Strange Interlude

Strange Interlude (1928), a play by Eugene O'Neill. [ John Golden Theatre, 426 perf.; Pulitzer Prize.] Nina Leeds (Lynn Fontanne) has turned against her father, Professor Leeds (Philip Leigh), for persuading her fiancé, Gordon, not to marry her until the war was over. When Gordon dies in battle, Nina continues to hold on to his memory despite the subtle overtures made by the writer Charles Marsden (Tom Powers), who is too shy and too attached to his mother's apron strings to confess his affection openly. Nina weds the weak Sam Evans (Earle Larimore), whom she has little feeling for, and soon finds herself pregnant. When Sam's mother (Helen Westley) reveals to her that the family has had a tendency toward insanity, Nina has an abortion. She keeps this a secret from Sam and shortly afterwards has a child by Dr. Edmund Darrell (Glenn Anders), who has always loved her. After their son, whom she names Gordon, is born, Edmund asks Nina to divorce Sam and marry him, but she refuses. Years later Gordon (John J. Burns) has grown up preferring Sam to his real father or his increasingly possessive mother. Realizing she has lost both Edmund and Gordon, she is stunned when Sam's death removes him, too, from her life. Only the loyal Charles remains, so she marries him. Charles urges her to regard the past as an interlude. She agrees, concluding, “Our lives are merely strange dark interludes in the electrical display of God the Father!,” and she congratulates Charles, “who, passed beyond desire, has all the luck at last.” The action of the nine‐act play, in which O'Neill consciously drew on Freud, frequently stopped to allow the characters to probe their inner thoughts in extended soliloquies. “The effect,” wrote Joseph Wood Krutch, “is to combine to a remarkable extent the vivid directness of the drama with the more intricate texture of the modern novel.” Because the Theatre Guild production was four hours long, the curtain rose at 5:15 and had a long intermission for dinner at 7:00. Although it quickly became the season's conversation piece, it was banned in several important cities, most notably in Boston. A major revival was mounted in 1963 with Geraldine Page as Nina, and a British revival in 1985 with Glenda Jackson was very popular in New York.

Eugene O'Neill
1928

Strange Interlude (1928), by American dramatist Eugene O'Neill, was a huge success when first produced by the Theatre Guild at the John Golden Theatre in New York City in 1928. It won the Pulitzer Prize and became the most successful American play to date.

The play covers a period of twenty-five years in the lives of mostly upper-middle-class East Coast characters. It centers on Nina Leeds, a passionate, tormented woman whose fiancé was killed in World War I and who spends the remainder of her life searching for an always-elusive happiness.

This is a very long play, lasting over five hours in performance. The story is not especially complex, and the length of the play derives from O'Neill's revival of two theatrical devices that had fallen out of use for nearly a century: the soliloquy, in which a character alone on the stage speaks his or her thoughts aloud, and the aside, which enables characters to reveal their thoughts to the audience but not to the other characters on stage. These devices, which O'Neill employed at length, enabled the playwright to probe deeply into his characters' motivations. The soliloquies and asides reveal the discrepancies between what the characters say and do, and what they really feel.

Strange Interlude was a controversial play because it dealt openly with such topics as adultery and abortion. Although it was rarely revived in the early 2000s, it was generally regarded as the first of O'Neill's works in which he revealed his full power as a dramatist.

Strange Interlude
Written by	Eugene O'Neill
Characters	Edmund Darrell Gordon Evans Nina Leeds Sam Evans Prof. Henry Leeds Charles Marsden Madeline Arnold Mrs. Amos Evans
Date premiered	January 30, 1928
Original language	English
Genre	Drama
Setting	Small university town in New England; various places in New York
IBDB profile

Strange Interlude is an experimental play by American playwright Eugene O'Neill. O'Neill finished the play in 1923, but it was not produced on Broadway until 1928, when it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Lynn Fontanne originated the central role of Nina Leeds on Broadway. It was also produced in London at the Lyric Theatre in 1931.

Because of its length, over four hours, the play has sometimes been produced with a dinner break or on consecutive evenings. The play's subject matter, very controversial for the 1920s, led to it being censored or banned in many cities outside New York.

Strange Interlude is one of the few modern plays to make extensive use of a soliloquy technique, in which the characters speak their inner thoughts to the audience. Some productions have had the actors carry masks to distinguish their spoken dialogue from their soliloquies, although most productions allow the distinction to be made through acting style alone. The soliloquies in Strange Interlude mostly take the form of relatively brief side comments, not of lengthy speeches in the Shakespearean manner.

Plot summary

The plot centers on Nina Leeds, the daughter of an Ivy League professor, who is devastated when her adored fiance' is killed in World War I, before they even have a chance to consummate their passion. Ignoring the unconditional love of the novelist Charles Marsden, Nina embarks on a series of sordid affairs before determining to marry an amiable fool, Sam Evans. While Nina is pregnant with Sam's child, she learns a horrifying secret known only to Sam's mother - insanity runs in the Evans family and could be inherited by any child of Sam's. Realizing that a child is essential to her own and to Sam's happiness, Nina decides on a "scientific" solution. She will abort Sam's child and conceive a child with the physician Ned Darrell, letting Sam believe that it is his. The plan backfires when Nina and Ned's intimacy leads to their falling passionately in love. Twenty years later, Sam's "son" Gordon Evans is approaching manhood, with only Nina and Ned aware of the boy's true parentage.

The meaning of the title is suggested by the aging Nina in a speech near the end of the play: "Our lives are strange dark interludes in the electrical display of God the Father!"

Adaptations

Strange Interlude has been filmed twice, as a theatrical film in 1932 and as a television mini-series in 1988. The 1932 film, which starred Norma Shearer as Nina Leeds and Clark Gable as Ned Darrell, was a shortened and toned-down version of the play. Voiceovers were used for the soliloquies.

The 1988 television version directed by Herbert Wise was based on a 1985 London stage revival and starred Glenda Jackson as Nina and David Dukes as Ned (with Kenneth Branagh in the small part of Gordon Evans). This version follows O'Neill's original text fairly closely, and allows the actors to speak their soliloquies naturally in the manner of the stage production.

Popular culture

• Groucho Marx parodies this play in the 1930 Marx Brothers film, Animal Crackers. On three occasions, he tells a player, "Pardon me while I have a strange interlude," whereupon he walks over to the camera and makes ersatz philosophical comments to himself and the audience.

• MAD Magazine satirically combined the play with the television show Hazel in a piece that ran in the 1960s.

• The fledgling Howard Johnson's restaurant chain received a boost in 1929 when the mayor of Boston banned a production of Strange Interlude from his city. The Theatre Guild moved the production to suburban Quincy, where it was presented with a dinner break. The original Howard Johnson's restaurant was near the theater, and hundreds of influential Bostonians discovered the restaurant, leading eventually to nationwide publicity for the chain.

v • d • e Pulitzer Prize for Drama Craig's Wife (1926) · In Abraham's Bosom (1927) · Strange Interlude (1928) · Street Scene (1929) · The Green Pastures (1930) · Alison's House (1931) · Of Thee I Sing (1932) · Both Your Houses (1933) · Men in White (1934) · The Old Maid (1935) · Idiot's Delight (1936) · You Can't Take It with You (1937) · Our Town (1938) · Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1939) · The Time of Your Life (1940) · There Shall Be No Night (1941) · The Skin of Our Teeth (1943) · Harvey (1945) · State of the Union (1946) · A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) · Death of a Salesman (1949) · South Pacific (1950) Complete list: (1918-1925) · (1926-1950) · (1951-1975) · (1976-2000) · (2001-present)

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