Long Day's Journey Into Night: A Play / by Eugene O'Neill

Of all the brooding playwrights hailing from the Modern/Post-Modern era, Eugene O'Neill might be the most tragic and morose. Like Ibsen, Pinter, Beckett and even Albee, O'Neill paints the portrait life as bleak as any, his characters full to the brim with disillusionment and despair usually enacting scenarios in which escalating cycles of conflict crush the soul. The son of an Irish immigrant actor, O'Neill was born on Broadway and raised in the shadow of the stage until his father eventually gave up the life and moved the family to Connecticut. On the surface, it wouldn't appear that his early years were all that bad. He was educated at Catholic boarding schools, spent his summers at the family's cottage home and attended Princeton before dropping out and joining the Navy. After contracting tuberculosis, he spent several years in recovery at a sanitorium whereupon he officially began writing and publishing his plays and poetry. A regular among the growing Socialist scene in Greenwich Village and other parts of the Northeast, O'Neill was well-known by a number of early American Communists, notably John Reed and Louise Bryant--the film Reds (DVD REDS) even speculates on a love triangle between the three. Even for an Irishman, O'Neill's life was particularly steeped in alcoholism and depression, themes overwhelmingly depicted in his plays like "The Iceman Cometh", about a New York City bar full of hopeless drunks too afraid to go outside, and even "A Moon for the Misbegotten", one of his lighter works focusing on the life of his older brother Jamie who died at the age of 45. "Long Day's Journey Into Night" is without a doubt his most autobiographical play, also perhaps his best one, evoking his family's thoroughly dysfunctional status just prior to O'Neill's entry into the sanitorium.

"If you can't be good you can at least be careful."

It seems a peaceful enough New England summer morning at the family cottage home of the Tyrones. Father James Sr. and mother Mary speak comfortingly to one another despite each's lingering preoccupations with the family's problems which include younger son Edmund's suspected tuberculosis and elder son Jamie's static life as a failed actor. A retired actor himself of moderately successful status whose long-running role in a single play provided financial stability but limited career opportunites, James has complicated his family's finances through faulty property acquisitions and poor decision making. Another far more hidden but much more devastating problem has been Mary's longtime drug addiction. Having just returned from another stint in rehab, she's strongly suspected by all three male Tyrones to have resumed her habit. Ironically James, Jamie and Edmund are each themselves alcoholics and their sly but honest attempts to find out info from Mary are received with cool retorts about their drinking. As the day wears on into evening, all four Tyrones escape the house for a while, the three males to get drunker and Mary to score a hit. When they return home near midnight all four are well-lathered up and ready for a fight.

O'Neill is regarded by more than a few of the well-informed as the best American playwright. While was never as popular as say Shaw or Noel Coward (both Brit contemporaries), perhaps not as structured as Miller, more subdued than Albee (a fellow Irish ex-pat) and certainly not as vociferous and loud as Tennessee Williams, he was one of the most keen observers of the human condition in all of literature. O'Neill's is perhaps not so much a style of representation as it is a personal tragedy from which he writes, a foregone conclusion of bereftness and desolation. But his hopelessness is far keener than any playwright before or since. Like with Pinter or Albee, there's an ominous repression of feelings and an inability to communicate emotions but nothing can remove the chronic, mutually bourne burden of doom from O'Neill's characters, something perhaps most well-manifested in "Long Day's Journey Into Night". The chief emotion among the Tyrone clan is a well-measured balance of rage and regret, thus making the sentiment most prominently evoked one of irrepressible misery. But their misery isn't something they're encountering for the first time, nor the second or even the last time. You get the sense that they're 'long day's journey into night' is exactly that--something they rise to reluctantly greet each day and violently retreat from with the onset of nightfall. There's a light at the end of the tunnel of their darkness but it's a familiar and unkind illumination, one they'd rather remain in the dark about than face. To face it means to confront a reality of fruitless immobility and recurrent misfortune. O'Neill never saw this particular play performed, never wanted to. Upon its completion in 1942, he sealed the manuscript in a vault with orders for it not to be viewed until after his death whereupon it debuted to obvious success. (812.52 ONEILL)

Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less / by Alexander Aciman

Is there anything that can't be done faster and with more abruptness? Apparently not. Even the greatest of the classic works of literature are never safe from the fast food mode of information dissemination we live with nowadays. Instant messaging, texting and Twitter have seemingly revolutionized communication to a point of no return. And so it's kind of an inevitability when you think about it that all "knowledge" will be streamlined before we know it. With this in mind, a couple of kids (both of them 19 at the time of writing) have taken it upon themselves to redo some of the world's best books (and plays and poems) ever. From the point of view of the major characters involved with a bit of of side-noting, each book is translated in Tweet-form, summarizing the gist of the story. For example, All Quiet on the Western Front / by Erich Maria Remarque, quite a "@Remarquable Tale" we're told, things start off with a nod to the now regrettable decision by the main character Paul to enlist in the German Army during World War I. "I've always heard 'Paul. Listen to adults, and teachers.' You too? We could be in Hamburg cracking open a Holsten instead."

On the cover of this book is a definition for the title--Twitterature: \'twi-te-re-,chur\n: an amalgamation of "twitter" and "literature"; humorous reworkings of literary classics for the twenty-first-century intellect, in digestive portions of 20 tweets or less. And that's just what it is. Some of the tweets are very funny; others are just plain silly and far more than just a few are really raunchy. Swiftness is key. Most tweeted book reports aren't but a page (a small page) or two at most. Along with the often quite sublime (and college-level crude) comments, things can get to the point in a hurry (i.e., from Fitzgerald's best known book: "Two bad drives met. :O," "Gatsby is so emo. Who cries about his girlfriend while eating breakfast... IN THE POOL?"). A brainchild of college students, Aciman and his roommate Emmett Rensin, at the University of Chicago, Twitterature is really irreverent. But it's also something which, as with everything else in the digital age, can't help but providing your literary knowledge with burst of quirky ingenuity. It might not be Cliffs Notes, but it's definitely a trip. Readers should be warned that this book is definitely *adult* in its humor. (818.607 ACIMAN)

King Lear / a graphic novel by Gareth Hinds; based on the play by William Shakespeare

For anyone who's ever been scared off by Shakespeare's plays (and accompanying film adaptations) owing to the difficult language barrier, there are now a variety of simply related, and surprisingly adept graphic-format versions which have steadily emerged over the past few years. Gareth Hinds, author and artist behind the successful Beowulf long form comic book (YP FIC HINDS), has now applied his hand to one of the great bard's tragic masterpieces. Hinds' caretaking of King Lear is refreshingly lucid and manageable, effortlessly eliciting Shakespeare's searing tale of ambition and defiance tempered by the passing of generations and family loyalty.

Clever with both the pen and the brush, the author displays both an artist's skill and a knack for getting the most out of what the play tries to say, his watercolored texture subtly producing the pained expressions of Lear, his creeping madness, and the individuality of his three daughters all plagued by fortune. All the while an odiously developing maelstrom develops in the heavens above, culminating with a brilliantly evocative conclusion. Even in abridged form with accompanying footnotes, the language is still a bit of a barrier but the reader can better get a handle on the breadth of the content, the meat of the moral conundrum and the depth of emotion as its drawn across the page in brisk though never understated fashion. While Lear is his most recently published work, Hinds other graphic adaptations of classic literature available include The Odyssey and The Merchant of Venice. (822.33 SHAKESPE)

"No Man's Land" / a play by Harold Pinter

Nobel Prize winning playwright Harold Pinter is remembered as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, his numerous plays, scripts, and essays forever leaving a lasting impression on his generation. Known for portraying ambivalent characters within strongly conflicted atmospheres, his plays and movies are most notable for their tension-rendered scenarios, often executing scenes offset by harsh personal histories and constrained animosity. “No Man’s Land”, penned in 1970, depicts a confrontational meeting between two vague acquaintances and the subsequent dissolution and fallout as an end result.


"Down the hatch. Right down the hatch."


A bachelor in his sixties, Hirst may live alone but he's fond of sharing a drink with a friend every so often. A more or less struggling writer with little to do and less to get, he's pleased when he meets an old school acquaintance, Spooner, with whom he can share long-forgotten memories over a whisky and soda. Back at home the night takes an awkward turn, however, when one drink becomes too many and words transition into verbal taunts. With each man's mood escalating, the testosterone-charged atmosphere is only worsened when Hirst's two boarders, Foster and Briggs, invade the already unquiet setting. With all four soon well-intoxicated, a sobering calm steadily descends upon the scene, each character's sudden self-repose revealed as a distinct conviction of isolation and despair--'no man's land'. (822.914 PINTER)