Strange Interlude

Times of Each Act:

Act I: Three Weeks before the begging of college, in late August or early September

Act II: set in the fall of 1920

Act III: set in the late spring of 1921

Act IV: is seven months later

Act V: April 1922

Act VI: is the summer of 1923

Act VII: eleven years later, in the fall of 1934

Act VIII and Act IX: are ten years later in 1944

Summary

At the start of the play Nina Leeds reveals to her father that she is leaving. Later on it is further revealed that this is because her soldier fiancé has been killed in World War I, and Nina feels that her father prevented her from consummating her love because he told her fiancé (Gordon Shaw) not to marry her until after he got back from the war. At the beginning of the play the audience is also introduced to Charles Marsden, a long time friend of the family who acts as a father figure to Nina during the play. When she leaves her father’s home she goes to work in a military hospital to ease her grief, while she is there she offers herself to the injured servicemen. While she is away her father becomes ill and dies before she is able to get back to him, when Nina finally does return home to her father and goes to his bedside and reveals to her dead father that she cannot cry for him because she is not sad that he is gone. When Nina returned home Ned Darrell, a doctor from the hospital, followed her. Throughout the play Ned serves as Nina’s doctor trying to cure her of her “mental illness.” To make Nina a happier person Darrell tells Nina to marry the innocent Sam. Sam was a friend of Gordon Shaw’s and idolized him almost as much as Nina does. Nina agrees to marry Sam because she feels as though having a child will normalize her life, and give her a little piece of Gordon back on Earth. Nina does achieve happiness with Sam for a little while, but it does not last. When Nina finally does get pregnant, Sam and Nina visit Sam’s mother and the trip proves to be disastrous. Sam’s Mother tells Nina that she cannot have Sam’s child because Sam, like his father, is in danger of becoming insane, as a result Nina has an abortion. Nina becomes very upset at this and regresses back into her original mood of melancholy that she possessed at the beginning of the play. In order to fulfill her dream, and to make Sam happy Nina begins an affair with Ned Darrel. Unfortunately both characters are unable to control their emotions and they fall in love with each other. Even though Nina and Ned toy with the idea of telling Sam the truth, but neither does for fear that it will make Sam go insane and inevitably kill him. This charade continues, and the relationships between Nina, Sam, Ned, Charles, and her baby culminate with Nina being able to be wife, mistress, mother, and daughter. However, being Sam’s wife, Nina admits, is more like being his best friend, and Nina feels like this is best situation for them all. Nina becomes possessive with all the relationships and does not want to give up either. However, at the end of the play Nina is forced to, she loses her lover because he drowns himself in his work, her husband dies, her son marries, and she and Charles are left, and the two marry.

Production

The Theatre Guild produced Strange Interlude in January of 1928 at the same time it was producing the play Marco Millions. Eugene O’Neil was afraid that the critics were going to dismiss the play due to its outrageous content and style. But this did not happen, the majority of critics felt that the “experiment” was a success. The public also gave O’Neil a vote confidence the production lasted for 414 performances and it was later made into a motion picture. O’Neil also won his third Pulitzer Prize for the play.

Style

In Strange Interlude O’Neil combines poetic, dramatic, and prose forms of writing. Even though this was not necessarily the first time that these techniques were employed in the same work, it is the first time that they were used to this kind of extent. Throughout the play the characters talk not only out loud but in soliloquies and asides that reveal their internal monologue. What is interesting about the soliloquies is that often the characters are saying the exact opposite of what their dialogue implies. The best part about the “thought aside” is that it makes the characters multidimensional and thus makes the audience want to watch them more. The subject matter of the play is also what made Strange Interlude so intriguing is the controversial subject matter, Nina’s promiscuity, as well as the abortion and the mother-in-law’s insistence upon the abortion is what made the play so intense to the audiences. Even though these elements were used before in O’Neil plays the change came with the Freudian touch that O’Neil put with the language and concepts. A final element of this play that is unique is the passage of time, this allows the audience to see Nina through different stages of her life, and this allows the audience to see her development as well as her mental strain that most plays do not allow the audience to view so intensely.

Sources:

Eugene O'Neil A Critical Study: 1961

Eugene O'Neil: The man and his Plays: 1947

Strange Interlude