The Eugene O'Neill Foundation, Tao House, presents a videotaped script-in-hand performance of "Abortion" by Eugene O'Neill. This production was recorded in the Old Barn at Tao House (Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site), in Danville, CA in August 2020.
I'd known that Eugene O'Neill had written a number of one act plays but the only one I ever saw a production of or read was the wonderful play Hughie. I happened on this semi-staged production of the 1914 play "Abortion" which is about the son of a wealthy family having borrowed money from his father to pay for an abortion when his townie girlfriend became pregnant. I'd expect that O'Neill realized that one of the unmentioned issues of the play was that the consequences are presented from the point of view of three men, the working class girl he impregnated and who had an abortion isn't much considered at all.
The text of the play sounds kind of odd because few contractions are used, it sounds like the kind of English that we were taught to use in grammar school sixty or more years ago. If they took the liberty of updating that kind of thing it would sound a lot easier to modern ears without doing any damage to the intentions of O'Neill. I was surprised at how good it was, considering it is part of an apparent project to do productions of the "forgotten" plays of O'Neill. The more I become familiar with his work the more impressed I am with how good he was. I'd like to see a really updated play on the theme that presented it from the point of view of Women.
I think I'll try to post more of these, they'd be a good project for an audio theater group to do, they're pretty much all in public domain, now. Apart from Hughie which is said to have been O'Neill's attempt to present a more upbeat play after the hauntingly gloomy The Iceman Cometh.
"If they took the liberty of updating that kind of thing [contractions] it would sound a lot easier to modern ears without doing any damage to the intentions of O'Neill."
ReplyDeleteSays the cluelessly awful writer/putz who didn't realize he should have written "without doing any damage to O'Neill's intentions."
Ah, the Edwin Newman of Eschaton opines. No doubt he'd site the stupidity of White-Strunk to that effect. Stop Safiring around, Simps. I'm not writing dialogue.
DeleteYou’re not writing vernacular English either, but that’s not news.😎
DeleteSo you still haven't looked up the definition of "vernacular," which is no shock to me. THERE IS NO FRIGGIN' LAW THAT SAYS YOU MUST WRITE IN VERNACULAR ENGLISH. It's not some stylistic virtue unless you're trying to depict vernacular speech, which is sort of the point of what I said above. You really are amazingly pretentious considering how fricking ignorant you are.
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