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THE COMPLETE & CONDENSED STAGE DIRECTIONS OF EUGENE

January 26-28, 2012

"An impish illustration of how lively entertainment can be created from theatrical spare parts."
- The New York Times

ABOUT THE SHOW

Once confined only to heated discussions amongst doctoral students, the New York Neo-Futurists unleash O'Neill's stage directions from their dissertation prison, transforming O'Neill's eloquent yet obsessive and often controlling stage directions into rip-roaring physical comedy.

Now a Broadway mainstay, Eugene O'Neill was once considered an experimental, downtown playwright. His plays defied the melodramatic conventions of the day and much of his work premiered with the Provincetown Players on MacDougal Street. The New York Neo-Futurists return O'Neill to his experimental roots with The Complete & Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O'Neill, Volume 1: Early Plays/Lost Plays. This first in a series chronicles O'Neill's early stage directions (1913-1917), and includes two of his "sea plays" (including Bound East for Cardiff) as well as more obscure early works such as his first play, the one-act A Wife for a Life, as well as his epic farce Now I Ask You.

PRESS

"A comic CAT scan of O'Neill's early work...nothing funnier than watching good actors attempt to play the unplayable...The Neo-Futurist's - brilliant minimalists, all - actually get the plays across, in all their fatal glory, even as they are racking up guffaws."
- New York Magazine

"Unwittingly hilarious...the effect is somewhere between television with the sound off, in which the bare bones of the story are all too clear, and an improv show, with cheerful youths carrying out arbitrary instructions for our entertainment."
- The New Yorker