In the 1910s the American theater, long dominated by melodramas, dictatorial producers (most of whom were artless magnates), and an audience more drawn by stars-preferably Britishthan good scripts, was finally ready to establish its own identity. The cha...

In the 1910s the American theatre, long dominated by melodramas, dictatorial producers (most of whom were artless magnates), and an audience more drawn by stars--preferably British--than good scripts, was finally ready to establish its own identity. The...

"I want to be an artist or nothing," wrote aspiring playwright Eugene O'Neill at the age of twenty-five. He pursued his goal relentlessly, and when he died forty years later he had written more than fifty plays, won the Nobel and several Pulitzer prizes,...

A Tony Award-winning set designer puts his stamp of authenticity on a recent Broadway mounting. In Edward Albee's Seascape, a couple's summer idyll on a beach is strangely interrupted by the anthropomorphic presence of another couple-two lizards. Initially on the defensive, the amphibian...

Monarch Notes 01-01-1963 Strange Interlude Introduction. O'Neill settled down in Bermuda to write the first half of Strange Interlude in the spring of 1926. That summer, vacationing in Maine, he worked on the second half. During the writing of the play, he read several...