Eugene O Neill

Eugene O'Neill spent some of his most productive writing years on a ranch in this San Francisco Bay Area suburb -- but you'd never know because the town has no monument to him. Now, local boosters of O'Neill, who died in 1953, want the city to recognize the connection with a plaque, a statue or newly named street. They say one donor has promised $20,000 for a tribute O'Neill, considered by many to be America's greatest playwright, lived and worked in Danville from 1937 to 1944.

Two of New York's most prominent experimental troupes, the Wooster Group and Richard Maxwell's New York City Players, have joined forces to tackle a trio of early one-act dramas written by Eugene O'Neill about seafaring men and that vast expanse of briny rootlessness that is their existential home. There are, in short, three contrasting sensibilities at work in this production of "Early Plays," which opened Thursday at REDCAT, where it runs through Sunday. But they are united in their desire to cleanse the palate of theatergoers accustomed to a menu of stale and flavorless familiarity.

One sure prediction for 1988: We will be hearing a lot about Eugene O'Neill. It is his centennial year, and here are a few of the ways it will be observed: Jan. 18-20--Glenda Jackson stars in a three-part version of "Strange Interlude" for "American Playhouse" on PBS. March 22-May 21--Colleen Dewhurst and Jason Robards offer two O'Neill plays in repertory at Yale--"Ah, Wilderness" and "Long Day's Journey Into Night."

William Hurt was virtually unrecognizable on the recent Golden Globes telecast when the cameras panned to the "Damages" nominee. The 59-year-old actor was sporting a beard of such massively bushy dimensions, he looked as if he had walked off a Smith Brothers' cough drop box. Hurt laughs when the beard is mentioned. "I had just finished 'Moby Dick,' " he explains over a cup of tea in the cozy office of his Beverly Hills publicist. "It's a two-parter for TV we made in Malta and Nova Scotia.

Dear Gene: Pardon the familiarity, but have just finished reading your letters , and feel I know you. Today would have been your 100th birthday. Irving Berlin didn't take much pleasure in his 100th birthday party at Carnegie Hall a few months ago. It's just as well that you kicked off off when you did, in '53, with your best work not that far behind you. You certainly left a great exit line. "I knew it, I knew it! Born in a goddamn hotel room and dying in a hotel room!"

We came to the sun-gilded hills east of Oakland on a ghost hunt. A literary ghost hunt, to be precise, to a house haunted by one of the greatest, and most tormented, spirits of the American theater. The center of our weekend was a tour of Tao House, the eccentric hilltop estate that dramatist Eugene O'Neill and his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, built for privacy in Danville with his 1936 Nobel Prize stipend.

Salome Jens and Mitchell Ryan were having a bit of a laugh trying to fit "Long Day's Journey Into Night," set in 1912, into the election year "family values" debate. "It's like a joke," Ryan said. "They say, 'Well, what happened to the good old American family?' It didn't do anything. It just went right along, like a Honda."

Two of New York's most prominent experimental troupes, the Wooster Group and Richard Maxwell's New York City Players, have joined forces to tackle a trio of early one-act dramas written by Eugene O'Neill about seafaring men and that vast expanse of briny rootlessness that is their existential home. There are, in short, three contrasting sensibilities at work in this production of "Early Plays," which opened Thursday at REDCAT, where it runs through Sunday. But they are united in their desire to cleanse the palate of theatergoers accustomed to a menu of stale and flavorless familiarity.

"The Glass Menagerie" by Tennesee Williams, Woodstock Summer Theater, New York, 1949 (Quintero's first stage work). "Dark of the Moon" by Howard Richardson and William Berney, Circle in the Square, New York City, 1950. "Summer and Smoke" by Tennessee Williams, Circle in the Square, 1952. "The Iceman Cometh" by Eugene O'Neill, Circle in the Square, 1956. "Long Day's Journey Into Night" by Eugene O'Neill, original Broadway production, 1956. "The Quare Fellow" by Brendan Behan, Circle in the Square, 1958.

Your otherwise fine interview with Jack Nicholson last Sunday contained an interviewer's error that surprisingly not even Nicholson caught: to wit, that until "Hoffa," Nicholson had never played a real-life person. Untrue. Nicholson portrayed playwright Eugene O'Neill in "Reds" in 1981. And one might even mount a case for his thinly disguised portrait of journalist Carl Bernstein in "Heartburn." I won't, but one might. JIM BEAVER Van Nuys

Roger Bean, writer-director of the long-running musical "The Marvelous Wonderettes," now playing off-Broadway, is back in town with his newest entertainment, "Life Could Be a Dream," at the Hudson Mainstage. If you're in the mood for Eugene O'Neill, give this show a pass. However, if you want unapologetically escapist entertainment, superbly rendered in every particular, this is your ticket. "Dream" is so frothy it floats. Like "Wonderettes," "Dream" features a small cast of lovable characters who group together under a flimsy but serviceable pretext to bop their hearts out and sing vintage rock 'n' roll standards in heavenly harmony.

YOUR piece describes a small but still troubling step in the decline of Western Civilization ["A Steady Diet of Plot Luck," July 23]. Untold theater companies around the country, including a number locally, are falling over themselves to mount productions of what amounts to Suzan-Lori Parks' daily musings, simply because she has stature. She is a MacArthur "genius" and a Pulitzer winner for the incoherent, pointless exercise that is "Top Dog/Underdog." She puts on paper anything that comes into her mind.

NO writer more than Eugene O'Neill exemplifies Yeats' notion of the artist forced to choose "perfection of the life, or of the work." After a suicide attempt at 23, the man who would eventually be considered the founding father of American drama resolved to turn himself into a playwright.

ON paper, Gabriel Byrne should be happy right now. He's back on Broadway, starring in a play he loves by a playwright he reveres. The production, a Roundabout Theatre Company revival of Eugene O'Neill's "A Touch of the Poet," allows him to live at his Brooklyn Heights town house, see his kids regularly and exercise his considerable stage muscles while waiting for the release of two new films he says he's quite proud of.

A native son he was not, but Eugene O'Neill -- Nobel Prize-winning playwright, American theater's great chronicler of foible and dysfunction -- sank important roots in this upscale Bay Area town. O'Neill toiled through the last days of the Great Depression and early war years to write his final and, by most accounts, greatest plays cloistered in a tile-roofed hideaway called Tao House up a hillside from Danville's tree-lined downtown.

Eugene O'Neill spent some of his most productive writing years on a ranch in this San Francisco Bay Area suburb -- but you'd never know because the town has no monument to him. Now, local boosters of O'Neill, who died in 1953, want the city to recognize the connection with a plaque, a statue or newly named street. They say one donor has promised $20,000 for a tribute O'Neill, considered by many to be America's greatest playwright, lived and worked in Danville from 1937 to 1944.

The Danville house where Eugene O'Neill wrote some of his best-known plays has been closed by the National Park Service because of a dispute over an access road. People living near Tao House, where O'Neill lived from 1937 to 1944, have threatened to block the road because of the constant stream of visitors. Park officials say that as many as 40 people a day visit the house where O'Neill lived when he wrote "The Iceman Cometh," "Long Day's Journey Into Night" and "Moon for the Misbegotten."

Nobel Prize-winning playwright Eugene O'Neill died from a rare form of brain deterioration called cerebellar cortical atrophy, not Parkinson's disease as was previously thought, researchers who studied the author's autopsy report in today's New England Journal of Medicine. The results also show that alcohol abuse played no role in his death. During the last 12 years of his life, O'Neill gradually lost the ability to control his hands.

Before he segued into the studied expressionism of his middle career, Nobel Prize winner Eugene O'Neill revolutionized the American stage with gritty dramas about life on the margins--a far cry from the polite chamber comedies and melodramas that were then standard theatrical fare. It's easy to see why "Anna Christie," for which O'Neill won a Pulitzer in the early '20s, must have been such a shocker in its day.