By Eugene O'Neill
Directed by Scott Elliott
Featuring Jena Malone and Lili Taylor
Pulitizer Prize-winner and Nobel Laureate Eugene O'Neill described his 1931 tragedy, Mourning Becomes Electra, as a "psychological drama of lust." The New York Times praised the original production as "magnificently wrought in style and structure... Mourning Becomes Electra is an occasion for great rejoicing. It is O'Neill's finest tragedy.” O'Neill's plays moved American theatre well beyond the early century’s obsession with melodrama to embrace realism and naturalism. In O'Neill's revival of Greek classicism, three taut plays--The Homecoming, The Hunted, The Haunted--combine to create an epic theatrical re-imagining of the internecine and interfamilial conflict as set down in Aeschylus' Oresteia. Like the doomed house of Atreus, the New England Mannon family during the Civil War era is dripping with foul and unnatural murder. The mother murders the father. The son murders his mother's lover. The mother mercifully commits suicide. The daughter drive the son to suicide. It is a family that simmers with hatred, suspicion, jealousy and greed, all twisted by unnatural loves.
An eText of the script is available from Project Gutenberg of Australia.
Reviews of the original 1931 production:
Relevant Classes:
Anthropology - Cultures of Accusation (R. Morris)
English Theatre - Modern Drama II: O’Neill, Williams, Miller (Z. Brietzke)
History - Colloquium on the Civil War and Reconstruction (E. Foner)
Humanities - Literature Humanities (Various)
