Sitting on a raft in shark-infested waters under a sun that glares like a "great angry eye of God," survivors of a shipwreck discuss whether the captain was responsible for causing the accident through his negligence. Says one survivor: "If he was guilty, he has paid with his life." Says another: "No. He has avoided payment by taking his life. The dead do not pay."
This scene from the work "Thirst" by Eugene O'Neill will be given voice on Thursday, March 6, when professional actors from the Playwrights Theatre of New York present a reading of the play at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 121 Wall St. The troupe will also read O'Neill's play "Recklessness" on Thursday, April 17. Both events will take place at 4 p.m. and are open to the public free of charge.
During the past two years, the Playwrights Theatre of New York, which is sponsored by the Tisch School of Arts, has presented 21 performances of O'Neill's plays in places that were significant in the writer's life -- New York, New London and Provincetown. The reading at Yale, where O'Neill's archive is housed, was arranged through the efforts of Stephen Kennedy Murphy, artistic director of the Playwrights Theatre, and Patricia Willis, the Elizabeth Wakeman Dwight Curator of the Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Library.
A former playwright-in-residence at the Eugene O'Neill Center in New London, Mr. Murphy has long been fascinated with the life and work of O'Neill, who garnered four Pulitzer Prizes during his career and is the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize. O'Neill was 24 years old and in a tuberculosis sanitorium when he first read the plays of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, which inspired the young man to write dramas and influenced his work.
Under Mr. Murphy's leadership, the Playwrights Theatre has devoted itself to reading all of O'Neill's completed plays -- 50 works in all. The troupe's Artistic Mission Statement notes: "In times when innocence hardly survives high school, youth has grown shorter than ever. As it has, the need for expression for the young adults of our dark culture grows in turn. It is an investment in the future of that culture to expose its youth to the dark master who transformed his own truncated youth into the fulfillment of his promise."
"Thirst," written in 1913, is O'Neill's third play. The three- character play is set entirely aboard a life raft, and deals with the then-unheard-of theme of cannibalism, among other issues. "Recklessness," a once-act thriller about a young wife, her lover and her husband, was also written in 1913.