John Ford’s The Long Voyage Home (1940)

This chapter deals with the 1940 film The Long Voyage Home, directed by ‘America’s Homer’, John Ford, and critically received as ‘a modern Odyssey’. The film is an adaptation of four one-act plays by Eugene O’Neill, known as the Glencairn cycle, which are permeated by a tragic vision of unattainable nostos. Set in the contemporary context of World War II, it dramatizes the SS Glencairn’s perilous voyage home from the West Indies to England, with a cargo of munitions aboard. There is no obvious Odyssean figure in this nostos tale. Instead the members of the steamer’s ragtag international crew represent variations of the same Odyssean longing. Joseph McBride defines the film’s dramatic focus as ‘the archetypal Fordian male conflict between the urge to wander and the yearning for home’. But these men are not so much wanderers as lost souls purgatorially in thrall to the sea.

Eugene O’Neill: Superpersonalisation and Racial Spectacularism

Playwright Eugene O’Neill jumpstarted his career and had his first major successes in and from the little art colony in Provincetown; this chapter focuses on O’Neill, the Provincetown Players’ most prominent member, who lived and worked there between 1916 and 1922. The chapter shows how the compressed scale and distinctive mobility of Provincetown’s creative community was crucial to O’Neill’s success. There, O’Neill was exposed to the art colony’s distinctive amalgamation of modern and experimental theatre practices, including those dealing with writing, staging, and promotion. His own work built upon these: he was especially adept at harvesting, adapting, and exporting these practices from the rural outpost to the metropolitan hub of modernist activity in New York. This chapter argues that the formal and topical elements of O’Neill’s notorious play The Emperor Jones (conceived and written in Provincetown), along with its production and promotional strategies, were distinctive to the little art colony. There, O’Neill cultivated and marketed to a ‘special audience,’ drew topical inspiration from long-simmering racial anxieties in the region, and expanded upon the Provincetown Players’ theatrical practice of superpersonalization: a writing and staging strategy that amplifies the bleed between character and actor in order to heighten the audience’s engagement in the play. These strategies kindled his white audience’s ‘racial feelings’: a move that brought the relatively unknown O’Neill into the national and international public consciousness and created a still-resonant sensation about his work.

A filosofia em cena: crítica e afirmação da teatralidade em Nietzsche

Resumo O propósito deste artigo é mostrar a contribuição de Nietzsche à revolução nas práticas da encenação que ocorreram no Século XX, bem como sua relevância como crítico apaixonado pelo potencial de uma forma de arte que ele sentia que era interpretada em sua época de forma diminuída. A partir de seu estudo do teatro grego na obraO nascimento da tragédia, sublinha a importância da encenação na tragédia antiga, a qual estava para além do texto escrito por seu autor. Oferece com isso uma análise da ideia de teatro como arte, a qual é consubstancial realizar-se em três dimensões: a do ator, a do poeta ou escritor do texto e a do espectador. Nietzsche defende a especificidade desses três papéis para toda realização teatral e o sentido filosófico que tem o teatro como autêntica forma artística. Conclui-se o artigo mostrando a recepção do pensamento teatral de Nietzsche em autores como August Strindberg, George Bernard Shaw e Eugene O'Neill, que buscarão novas formas e novos significados para sua arte.

Reception Theory, New Humanism, and T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot has been a major, if challenging, figure for students of reception and the Classical Tradition, and is implicated in an important debate on historicist versus aestheticist models of reception study. This article challenges assumptions about his position on, and practice of, reception. The politics implicit in theorists’ references to Eliot is teased out, and the position he took in response to inter-war New Humanism is shown to be predominantly historicist. An analysis of The Family Reunion (1939) then suggests that the Modernist-poetic approach he therefore took to the Oresteia broke so decisively with existing models of reception as to have called the fact of reception into question. The play is also shown to build on H.D.’s experiments in translation and to respond to Aeschylean receptions by Robinson Jeffers and Eugene O’Neill. It is further suggested that it anticipates several aspects of recent Reception Theory.

La puerta Electra y la puerta Lavinia. Análisis comparatista de las Electras de Virgilio Piñera y Eugene O’Neill

Tanto Eugene O’Neill como Virgilio Piñera crearon sus propias versiones sobre el mito clásico de Electra con el fin de realizar una crítica a las sociedades estadounidense y cubana, respectivamente. Separadas por una década, ambas obras de teatro giran en torno a las relaciones paterno-filiales y a la necesidad de romper con las tradiciones heredadas a través de la educación recibida. El presente ensayo compara Mourning Becomes Electra, de O’Neill, y Electra Garrigó, de Piñera, con el objetivo de destacar tanto sus similitudes como sus diferencias. Haciendo uso de tradiciones distintas para ahondar en las dinámicas familiares (el psicoanálisis en el caso de O’Neill y el existencialismo y el choteo cubano en el de Piñera), ambos autores actualizan el mito a su manera, siempre recalcando la necesidad de rebelión contra modelos impuestos con el fin de ser libres. Mientras que el autor estadounidense se decanta por condenar a su protagonista, Lavinia Mannon, a un determinismo psicológico consecuencia de los comportamientos de sus padres, el escritor cubano prefiere hacer a su Electra, de apellido Garrigó, libre y capaz de romper con toda tradición para así poder elegir su destino. Si bien ambos personajes terminan encerradas detrás de las puertas de sus palacios, Lavinia Mannon lo hace forzada por la imposibilidad de escapar a su destino, mientras que Electra Garrigó lo hace por decisión propia, ejerciendo su libertad. En definitiva, este ensayo busca recalcar el mensaje común de ambos autores y cómo cada uno lo desarrolla de forma completamente diferente. Both Eugene O’Neill and Virgilio Piñera wrote their own versions of the classical myth of Electra as a critique of the distinct societal structures they perceived in the United States and Cuba respectively. Only a decade apart, these reinterpretations focus on the nature of the relationships between parents and children and on the urge to emancipate from inherited traditions and parental constraints. This comparative essay thus highlights the similarities and differences in the plays­ Mourning Becomes Electra by O’Neill and Electra Garrigó by regarding the ways both authors reimagined the Greek myth, using different critical approaches: while O’Neill relies on Freudian psychoanalysis to delve into family dynamics, Piñera has a tendency towards existentialism and Cuban choteo. Their works are an appeal to a rebellion against cultural structures based on tradition in order liberate oneself from their crippling nature. While the American author condemns his Electra character (named Lavinia Mannon) to a life determined by psychological constraints resulting from her parent’s behavior, Piñera makes his Electra (whose surname is Garrigó) emancipated and in the position to break with tradition in order to pursue her own fate. Despite both characters remaining locked in their own mansions, Lavinia Mannon is trapped due to her psychological inability to escape her own destiny, whereas Electra Garrigó does it because it is her own free choice to do so. Ultimately, this essay shows how these authors share a common message that they carry out in completely distinct ways.