Recently I learned that Eugene O'Neill used to live in nearby Danville, and the house he built there, known as Tao House, is a part of the national parks service, and thus, free to visit. Like most Americans, I'd heard of Eugene O'Neill, one of our most important playwrights, but I hadn't seen any of his plays, and I figured I should know a little of his work in order to appreciate a visit to Tao House.

I had my first chance when our favorite local playhouse, The Pear, put on A Long Day's Journey Into Night. It was really good and heartbreakingly poignant. It's still my favorite Eugene O'Neill play, probably helped along by the fact that the actors were really good, and, as usual for the Pear, it was imaginatively staged (for instance, if you were sitting in the front row, Mary Tyrone, the mother, would often be sitting right next to you). But, boy, they did drink: they all started drinking at noon, though the family continually watered the whiskey to hide their consumption from cheapskate dad. Peter and I joked during intermission about how watery that whiskey would get until dad took a drink in Act 3, figured it out, and brought in a new bottle. (And meanwhile, mom was shooting up with heroin, off stage).

We watched 4 more of O'Neill's plays in movie adaptations, and as it turns out A Long's Day's Journey Into Night is one of O'Neill's least alcoholic plays.

At least two of his plays (The Iceman Cometh and A Touch of the Poet) are set in bars, and major characters start downing one alcoholic beverage or another within minutes of waking up. In fact, in The Iceman Cometh, they don't even leave the bar: they pass out on the tables until they wake up again and scream for another drink. Another play, Anna Christie, opens with all the characters drunk.

Thanks to Eugene O'Neill, we learned to be grateful for the moments when the characters were drunk. That's when they'd cry out their sorrows and embrace each other, and share compelling tales. When they sobered up, the characters would start killing each other and themselves.

I don't remember the drinking in Mourning Becomes Electra, and that's the play in which mother kills husband, son kills mother (with daughter's instigation), son kills himself, and daughter entombs herself. Plus it includes an incestuous cross-generational love triangle that doesn't involve daddy. These are people desperately in need of hard liquor, though, this being a Eugene O'Neill play, it's probably fair to assume that the daughter will keep herself seriously pickled for the rest of her life.

It's even worse in The Iceman Cometh. The main character, eagerly awaited by all the boozers in the bar, is a salesman named Hickey. He comes every year to buy drinks for everyone in the bar, though they've been sponging drinks off the perpetually soused owner all along, so you really get the impression that they're a bunch of shut-ins looking for a visit. Hickey appears like a motivational speaker, and an extremely charming one at that. When Hickey's efforts to pull his friends out of their alcoholic daze and actually pursue their "pipe-dreams" fails, you find out that the sober Hickey is actually a Very Bad Man.

After all that, Peter and I decided we knew what a Eugene O'Neill play would be like. They're all compelling (which they need to be to get you through the usual 3-4 hour length) but if we watched a whole lot more, those characters would drive us to drink. So I think we'll just go see Tao House, and take in the rest of his plays another time.