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A wood-paneled room in a New London summer cottage is more than the setting for two great American plays; it's also the setting for the real life of playwright Eugene O'Neill, the only American playwright to win a Nobel Prize.
Both Ah, Wilderness!-O'Neill's only comedy-and the tragic Long Days journey into Night play out against the backdrop of Connecticut's Monte Cristo Cottage.
Famed nineteenth-century actor James O'Neill bought the summer house on the Thames River in 1888 and named it Monte Cristo Cottage after his most famous role, the Count of Monte Cristo. Since the family traveled with O'Neill's acting company the rest of the year, this was the only home the O'Neill children knew in their early lives. Young Eugene and his siblings lived here at a time when New Londoners all turned out on the Fourth of July for fireworks and fun-much as they did in Ah,Wilderness!
It was the era of bathing costumes and ragtime, but it had a darker side-the rise of industrial mills child labor, and what O'Neill called the "underclass." Sally Paretti, curator of the Monte Cristo Cottage, explains that the O'Neills were not immune to their age. The home held many secrets--secrets about a mother's drug addiction and about a brother's alco-holism agonizing secrets that O'Neill revealed in his masterpiece Long Day's Journey. "He didn't want the play published for twenty-five years after his death so that all of those New London friends of his would have passed away," Sally notes. "Anybody who knew the O'Neill family would have been long gone, so it wouldn't make any difference." But Eugene O'Neill's third wife, Carlotta Monterey O'Neill, sold the play just two years after his death, lifting the veil over the life in Monte Cristo Cottage.
Today the summer home is a museum that details O'Neill's times and talent. It's part of the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in nearby Water-ford, where in summer you can watch plays, musi-cals, and cabaret acts born right in front of your eyes. Actors often work with script in hand, using minimal props, costumes, and sets. For thirty years the O'Neill Playwrights Conference, Music Theater Conference, Puppetry Conference, National Theater Institute, and Critics Institute has nurtured writers and directors, puppeteers, actors, and singers as they create new work, which has gone on to Broadway, regional theater, the movies, and TV. More than seven hundred plays and musicals have premiered at the O'Neill, including John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves, August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bot-tom and The Piano Lesson, Lee Blessing's A Walk in the Woods, and Nine by Arthur Kopit, Mario Fratti, and Maury Yeston.
Years after his death, Eugene O'Neill's life and work continue to inspire those who flock to his old hometown.
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Diane Smith is co-host of Connecticut’s top-rated radio morning show, heard on WTIC-AM News Talk 1080. She produces programs for Connecticut Public Television (CPTV) based on her popular series Positively Connecticut and she is the author of a number of books about Connecticut. Diane was a news anchor and reporter at WTNH News Channel 8 in New Haven for more than sixteen years, where her reporting earned her an Emmy Award. Her public affairs documentaries have earned state and national awards
Diane Smith
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