Past and present in American drama: The case of Eugene O'Neill and Sam Shepard

This study of O'Neill and Shepard demonstrates that the dualistic combination of realism and romance that is characteristic of American fiction is characteristic of American drama as well. O'Neill adopted naturalism to bring objective truth into drama, and romance to express a deeper, spiritual truth by way of impressionism, symbolism, expressionism, and a mythicizing technique. Shepard's initial works were not consciously thought out; indeed, they were spontaneous, unrevised outpourings, but they were written in a romantic/expressionistic tradition. O'Neill probes areas of his characters' minds where conscious and unconscious thoughts merge; Shepard fills his characters' minds with fantasies that overflow their imaginations and take over the "reality" of their lives.; Each playwright expresses the spirit of his age. Both are social rebels who find their greatest subject in the family. Whatever techniques they use, whether they invent their characters, take them from life, or adapt them from an earlier literary tradition, it is their own lives they write about.; Chapters one and two are devoted to autobiographical plays: O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class respectively. The focus in each chapter is an evidence of the protagonist's effort to arrive at a sense of identity. Biographical material and Freudian theory are enlisted in a search for the origins of the artist. Chapter three discusses Mourning Becomes Electra and Buried Child; myth in the background of each coexists uneasily with its naturalistic characters and action. O'Neill's use of classical Greek drama and Shepard's, of ancient vegetation mythology, make inescapable the emphasis in each work on primitive behavior in the American family. Chapter four explores O'Neill's symbolic use of mythological figures in The Great God Brown. Through them, he dramatizes the stifling of the artist's Dionysian imagination by materialistic and puritanical forces in America. In the same chapter, Shepard's True West deplores art as business, too. According to this interpretation, the play also demonstrates the danger to an artist of the Dionysian power of his ungoverned imagination.