Abstract
My title, "The Beckettian O'Neill," points directly to my thesis, but at the outset I must say that I do not wish to push this thesis so far that it seems "absurd." I recognize that there is something oxymoronic about the phrase, "The Beckettian O'Neill." Eugene O'Neill seems to thrive on expansiveness, a maximalist who wrote not only full-length plays but marathon plays, allowing for dinner breaks, and relying on the patience of his audience if not the fleshiness of their backsides. Robert Benchley, commenting on the notorious Strange Interlude, jokingly wondered what everyone was getting excited about; after all, it's "just an ordinary nine-act play." And a reviewer of the massive Mourning Becomes Electra captioned his piece, "Evening Becomes Intolerable." Samuel Beckett, on the other hand, thrives on minimalism, and with the passing years he offers less and less by way of stage time, reducing and simplifying, hardly giving his audience a chance to settle in before the play is over. Beckett told Peter Hall that "all true grace is economical," and he dedicatedly practices that belief. To my knowledge, no one writing or talking about O'Neill ever used the words "grace" or "economical."
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