In my top five of all books I've ever read. Such an amazing parallel to Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy. Absolutely love it.

These are three prominent O'Neill plays, famous and celebrated in their time, and written before his acknowledged masterpieces that were more frankly autobiographical came out, such as Long Day's Journey into Night. Of the three plays, Mourning Becomes Electra is, in my view, the weakest and most contrived. It is not a bad play, to be clear -- O'Neill writes flawed not bad plays, such is his talent -- but it is the one most forced in its construction to drive to a tragic conclusion. The other tw...

Fintan O'Toole's review of a recent biography of Eugene O'Neill is headlined "Our Worst Greatest Playwright." The critic enumerates the entwined flaws in O'Neill's art and life: a dramatist in flight from his imperious actor father's success as a star of melodrama, he abused his family in turn and marred his attempts at serious theater with ludicrous artistic excesses of his own. O'Neill's place in literary history is not exactly insecure. As America's first great playwright and second Nobel lau...

I read "Strang Interlude" kind of by surprise at 23 years old, when I was taking myself seriously as a creative writing major, because it beat working at a bookstore. I bought a great old O'Neill compendium called "Nine Plays" I'm pretty sure, and I didn't buy it for "Strange Interlude," but "Desire Under The Elms," which I loved for its raw sensuality, and very brutal view of sex, death, and life. But "Strange Interlude" really took me for a ride and showed me what theater could be though I nev...

Strange Interlude is very good, but Desire Under the Elms and Mourning Becomes Electra are both masterpieces. O'Neill's just a genius when it comes to displaying his characters' souls, and whether what we see is revolting or noble, there is an underlying sympathy for just about every character that he pens in the two plays.

This is just about the first play whichis Desire Under the Elms. A tragedy on so many levels that shows in a shockingmanner the nature of the human kind. Themes are ranging from capitalism, the American dream to the Medical Complex in a way that exposes this hidden desire of Man to not only control but also possess. Overall a light read although aid to read the play because of a literature class I'm taking at uni.

A pretty good read. Compared to O’Neill’s greatest works these three don’t shine as brightly. But Strange Interlude is interesting for its experimentation and all three are deeply moving.

Mourning Becomes Electra would be a fiver.

Desire Under the Elms and Strange Influence are too overwrought for me. And the descriptions – holy heck, O’Neill, just write a novel. More than one character had a twenty-plus line description: “She was willowy in a depressed, quiet sort of way. Her eyes spoke of bygone hardship and happiness, more of the former than the latter. Etc. and so on” (This is not actually O’Neill’s writing, merely my recreation of these endless descriptors). I sympathize with any casting director trying to find actor...

I wasn't sure whether to rate these plays three or four stars. I picked four because I think they will stay with me, I think I'll roll them around in my head over the next few years and I think I'll want to revisit them in the future. I wasn't sure about O'Neill's treatment of his female characters. They seem problematic, but then, all of the characters are problematic. That's the point. There are violent emotions flying around in O'Neill's play and no taboo is left untouched. It makes for uncom...

Not going to lie, took me sometime reading the book, but its a great retelling of the original Greek myth. Mother loves son while having an affair, daughter loves father and acts as his wife. If youre in for a mind-fuck, you should read mourning becomes electra, my favorite play out of the three.

A good reading

Life is merely a strange, dark interlude before the fireworks of God the Father's flowering presence.

Out of largesse, 3-stars. Life is a "pipe dream," eh, and "dere's dat ol debbil sea." O, shut the fuk up, Gene. He yanked American drama away fr mawkish mellerdramer, and introduced sex & neurosis (on an adult level), bolstered by his knowledge of Freud, Jung and himself. Today he's unreadable and almost unplayable. I'm glad bio-writers keep his name flickering, I guess, but the only work that holds up is "Long Day's etc." Despite an interesting Life, his "theatre" of the psychic and subconsciou...

Eugene O'Neill is one of those many authors you find fantastic when you're young. I saw The Iceman Cometh when in my twenties and found it so wonderful that I started on a translation and getting people together for a performance - some thirty years later I watched it again and found it ... well, quite good. As for these Three Plays, although they exude the mores of a bygone era I don't think they've aged badly - it's just that their subject matter makes me no more than lukewarm - I may have age...

This review concerns Desire Under the Elms.Just as I see the list of characters in a play as an interesting preview of where the author's head is at, so too I see a later authors' choice of play when seeking to adapt any of the many myths of yore. Choosing Hippolytus is significant. It's one of my favorites by Euripides, so the fact that O'Neill, someone who I've felt a kinship with ever since Long Day's Journey into Night first mortally wounded me in high school, shares a similar taste in the G...

At least one of these plays is good, because it redeems this lengthy (more than 400 page) collection of drama by a lamentably overrated playwright.  And as someone who has read a great deal of the author's plays, the recipes for failure on the part of the author are definitely here in the first two plays.  Does he view most of his female characters as sluts?  Absolutely--that is the whole thrust of the first two of the plays in this collection, neither of which work particularly well.  Does he u...

Strange Interlude perhaps the worst play I've ever read, like O'Neill tried to break all playwriting conventions only to end up with a broken play. Flays the play of subtext for NINE interminable actsMourning Becomes Electra, perfect

Life is bleak and headed for the rocks. One is pleasantly but hopelessly disillusioned to hold otherwise. Enjoy!

This is intense melodramatic stuff. What is striking about Eugene O'Neill's dramas is the awarenes and portrayal of what protagonists are thinking juxtaposed to what they are actually saying. I imagine that the plays are therefore onyl producable for the radio. A large part of the action takes place at two simultaneous levels (the spoken and the unspoken). This stresses the siunity of the human persona and is therefore intensely psychological in the modern, post-Freudian sense of the word. The c...