American playwright Eugene O’Neill married actress Carlotta Monterey in 1929. She was his third wife, he her fourth husband. They endured many self-imposed separations through their marriage, but never divorced. O’Neill writes this letter shortly after their romance began—and before his divorce from his second wife was official. Here he describes the staging of his play, Strange Interlude, and predicts the work’s soon-to-be artistic success; it won the Pulitzer Prize in drama that year. O’Neill calls it a “play in two parts,” as it told a story over the course of two evenings.
To Carlotta Monterey
March 4th [1927]
Well, at last I’ve finished it. Strange Interlude is now an accomplished fact—at least, the first draft of it is—for better or worse. I’m still much too near it to be able to view it with any dispassionate judgment and tell how successfully I’ve accomplished what I set out to do. Now it will be typed—then put away to rest until sometime in late spring when I’ve recovered perspective and am capable of going over it critically. All my feeling about it now is confined to a deep joy that such a “work” is out of my system. I’m exhausted and pining to rest. I’ve been driving myself—or more correctly being driven by it—to the limit during the time since my last letter, working as much as eleven hours on some days, from eight-thirty in the a.m. until 5 in the p.m. and afterwards in the evening. My face—my eyes especially—is all caved in as if some vampire had been “scoffing” my life up! Well, not to be too melodramatic about it, I’m damned tired and determined to take a lengthy vacation with much sun bathing and loafing in the sea and tennis.
Yes, I’ll admit nine acts and two evenings do sound a bit impractical but I don’t think they will be. I need a producer with courage, not necessarily one with much money. It’s not an expensive production. Honestly, I sincerely believe this play can be a financial as well as an artistic success. A two-play play has never been so before because no playwright has ever really written in that form. They have always either written two distinct plays with no real connection except that they are about the same characters; or else they have written one play that is simply two plays in length. But mine is really two plays in one play. I know that anyone who sees the first will want to see the second—won’t be able to help seeing the second, I think! Of course, the Broadway dogmatists of what’s done in the theater will shudder and cry impossible, but they’ve been doing just that, on one ground or another, ever since I wrote The Emperor Jones. The real truth is I was practically born in the theater and I couldn’t do anything that wasn’t practical in a theater if I tried. I’m too wrapped up in the theater as a medium. I’ve simply made it a bit broader, higher and deeper than the usual show-shop but what I write always can be done. I’ve never yet written a closet drama. My only mistake is in always assuming that there are actors who can play roles, like “Lazarus,” for example, when of course there are not…
What does Strange Interlude make you think of? No, there is nothing of us in it—at least, it was all planned out even before we met at Belgrade. Of course, there’s almost everything in it that makes people mad with rapture or tortured beyond belief—emotions out of my own experience but principally, in this play, out of my experience with others’ experiences as I have known them and suffered or been happy in or with them. There is no one character in it who, as “Dion” in Brown, or a number of my characters, partly reproduces phases of my character of experience. This whole play is my experience, you might say, but the characters in it individually more closely resemble many, many men I have known. There is a lot of you in the woman, I think (come to think of it) and yet she is wholly unlike you. And there you are!
And I am hungry to talk to you, Carlotta! Yes!, as Lazarus says.
I am awfully sorry you have to go to Europe alone. I wish I had an aura or a ghost or my soul or something – but that wouldn’t be very satisfying, would it?
Always,
Gene
From Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill. Edited by Travis Bogard & Jackson R. Bryer, Yale University, 1988, p. 235.
FURTHER READING
Read one of the original reviews of Strange Interlude from its 1928 debut.
Read about the recent discovery of Eugene O’Neill’s “lost play.”