For some strange random freak serendipitous reason while I was scrolling the other day for joshi puroresu from Japan this transfer to video of a fifty-year-old film of a stage production showed up:
Memories were triggered. I had seen the production performed live with the same cast (Jason Robards, Jr. and Colleen Dewhurst) at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles in 1974, a few months prior to the filming. I was there mostly because Robards, who, when I thought for a second I was going to be an actor, was my inspiration from the movies, particularly “A Thousand Clowns” and “The Night They Raided Minsky’s.”
A few months following, in February of 1975, at the Met Theatre in Los Angeles, I saw a play written early in Eugene O’Neill’s career, The Hairy Ape, and a few months after that, July 1974, at the Westwood Playhouse, it was back to the later O’Neill, this time the one-act play Hughie, and—how lucky can a person be—starring again Jason Robards Jr., this time with Jack Dodson, both actors reviving their 1964 Broadway performances.
I’ve managed in my touristy travels over the years to also visit Eugene O’Neill landmarks: I’ve been to Provincetown, MA where in the 1920's the aspiring dramatist debuted his earliest writing with the Provincetown Players, and I’ve visited Tao House in Danville, CA where he wrote his final plays in the late 1930's and early 1940's. As of this date, Eugene O’Neill is the only American playwright to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
And amazingly, it was AFTER winning the Nobel in 1936 that O’Neill, “secluded from the outside world," wrote his BEST plays, the classics: A Moon for the Misbegotten, The Iceman Cometh, Hughie, A Touch of the Poet, and Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
So then which of the early plays won him the Nobel? Because some of the early O’Neill work I’m familiar with (like the above-mentioned Hairy Ape) can get kind of cringey. The Nobel committee would have had to overlook some real duds. So, just what was it the Nobel was recognizing?
According to O’Neill biographer Robert M. Dowling it was the play Mourning Becomes Electra written in 1931 that set the literature prize committee on fire, so I've gone ahead and ordered from the library a book containing that play and plus two others from the early days: Desire Under the Elms and Strange Interlude. (Other than the titles, I'm not familiar with any of them; I'll report back.)
I’ve been mad librarying recently, like running good at poker, holding, discarding, taking, seeing, showing, checking, calling, raising. If libraries were casinos, I’d be rolling in dough. I’ve had incredible luck in finding great books, new, classics, fiction, non. Por ejemplo:
Propaganda, by Jacques Ellul, 1962
Translated from French by Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner, 1965
The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger’s Guild, by Mathias Enard, 2020
Translated from French by Frank Wynne, 2023
Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson, 2011
Possessing the Secret of Joy, by Alice Walker, 1992
On Witness and Respair, by Jesmyn Ward, 2026
Eugene O’Neill, by Robert M. Dowling, 2014
Zami, by Audre Lorde, 1982
Tales of the Alhambra, by Washington Irving, 1832
The News From Dublin, Colm Tóibín, 2026
A Suit or a Suitcase, Maggie Smith, 2026
And here are some links related to the above that I acquired during my research for the post:
The Night They Raided Minsky's -
Wikipedia
Provincetown as a Stage - Chapter One
History of The Tao House | Tao House
San Francisco Bay | Eugene O'Neill
Randy Stark’s Amazon Author’s Page
