O'Neill Visited

I made a check mark today off my Theatrical Bucket List and visited playwright Eugene O'Neill's birthplace in New London, Connecticut. O'Neill is the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize; he also won four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. His writing--dreamy, dark and intensely personal--changed American Theatre from a melodramatic frolic to unhinged reality.

Monte Cristo Cottage was the summer home of the O'Neill family. It was so named for The Count of Monte Cristo and the acting role that earned O'Neill's father his fortune. O'Neill based two plays upon the setting of the summer home: a sentimental valentine to the American family, Ah, Wilderness!, and his sorrowful autobiographical nightmare, Long Day's Journey into Night. The home definitely lives in the world of the latter play.

To a theatre nerd, the day couldn't have been much better. I was joined by my friend Jefferson, another O'Neill affectionato. Our tour began at the home's front hedge, from where you can almost imagine the character of James Tyrone, Sr., calling out merrily to neighbors while his resentful son Jamie toils with the pruning shears. The docents pointed out all the renovation shortcuts that O'Neill took making the home look elegant, further reinforcing the dramatized miserliness of Tyrone. The "spare room" upstairs (next to Eugene's) where mother Ellen/Mary retreated to indulge in her morphine addiction was locked and used for storage. This was disappointing, but left to my imagination the secrets and shame that happened on the other side of the door. Finally, the summer room, which O'Neill describes so specifically in his stage directions, is dark and cheerless, no place for a family of depressed addicts to spend the day.

After Monte Cristo Cottage, we went two blocks down Pequot Avenue to gaze at the actual lighthouse O'Neill used to evoke the mournful and lonely fog that fills the family's home. I asked the docent if there was still a watering hole in New London where the O'Neill men would have drank. She sent me to to the Dutch Tavern, which lives down a hidden, narrow street by the harbour. The Dutch Tavern was a great way to end the day in New London. The wood paneling inside was dark with beaded varnish and the mirrors behind the bar were clouded with age. There was rough wide plank floorboards, a painted tin ceiling and antique card tables. The barkeeper told us proudly it was the only bar still operating in New London that was patronized by O'Neill. The ambiance proved it and we drank a few pints to the playwright's memory.

Coincidentally, I teach Long Day's Journey into Night in an interdisciplinary theatre and history course alongside Professor Andor Skotnes. While I might take a day discussing O'Neill and the play's characters, Andor really brings them to life, filling the class in on how history got them to where they are. Potato famines, Irish discrimination and morphine use for female "hysteria" are topics that make the autobiographical play seem even more real. History brings depth to any subject and O'Neill's history of his family--loving, haunted and ultimately helpless, lives still at Monte Cristo Cottage.