's death, and Ruth confesses that long ago she had told Robert that she loved Andrew. Andrew, with his affection for his dying brother is horrified. He exacts from the girl the promise that she will tell Robert before he dies that she really loved him all the time. When she enters the bedroom she finds that Robert has already passed "beyond the horizon" to the fulfillment of his longings. All Andrew can say as he shakes Ruth roughly is: "He's gone and you never told him! You never told him!"

DISCUSSION:

1. Explain the meaning of the title “Beyond the Horizon”.

2. What is the main mistake the heroes of the play “Beyond the Horizon” have made?

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

1911-1983

His real name is Thomas Lanier Williams. He was born in Columbus, Mississippi, where his grandfather was the Episcopal clergyman. The second of three children, his family life was full of tension. In 1926 his father who was a travelling shoe salesman, moved with his family to St. Louis. Williams entered college and left after a couple of years to take a job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years, spending the evening writing. In 1927, Williams got his first taste of literary fame when he took third place in a national essay contest sponsored by “The Smart Set”magazine. He entered the University in Iowa in 1938. There his friends nicknamed him Tennessee and it became his pen-name. In 1940 he was awarded a $1,000 Rockefeller fellowship for his play “Battle of Angels”. The play was produced in Boston in 1940 and closed after a few weeks. Williams later revised it as “Orpheus Descending”.

Williams spent a number of years traveling throughout the country and trying to write. His first critical acclaim came in 1944 when “The Glass Menagerie” opened in Chicago and went to Broadway. It won a Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and, as a film, the New York Film Critics’ Circle Award. Just before his move out to the West Coast in 1943, Williams' sister, Rose, underwent a prefrontal lobotomy because of her mental illness, and within “The Glass Menagerie”are echoes of his guilt for not sparing Rose from this operation.

At the height of his career in the late 1940s and 1950s, Williams worked with the premier artists of the time, most notably Elia Kazan. Williams followed up his first major critical success with several other Broadway hits including such plays as “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1948), “Summer and Smoke” (1948), “A Rose Tattoo” (1951), and “Camino Real” (1955).

He received his first Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for “A Streetcar Named Desire”, and reached an even larger world-wide audience in 1950 and 1951 when “The Glass Menagerie” and “A Streetcar Named Desire” were made into major motion pictures. Later plays which were also made into motion pictures include “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (for which he earned a second Pulitzer Prize in 1955) and “Orpheus Descending” (1957).

His other famous plays include “Suddenly Last Summer” (1958), “Sweet Bird of Youth” (1959), “Baby Doll”. The total number of his plays is over 30. He also published poetry collections, “The Summer Belvedere” (1944) and “Winter of Cities” (1956), as well as “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone”, a novel, in 1950.

The 1960s were perhaps the most difficult years for Williams, as he experienced some of his harshest treatment from the press. In 1961 he wrote “The Night of the Iguana”, and in 1963, “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Any More”. His plays, which had long received criticism for openly addressing taboo topics, were finding more and more detractors. Around this time, Williams’ longtime companion, Frank Merlo, died of cancer. Williams began to depend more and more on alcohol and drugs and though he continued to write, completing a book of short stories and another play, he was in a downward spiral. In 1969 he was hospitalized by his brother.

After his release from the hospital in the 1970s, Williams wrote plays, a memoir, poems, short stories and a novel. In 1975 he published “Memoirs”, which detailed his life and discussed his addiction to drugs and alcohol, as well as his homosexuality. In 1980 Williams wrote “Clothes for a Summer Hotel”, based on the lives of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Only three years later, Tennessee Williams died in a New York City hotel filled with half-finished bottles of wine and pills.

“The Glass Menagerie” (1944) which established T. Williams as a major American playwright is a sad play depicting the crash of illusions in the collision with reality. A young girl lives in a dream world, which proves as fragile as her collection of tiny glass animals that her mother calls “the glass menagerie”.

The play is replete with lyrical symbolism. The glass menagerie, in its fragility and delicate beauty, is a symbol for Laura. She is oddly beautiful and, like her glass pieces, easy to destroy.

Williams’ next important play is “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1947) which won a Pulitzer Prize. The message of the play is the ruin of the ideals of beauty and humanity and the triumph of brutality and violence. The main heroine Blanche DuBois, a poverty-stricken heiress of an aristocratic South family, as the last family jewel keeps and cherishes her ideals. But they are alive and real only in her imagination.

In “Orpheus Descending” the Orpheus is a young charismatic musician, Val Xavier, who descends into a small repressive southern town. He forms a relationship with a passionate woman who is trapped in a bad marriage and who has a tragic past. He tries to rescue Lady Torrance, the wife of a ruthless man, racist and murderer. Pure and bright love of Val and Lady is opposed to an awful world of cruel man of property, in which all human relations are built on buying and sale, lying, violence, cruelty. Val-Orpheus is unable to save Lady-Eurydice because in such world cannot be saved anything pure, everything is subjected to rot and ruin in it. In the world of crude force and violence Val and Lady are doomed losers. Val is lynched and Lady is killed by her husband. The play exhibits many of the playwright's typical themes: loneliness and desire, sexuality and repression, the longing for freedom.

“CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF” (1955)

“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” deals with a violent struggle for inheritance in a wealthy family. However, the play is marked by emphasis on the biological in human relations, the lovers’ relations in particular.

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