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Metropolitan
Playhouse
The American Legacy 220
East
Fourth Street ~ New York,
New York 10009
Office: 212 995 8410 ~ Tickets: 212 995 5302 "One
of
my favorite downtown theaters"
~ Martin Denton, nytheatre.com
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Eugene O’Neill (1888 - 1953)  It is easy to read in his work the details of his personal life, which so often appear transfigured in his work. He was raised in a touring theater family, his father the grandiose matinee idol James O'Neill, his mother the fragile (and morphine addicted) Mary Ellen "Ella" Quinlan. His brother Edmund died of measles at two, while his older brother, Jamie, was occasionally employed as an actor, but died of complications of alcoholism at the age of 45. Eugene himself began adulthood by dropping out of Princeton and into the life of a seafarer, stopping in Buenos Aires, Liverpool, and New York. He held jobs that varied from secretary to gold prospector to draughtsman to mule tender to newspaper reporter. He frequented prostitutes, succumbed to alcohol, and later tuberculosis, and nearly took his own life, but on recovery through a sanitarium in 1913, he began writing plays. He was married three times, and he fathered three children: Eugene O'Neill, Jr. (with his first wife, Kathleen Jenkins); and with his second wife, Agnes Boulton, a son Shane, and daughter Oona, whom he disowned when she married the rather senior Charlie Chaplin. A prolific writer, he wrote over 20 full-length plays between 1920 and 1943, though his most ambitious project was never completed. This was a cycle of 11 plays, to be performed on 11 consecutive nights, following an American family over two centuries. A Touch of the Poet was the only play he completed of that cycle, while More Stately Mansions was a rough draft of a second, and both were published and performed after his death. His final years were afflicted by a tremor that rendered him unable to hold pencil and paper. A recluse from all but a doctor, nurse, and his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, he died in a Boston hotel room in 1953.
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