Complete Plays 02, O`Neill E

In Diffrent, The First Man, and Welded, egotistical characters have their illusions about love shaken by the force of other peoples desires. All Gods Chillun Got Wings depicts the web of racial hatreds and spiritual longings that surround the marriage of a black man and a white woman.

The Fountain tells of Ponce de Leons search for the fountain of youth. Marco Millions satirizes American materialism by portraying Marco Polo as a hustling businessman blind to the riches of Eastern culture. Lazarus Laughed shows its Biblical hero preaching love, laughter, and the defeat of death.

The stoker Yank in The Hairy Ape, the architect Dion Anthony in The Great God Brown, and the ministers son Reuben Light in Dynamo all try to find a place for themselves in an increasingly soulless and mechanistic world. Yank believes that he belongs in his stokehold until a terrified heiress calls him a filthy beast. His rage turns to despair as he encounters a brutally indifferent society onshore. The Great God Brown uses masks to depict the divided souls of its hero, his wife, and his alter ego, the successful businessman William Brown. Betrayed by his mother, Reuben Light forsakes the God of his father for the new electrical god of the dynamo but finds no escape from the sexual conflicts that ONeill characteristically intertwines with his heros religious doubts.

Strange Interlude follows its heroine Nina Leeds through nine acts and twenty-five years of passionate and painful involvement with three men. Inspired by contemporary psychology, the novels of James Joyce, and the soliloquies of the Elizabethan theater, ONeill uses spoken asides to reveal the shifting flow of his characters inner thoughts. His most commercially successful play, it won him his third Pulitzer Prize.