for the Providencetown Players. This was an experimental theatrical group that staged numerous one-act plays.Eugene O’Neill’s career as a playwright consisted of three periods. His early plays tried to reenact his own experiences. This period was known as his realist plays. Though in the 1920s he rejected realism in an effort to capture on stage the forces behind human life. The second period in his plays were known as his expressionistic period. They were influenced by the ideas of philosopher Freidrich Nietzsche, psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and a Swedish playwright August Strindberg. During his final period O’Neill returned to realism. These later works were considered to be his best works. They depended on his life experiences for their story lines and themes. Eugene O’Neill continued to write plays until 1944 when he was stricken with a debilitating muscular disease which prevented him from writing anymore plays, or anything else for that matter. The last two decades of Eugene O’Neill’s life were the hardest. After not being able to write plays anymore, which was his one love, Eugene is hit harder by the close deaths of his father, mother, and brother. This led Eugene into deep depression and mourning for the last twenty years of his life.Eugene O’Neill remains to most, the best playwright in The American Theater. He revolutionized theater in ways that could only be imagined at that time. O’Neill’s life was full of tragedy and grief; with this his plays were affected by his whole attitude and outlook on life, which was realistically. Eugene O’Neill wanted his audience to feel what he went through in life; all his pain, all his anguish, all his suffering. If O’Neill could make the audience feel for at least one second how he felt for all the years of his life, then he was satisfied. “Before O’Neill,” one writer would l...
