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"Get drunk forever." That's the only problem, everything else doesn't matter. If you don't want to feel the terrible burden of time on your shoulders, crushing you to the ground and not being able to turn over, then keep getting drunk.
What to use to get drunk? With wine, with poetry, with benevolence and morality, anything is done, as long as it is drunk. ”
—Eugene O'Neill
Royal Swedish Academy. The premiere of "The Long Night". Cotter Theatre, New York. 1956
Premiere program in 1956
O'Neill's script distances itself from traditional "American" literature, whether it's the ideal "New London" in his mind or the smell of sea and fog in the script. In this way, O'Neill's creative purpose of trying to realize his purpose and ideas seems to have some anti-opportunistic tendencies, and the discussion of the family in twentieth-century American literature is far lower than that of the individual, and the writers emphasize the reflection of social problems and inner problems, and use wandering, alcoholism and sex to try to evoke a certain spirit that has no specific name. O'Neill's earlier works have a similar creative intention - the group lonely carnival in "The Ice Deliverer Is Coming".
After being dissuaded from Prince's End University, the Honduran gold rush, and the life of a sailor in Buenos Aires, O'Neill began to write plays on themes such as desire and religion, and as one of the few "sword bearers" in American theater, he can be said to have completed his work relatively completely. As the last drama play released, "The Long Night is Long", the question thrown by the "sword bearer" at the end of the question - what is the purpose of family and art - seems warm and calculating.
According to O'Neill, "It's a play that dispels old hatred and is written in blood and tears. "There is no shortage of autobiographical creations in twentieth-century literature, and most of them are mainly novels. What makes Long Nights Unique is the form of its script and the barely spoken facts that have been largely unchanged. As an autobiographical work, this four-act script only intercepts the most conflict-intensive time periods; as a script, it seems too "verbose", too exhausting a sense of burden, although this "exhaustion" is also the author's skill.
It looks a little strangely, in a heavy and serious tone, directly drawing the reader, or rather the viewer, into those memories, and into the darkened room that has been clouded by the father's miserliness to turn on the lights, to the tone of the over-and-over, the recitation aloud of shakespeare and Baudelaire's verses, the ghostly wandering mother of an addict, the debauched eldest son, the gloomy and weak second son suffering from tuberculosis. The reader knows that this is a drama, and in the process of reading it becomes such length and temperament.
Movie adaptation poster
Henry Hewes of Saturday Review, in exploring the universal meaning of the play, divides human life into several different classes: sometimes, living in the "impulsive" class, that is, making an unthinking intuitive reaction to food; sometimes living in the "social" class, pretending to cope with, and even deceiving others; sometimes "compromising" and conforming to everything; sometimes "introspecting" and searching for truth inwardly; and sometimes life is in "escape" and "hallucination". He said that in "The Long Night", O'Neill represents himself, his brother and his parents in these classes, dancing the magic dance of life.
O'Neill's wife, Carlote, said that O'Neill worked extremely hard to create the play, trying to grasp everything that was real in his memory, but he couldn't be specific. With such an ambitious plan to describe the "broken house" of the past, he must return to the words "drug addiction", "poverty", "desolation", "debaucher", and this pain comes from O'Neill's insistence on alleviating it through writing, insisting on telling the truth and thus forgiving the past. In the central conception of "performance", which is the creation of drama, action is no longer intended to transform life, but can also make escape from life, and if you want to give this escape a meaning, you must understand escape.
Perhaps sometimes, on the stairs of the palace, on the green grass on the other side of the ditch, living in your own lonely, dreary chamber, you will wake up to find that your drunkenness has half-faded or completely receded. Then ask, ask the wind, ask the waves, ask the stars and birds in the sky, ask the clock, ask everything that can fly, sigh, sway and sing, can speak, ask what hour it is. Then the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, and the clock will tell you, "It's time to get drunk!" If you don't want to be a slave and a victim of time, keep getting drunk! With wine, with poetry, with benevolence and morality, anything can be done. ”
O'Neill and Carlote
In The Long Night, O'Neill finds his final subject, family, and in fact he never stays away from it, which is a key work to understand O'Neill, his final blow. Sontag mentions in Against Interpretation that a new form of preaching occupies all kinds of art, and it is indeed a "modern" element of art. Its central tenet is the idea that art must develop. The result is this type of work, the main purpose of which is to promote the history of the genre and to innovate in technique.
Drama as a literary genre that has developed happily since the beginning of the classical period, preceded by shakespeare Molière Chekhov's splendor, followed by Miller Beckett and others, the writing of script forms has strictly defined the genre, how to play the "modern" factor again within the established subject matter, the main point of Beckett's scattered works is to show how lexical, punctuation, syntax and narrative order can be readjusted to express the continuous out-of-body state of consciousness. And the script as a dramatic line and recitation is obviously slightly weak in the structural function of the text, it must be consistent as a whole, coherent and harmonious, almost can be said that it needs to pay more attention to the viewer's feelings than other genres.
In The Long Night, O'Neill makes the play take place some time after the story has been developed, after breakfast in the morning, when his father, Tyrone, has wasted his acting talent on the same play, spending the day focused on how to save money and avoid the fate of the "poor house"; the mother Mary because of the loneliness of running with her husband for many years, and the young son who once died turned to drugs for comfort; the eldest son Jamie was addicted to alcohol and prostitutes, and was persuaded by the university to leave the family doing nothing The youngest son, Edmund, was already showing early symptoms of tuberculosis.
Screenshot of the movie
This information gradually appears as the character dialogues. Constantly creating questions and giving information, O'Neill seems to abandon the easy-to-understand narrative order and old aesthetic theories, which, if lost enough serious core, are bound to lead to a large number of works that are both tedious and contrived. Maybe people used to look forward to that ancient way of literary activity, those non-self-aware, those large sections of colorful recitation. But a dramatist like O'Neill, restrained and sincere, forcing the reader to accept the slightly botched "modern" period, is bound to see the inevitability of this transformation. Although the process has been much slower than we expected.
After the loss of Miller and O'Neill, the prospects of the American theater scene are bleak, but as a literary form, theater has never been able to stay out of the modern art revolution, and its interest has become more and more complex and serious. O'Neill's anti-realist rationale seems convincing, the reality is not clear, and its normalcy is more like the sea and fog in many of his plays.
The realism of most of those works and the unthinking assertions about life that it evokes, the sense of realism of the seat, should be questionable, and doubt is also a characteristic of our time. Life is not lifelike, and a story may not choose an open-ended or closed climactic ending at the end, it certainly does not give a clear ending and destination, and we don't seem to need an ending as a consolation.
"Nothing lasts,
Tears and laughter,
Love and Lust and Hate:
Our shell no longer contains,
Once you have passed the ghost gate,
Nothing lasts,
Days of Wine and Roses:
From a hazy dream,
As soon as our journey appears,
And disappeared in the illusion. ”
Eugene O'Neill
O'Neill Street, "New London"
Swedish Theatre Royal adaptation of The Road to Destiny.2017
Note: The title and quotations in the text are from Eugene O'Neill's translation of "The Long Night";
References: John Garnier's O'Neill and His Works, Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation, Eugene O'Neill's A Little Poetic Temperament; Wikipedia Eugene O'Neill article;
Image from the web.
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