Arena Stage Announces Partnerships & Schedule for Eugene O'Neill Festival

In homage to one of America's greatest playwrights, Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater hosts the Eugene O'Neill Festival, a two-month examination of the life and work of O'Neill. Similar to the Edward Albee Festival in 2011, this celebration will feature unique collaborations with other arts and education institutions in a diverse program of events. The Eugene O'Neill Festival runs March 9-May 6, 2012 and is sponsored by Joan and David Maxwell.

Headlining the festival are three full-length productions, the first of which is O'Neill's singular comedy Ah, Wilderness!, directed by Kyle Donnelly in the Fichandler Stage, March 9-April 8, 2012. His starkly tragic autobiographical play Long Day's Journey into Night follows, running in the Kreeger Theater, March 30-May 6, 2012, directed by Robin Phillips. In conjunction with the O'Neill Festival, Shakespeare Theatre Company is producing O'Neill's playStrange Interlude, directed by STC Artistic Director Michael Kahn in Sidney Harman Hall, March 27-April 29, 2012.

In addition to these full productions, the festival features more than 20 readings, workshops, radio plays, lectures, panels, presentations and art exhibits throughout the Mead Center and partnering venues in the D.C. Metro Area. Participating organizations include Al Hirschfeld Foundation, Capital Yacht Club, Georgetown University, George Washington University, New York Neo-Futurists, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Taffety Punk and University of Maryland. Tickets to festival events go on sale February 1, 2012.

"At Arena Stage we are committed to shining a spotlight on the giants of American theater," says Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith. "There is no question Eugene O'Neill is one of our giants, and I am so pleased that we are partnering with so many educational and artistic groups across the city to enable deep exploration of his work and highlight the many achievements of this great playwright's life."

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (1888 – 1953). When Eugene O'Neill began writing for the stage early in the 20th century, the American theater was dominated by vaudeville and romantic melodramas. Influenced by Strindberg, Ibsen and other European playwrights, O'Neill vowed to create a theater in America, stripped of false sentimentality, that would explore the deepest stirrings of the human spirit. In 1914, he wrote: "I want to be an artist or nothing." During the 1920s, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for three of his plays–Beyond the Horizon, Anna Christie and Strange Interlude. Other popular successes, including The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, Desire Under the Elms, The Great God Brown and Mourning Becomes Electra, brought him international acclaim. In 1936, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature–the only American playwright to be so honored.

O'Neill experimented with new dramatic techniques and dared tackle such controversial issues as interracial marriage, the equality of the sexes, the power of the unconscious mind and the hold of materialism on the American soul. In each of his plays, he sought to reveal the mysterious forces "behind life" that shape human destiny. Three of his final works, written at his California home, Tao House, tower over the others: The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten. These autobiographical plays portray, with "faithful realism," the haunting figures of his father, mother and brother, who loom in the background of most of his other plays. He was awarded a fourth Pulitzer Prize, posthumously, in 1956 for Long Day's Journey into Night. In a career that spanned three decades, Eugene O'Neill changed the American theater forever.

THE EUGENE O'NEILL FESTIVAL SCHEDULE*           
For up-to-date information on the festival, visit arenastage.org/shows-tickets/the-season/productions/eugene-oneill-festival/.

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