![]() He is followed by the local carpenter, Amos Ames, a well-meaning gossip his wife, Louisa, “ a similar scandal-bearing type” and her cousin Minnie, a stupid, 40-year-old “ eager-listener type” (2:894). Seth Beckwith, the Mannons’ 75-year-old gardener, enters from left finishing the last line of the song. From the town in the distance, a band can be heard playing “John Brown’s Body,” and from the left rear of the house, a man’s voice is singing “Shenandoah”-“ a song that more than any other holds in it the brooding rhythm of the sea” (2:893). The sun’s rays highlight the white portico and columns and reflect harshly off the windows. The exterior of the Mannon house, just before sunset in April 1865. Part One: Homecoming: A Play in Four Acts Act 1 The main entrance is at center, flanked by side lights and with a transom above (2:890). The house itself is “of the Greek temple type” built from gray cut stone, and four steps lead up to a white portico with six tall columns there are five windows on the second floor and four on the first with dark green shutters. A rounded driveway reaches the street by two white-gated entrances, with its apex at the front door. The street is at the foreground, lined with locust and elm trees, and a white picket fence and tall hedges surround the property. Synopsis General Scene of the TrilogyĮither spring or summer, 1865–66, at the Mannon house, located “on the outskirts of one of the smaller New England seaport towns.” A “special curtain” reveals the house as it appears from the street it also shows an extensive property of around 30 acres, with woods in the background, an orchard at right, and a large greenhouse and flower garden at left. No O’Neill play achieves the level of tragic power we find in this work until his late masterpieces, The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night. ![]() Mourning Becomes Electra had opened in the United States five years before, but the drama was still fresh in the minds of European audiences and ran triumphantly in theaters across the continent well into the 1940s. O’Neill was convinced, and rightly so, that this play won him his 1936 Nobel Prize in literature, making him the only American dramatist to win the coveted award. Generally performed as one play, with a six-hour playing time for its first run, the trilogy charts the tragic decline of a prominent New England family named the Mannons just after the American Civil War. Mourning Becomes Electra consists of three plays- The Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted-that together borrow from Greek tragedy, specifically Aeschylus’s Oresteia, also a trilogy. O’Neill returned to New York to oversee rehearsals for the production, which opened on October 26, 1931, to enormous critical acclaim. ![]() He copyrighted the trilogy on May 12, 1931, and the Theatre Guild enthusiastically accepted it for their fall season. Working through six drafts from August 15, 1929, to March 27, 1931, O’Neill experimented with masks, soliloquies, and asides for the 14-act trilogy, but he ultimately abandoned the “show shop” stage tricks of his experimental plays from the 1920s (Floyd 1983, 404, Bogard 340). O’Neill’s single clear-cut masterpiece” (127). He did correspond for advice and support in the late stages of the writing process with the Pulitzer Prize–winning theater critic Brooks Atkinson, who referred to Mourning Becomes Electra when it finally appeared as “Mr. Recovering from the debacle of Dynamo, which O’Neill believed failed critically because he released it too soon, he kept this project close to the vest, telling virtually no one about the story until it was completed. Critical Analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes ElectraĮugene O’Neill began writing Mourning Becomes Electra, one of his most revered dramas, in France at Chateau du Plessis near Tours in the Loire Valley. ![]()
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