Eugene O’Neill’s Quest for Greek Tragedy Page 1 of 12 Eugene O’Neill’s Quest for Greek Tragedy Vassilis Lambropoulos The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas Edited by Kathryn Bosher, Fiona Macintosh, Justine McConnell, and Patrice Rankine Abstract and Keywords In “Eugene O’Neill’s Quest for Greek Tragedy,” Vassilis Lambropoulos considers the importance of an often overlooked play in O’Neill’s canon, The Great God Brown. As with Euripides’ Bacchae, Dionysus is the hero of the drama, yet the play is not modeled on Euripides, but rather ‘presupposes’ the ancient Greek tragedy. Lambropoulos argues that the Nietzschean-inspired imprint on the play not only provides a key to its treatment of Dionysus (Dion) as hero, but also to its use of doubling through the convention of the mask, which, he maintains, is at the heart of O’Neill’s conception of the tragic. For O’Neill however, the suffering of Dionysus is not the individuation of the will, as Nietzsche had argued, but the duality of identity. Keywords: The Great God Brown, Friedrich Nietzsche, Dionysus, Euripides' Bacchae, mask, doubling, individuation DURING the decade of the 1920s, the most productive period of his long career, Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953) systematically explored several aspects of tragedy—formal, religious, psychological, and other. Between The Emperor Jones (1920) and Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), he experimented with ancient and modern tragic themes, techniques, and ideas. In the productions of his plays he collaborated with major theater people who shared his interests, such as George Cram “Jig” Cook (1873–1924), who founded the Provincetown Players in 1915 (see Hall, this volume), and Kenneth Macgowan (1888– 1963) and Robert Edmond Jones (1887–1954), who transformed the Players into The Experimental Theatre. He also discussed his plays and ideas with emerging theater critics with a strong interest in tragedy, such as George Jean Nathan (1882–1958) and Joseph Wood Krutch (1893–1970). In short, in the 1920s O’Neill found himself at the center of a broad artistic and intellectual milieu that, like its contemporary European one, explored the function of tragedy on the post-Wagnerian stage. Print Publication Date: Oct 2015 Subject: Classical Studies, Classical Reception Online Publication Date: Dec 2015 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199661305.013.015 Oxford Handbooks Online