The Road to Abstract Athens : Czech Interpretations of Eugene O’Neill’s Plays from Early Productions to Anti-American Propaganda under Communism
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The paper has first provided the conference participants with an overview of pre-WWII productions of Eugene O’Neill’s plays, focusing on their radically experimental nature, furthering the Expressionistic tendencies and influences. It has discussed the role of the Czech practitioners such as K. H. Hilar (actor and director trained in the style of German Expressionism) and E. F. Burian (director and musician, an Avant-Garde theatre manager) and their stagings of O’Neill’s plays with an emphasis on their experimental nature (stage design, sound, masks and stage environment) and Modernist features. Historically speaking, some productions followed first stagings in the US very soon, which documents O’Neill’s influence, and reciprocally, acceptance, in the theatrically progressive circles in Central Europe between mid-1920s and mid-1930s. Then, the paper has dealt with the staging history of O’Neill’s drama in Czechoslovakia under Communism, between 1948 and 1989. It has presented my current research on the focus of dramaturgy (choice of plays, emphasis on topics within these plays), staging processes, and criticism, which followed a political aim: to present a point of criticism of American society. Ironically, the Communist critical views often clashed with O’Neill’s own leftist, but non-Marxist, position. For this reason, period interpretations disregarded a lot of O’Neill’s plays and themes that did not adhere to the Communist ideological position. A common technique to achieve a general criticism of the American way of life was to employ abstraction: thus, it was Mourning Becomes Electra that became the perceived core play of the O’Neill oeuvre in the Czechoslovakian theater context. |
| Related projects: |