The Theatrical Art of Eugene O’ Neill
Keywords:
Little Theatre Movement, Prince town Players, Expressionism, RealismAbstract
In the beginning of twentieth century, American drama was filled with richness of American sense. The rise of the Little Theatre Movement was the sign of liberation of drama from the conventional bounds of the commercial theatre. . In the modern literary context, the theme of expressionism has been effectively handled by playwrights like Eugene O’ Neill, Arthur Miller etc. The American Theatre in the 1920’s started experimenting in all possible directions. New methods of characterization, explorations of space and movement, new modes of dialogues have been employed with an objective of presenting a more realistic and concrete view of life. As the life of the modern man has been extremely complex, as a result of modern scientific inventions, dramatists also started experimenting newer theatrical techniques to present the complexity of modern life in a more realistic manner. Expressionism is one such modern technique which surpasses realism, which was imported to US from Europe. Expressionist writers were dissatisfied with naturalism or realism and they went beyond that. They wanted to project the inner psychological conflicts and the complex state of mind through external symbols. O’Neill has experimented both realism and expressionism in his plays like “The Emperor Jones” (1920), “The Hairy Ape” (1922) and so on. He made use of expressionist devices and settings combined with naturalistic details, so that the “real” achieved a symbolic quality through repetitions and exaggerations. This paper is aimed at tracing the characteristics of modern American drama with special reference to Eugene O’ Neill
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