Theater

Beginning in 1935 and working intermittently until 1941, Eugene O’Neill completed three drafts of what was to have been the fourth in a cycle of nine plays about an American family of power, the Harfords—More Stately Mansions. The first two drafts he burned in 1943, and along with them the first two plays in the cycle, which were hopelessly long and so burdened with complexities as to have recast themselves mitotically in his mind as four plays, pushing the series up to eleven.

O’Neill’s method of revision lay in accordance with his meditations on the Harfords and their origins. The more he thought about it the deeper it drove him into the past. He made endless notes, tracing genealogies, the rise and fall of characters. Again and again as he undertook to revise he found himself faced with the task of reconstituting the living tissue of his material as it extended itself forward and backward in time. His material seemed indeed infinite, as infinite as the mystery of human personality, which was his true subject.

AC

About the Author

Arlene Croce

Beginning in 1935 and working intermittently until 1941, Eugene O’Neill completed three drafts of what was to have been the fourth in a cycle of nine plays about an American family of power, the Harfords—More Stately Mansions. The first two drafts he burned in 1943, and along with them the first two plays in the cycle, which were hopelessly long and so burdened with complexities as to have recast themselves mitotically in his mind as four plays, pushing the series up to eleven.

O’Neill’s method of revision lay in accordance with his meditations on the Harfords and their origins. The more he thought about it the deeper it drove him into the past. He made endless notes, tracing genealogies, the rise and fall of characters. Again and again as he undertook to revise he found himself faced with the task of reconstituting the living tissue of his material as it extended itself forward and backward in time. His material seemed indeed infinite, as infinite as the mystery of human personality, which was his true subject.