Homage to Eugene O'Neill: Literary Criticism in a New Key

Homage to Eugene O'Neill re-invokes O'Neill's own muses to offer a re-conception of his artistic world, a re-enactment, and an entirely new work not so much in the style but in the spirit of the Nobel-prize winning American dramatist. Most closely allied with Strange Interlude but with echoes as well of Long Day's Journey Into Night and Morning Becomes Electra, Homage to Eugene O'Neill breathes new life into an epic sweep of familial history: the rise, fall, and perhaps rise again of a family of North Carolina industrialists-a family which may have bought its success by sacrificing its son to war, a family of weak men and strong women, a family that both embraces and tries to understand its tumultuous fate. Homage to Eugene O'Neill is both new work and an old, speaking through the masks of the ancestors, causing them to live anew-the literary criticism of the future.