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Announcing our 20th Season!
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Eclipse Theatre is proud to feature the works of legendary American playwright Eugene O'Neill in 2012!
To learn more about Eugene O'Neill and read his plays , visit eoneill.com |
Beyond the Horizon
Directed by guest director Louis Contey
Director Louis Contey was recently nominated for a Jeff Award for his direction of Frost/Nixon at Timeline Theatre Company where he is an Associate Artist. For Eclipse, he directed the 2005 production of Talley & Son. Mr. Contey has directed over 60 plays at various Chicago theatres. His credits include Awake and Sing, It's All True, Paradise Lost, Lillian, The General from America, Copenhagen and Pravda all for Timeline Theatre. He also worked extensively with Shattered Globe Theatre. He is a twelve time Jeff Nominee and has received seven Jeff Awards for direction. Ah, Wilderness!
Directed by ensemble member Steve Scott
Director Steve Scott is the Associate Producer of the Goodman Theatre where he has overseen more than 150 productions since 1987. He has directed numerous productions for various Chicago Theatre Companies. As an ensemble member at Eclipse, he most recently directed the Jeff Nominated production of After the Fall. Other Eclipse directing credits include Six Degrees of Separation, Plaza Suite, Boy Gets Girl, The Moonshot Tapes, Big Time, Lost in Yonkers, Childe Byron and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale. He will be directing the 2011 annual production of A Christmas Carol at the Goodman Theatre. Long Day's Journey into Night
Directed by Artistic Director Nathaniel Swift
Nathaniel Swift if the current Artistic Director for Eclipse Theatre Comapny where his directing credits include the Jeff Award Winning production of 2, Brutality of Fact, The Sweetest Swing in Baseball, The Autumn Garden, and Resurrection Blues. He received a 2003 Jeff Award for his direction of 2 in addition to a Jeff Award for Best Supporting Actor in 2010 for his performance in Blue Surge. The Playwright Scholar Series
As a subscriber, you'll also get to learn more about the life and work of Eugene O'Neill with free readings and events throughout the season. Details regarding our Playwright scholar series events will be announced in 2012. |
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Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel prize winner in literature. He is the author of
over 50 plays. His plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier
associated Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, and August Strindberg. His plays were among the first to include speeches
in the American vernacular and involve characters on the fringes of society, where they struggle to maintain their
hopes and aspirations, but ultimately slide into disillusionment and despair. O'Neill spent time as a stage manager,
an actor, a tramp, and a reporter. He also tended mules on a cattle steamer and set out on several other voyages as
a sailor. It was here that he came in contact with the sailors, dock workers and outcasts that would populate his
plays, the kind of characters the American theatre had previously ignored. O'Neill began to read the classic
dramatists and then turned his hand to playwriting, quickly churning out eleven one-act plays and two full-length
ones, not to mention a bit of poetry. Then, in 1916, O'Neill met at Provincetown, Massachusetts, a group which
would found the Provincetown Players. Shortly thereafter, the group produced O'Neill's one-act play Bound East
for Cardiff . Other short pieces followed and soon O'Neill's plays became the mainstay of this experimental
group. With the Broadway production of Beyond the Horizon in 1920, O'Neill began a steady rise to fame. He
received countless productions both in the United States and abroad, and when the Provincetown players finally
collapsed, he became the Theatre Guild's leading playwright. But by the time he received the Nobel Prize in
1936--a feat which no other American playwright had been able to accomplish--his career began to fizzle.
Obscurity began to settle in on the playwright, and it deepened more and more until his death in 1953.
Ironically, it was during these dark years that O'Neill's real development began. Maturing in silence and
motivated only by his obsessive urge to write, he developed a profound artistic honesty which would result
in several genuine masterpieces of the modern theatre including A Touch of the Poet (1935-1942), More
Stately Mansions (1935-1941), The Iceman Cometh (1939), A Long Day's Journey into Night (1939-41) and A
Moon for the Misbegotten (1943). Most of these were not published or produced during O'Neill's lifetime.
Then, in 1956, three years after the playwright's death, a successful revival of The Iceman Cometh and
the first Broadway production of A Long Day's Journey into Night, returned Eugene O'Neill once again to
his rightful place at the forefront of American drama. As New York drama critic George Jean Nathan noted,
"O'Neill alone and single-handed waded through the dismal swamplands of American drama, bleak, squashy,
and oozing sticky goo, and alone and single-handed bore out of them the water lily that no American had
found there before him." Today, he is recognized not only as the first great American dramatist, but as
one of the great dramatists of all time.
Eclipse Theatre opens the 2012 Eugene O'Neill season with a rare revival of his very first full-length 1920 Pulitzer Prize winning drama, Beyond the Horizon. The story of two brothers: one a dreamer and the other a pragmatist, who share their love for the same woman. Their tale unfolds when the woman's rejection of one brother and her marriage to another set the stage for discontent and disillusionment. Originally produced on Broadway in 1920, O'Neill's first full-length play captures the powerful, perilous emotional currents swirling below the surface of everyday life. Jeff Award winning director Louis Contey returns to Eclipse to direct one of Eugene O'Neill's hidden gems.
The O'Neill season continues with his only lighthearted and comic play, Ah Wilderness!. Set in New England in the days of America's innocence, this affectionate comedy presents a young man's coming of age story during a summer in which he experiments with poetry, politics, wicked women and alcohol and succumbs to his first romantic crush. Ensemble member and Goodman Theatre Associate Producer, Steve Scott directs. 
The 2012 Eugene O'Neill season concludes with what is arguably his finest work and an American masterpiece. Considered to be an autobiographical piece which was published and produced posthumously, the story centers on the Tyrone family. James Tyrone, a semi-retired actor, is vain and miserly; his wife Mary feels worthless and retreats into a morphine-induced haze. Jamie, their older son, is a bitter alcoholic. James refuses to acknowledge the illness of his consumptive younger son, Edmund. As Mary sinks into hallucination and madness, father and sons confront each other in searing scenes that reveal their hidden motives and interdependence.