The Pioneer at the Metropolitan playhouse

The Metropolitan Playhouse presents The Pioneer, five of Eugene O�Neill�s short plays collectively woven together into one, whole performance, opening at the Metropolitan Playhouse on 16 Nov 2007, following previews from 9 Nov and running through to 9 Dec 2007.

The five short Eugene O�Neill plays presented in The Pioneer are 'The Web,' 'The Movie Man,' 'Ile,' 'Before Breakfast,' and 'The Last Will and Testament of Silverdene Emblem O�Neill.'

The press notes says

"Eugene O�Neill�s early work, before his 1920 Broadway debut with Beyond the Horizon, consists mainly of one-act plays. They encompass the crush of domestic fealty, the gulf between social classes, and the longings of humanity high and low. They are set on the high seas and foreign battlefields, as well as in bourgeois kitchens and urban slums. Metropolitan�s evening includes four of these plays, plus a little known monologue, written in 1940 from the point of view of O�Neill�s dog, which together reveal the growth of an artist�s voice from its first utterance through to a whimsical and sentimental reflection on life. The plays are �The Web,� �The Movie Man,� �Ile,� �Before Breakfast,� and �The Last Will and Testament of Silverdene Emblem O�Neill.�

Salient details of O�Neill�s personal life are well known: his father�s grandiose and erratic career as a matinee idol, his mother�s addiction and despair, his own troubled relations with his three wives and three children. He began adult life dropping out of Princeton and into the life of a seafarer, frequenting prostitutes, succumbing to alcohol, and later tuberculosis, and nearly ending his own life. On recovery through a sanitarium in 1913, he began writing plays, and here Metropolitan�s production begins. For what is less familiar to theatergoers are these prescient and penetrating early works, which set the model for his later works both in style and substance. Seen together in one evening, they reveal a moral vision, a sentimental love, an ironic wit, and a poetic character that is constant throughout his work and later life."