Gallery: Performances and Reviews of O'Neill Plays
From 1916 to the present, Eugene O'Neill's plays have been magnets for actors and directors. Browse this gallery of photographs from performances of the plays, and read quotes from reviews that were published in New York newspapers.
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The Provincetown Players staged Bound East for Cardiff in 1916.
Credit: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library -
In 1920, the Provincetown Players premiered The Emperor Jones. In the New York Tribune, Heywood Broun called it "the most interesting play which has yet come from the most promising playwright in America."
Credit: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library -
Anna Christie featured actors George Marion and Pauline Lord at New York's Vanderbilt Theater in 1921. The New York Times praised Lord's performance and said the play was "worth seeing again and again."
Credit: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library -
Alexander Woollcott described this production of The Hairy Ape, which opened in New York in 1922, as "turbulent and tremendous" in a New York Times review.
Credit: Arthur and Barbara Gelb -
The Great God Brown featured actor William Harrigan in 1926. The New York Timessaid it "poured a powerful flood of feeling across the footlights" but The New York Postjudged it a "superb failure."
Credit: The New York Public Library -
Lynn Fontanne played Nina in Strange Interlude in the work's 1928 premiere. The New York Evening Herald described the "nine-act dramatic marathon" as "profoundly engrossing."
Credit: Photofest -
Mourning Becomes Electra featured Alla Nazimova and Alice Brady in 1931. The play was structured as a trilogy that took six hours to perform. In the New York Times, J. Brooks Atkinson wrote, "to this department, which ordinarily reserves its praise for the dead, Mourning Becomes Electra is Mr. O'Neill's masterpiece."
Credit: Photofest -
Earle Larimore played in Days Without End in 1934. The New York Post panned it as "one of the feeblest" of O'Neill's works.
Credit: The New York Public Library -
In 1956 Jason Robards and Bradford Dillman portrayed the two Tyrone brothers in the first New York production of Long Day's Journey Into Night. The New York Daily Newspronounced it "a magnificent work" that "exploded like a dazzling skyrocket over the humdrum of Broadway theatricals."
Credit: The New York Public Library
