Ten "Lost" Plays

The ten plays in this collection (A Wife for a Life, Thirst, The Web, Warnings, Fog, Recklessness, Abortion, The Movie Man, Servitude, and The Sniper) were all written in the very earliest part of O'Neill's career, from 1913 to 1915, and were (and still are) all overshadowed by the numerous masterpieces O'Neill wrote beginning in 1920 with Beyond the Horizon. In the years before he began writing, O'Neill spent a great deal of time at sea, attempted suicide, and then came down with tuberculosis and spent six months at a sanatarium, where he discovered the works of Strindberg and others and decided to become a playwright. This is all reflected heavily in these plays: one of them deals with a consumptive character, three are set at sea, and a number of them end in suicides. Also, two of them deal with marital infidelity among the wealthy, a topic that I don't think O'Neill ever returns to in his later works but which was a favorite subject of O'Neill's idol Strindberg (in particular, Recklessness relates the affair between a married woman and her servant, which should sound familiar to readers of "Miss Julie."). All of the plays except the three-act work Servitude are only one act and under thirty pages long. Presumably, O'Neill felt a lot more comfortable at this point in his career sticking to short treatments of matters that were close to him, and this appears to have been a good idea. Pretty much all of the plays in this collection show definite signs of the powerful tragedy for which O'Neill is known, and, considering how short they are, many of them are quite moving and haunting. While O'Neill had not yet reached his full maturity at this stage, he definitely was well-enough prepared to write very good one-act plays. His later, longer and more demanding works are very justifiably more famous than these ones, but if you enjoy O'Neill's better-known plays, his earliest works provide a very good view of the development of his style and talents, and you will probably enjoy them as well.