The Playing of O’Neill’s Misbegotten
Keywords:
Eugene O’Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten, staging, metadrama, performativity, theatrical representationAbstract
In A Moon for the Misbegotten, Eugene O’Neill’s last completed work, the characters’ emotional struggles are depicted in a psychologically realistic manner. The first two acts of the play are broadly comic, relying on stereotypical, even hackneyed formulae, harking back to vaudeville. The second two acts move the drama toward confessional tragedy. Within these seemingly conventional contexts, however, characters plainly calculate their own performativity and otherwise overtly call attention to multiple levels of theatrical representation and illusion. Audiences are sporadically pulled out of the text and reminded that what they are participating in has been composed and is being performed. This paper will attempt to use definitions of what has been termed metadrama to characterize layers of playing therein.
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