O’Neill (Unexpected)

Two plays by young Eugene O’Neill Nearly Never Performed: Recklessness and Now I Ask You.

Recklessness (1913) plots the ingenious and cold-blooded revenge of a cuckolded husband when he discovers his younger wife’s affair with his chauffeur. An American Miss Julie with a Hitchcockian twist, the play foreshadows O’Neill’s doomed lovers and tormented spouses yearning for freedom, even to the point of death.

Now I Ask You (1916) satirizes young Bohemian aspiration and suburban bourgeois complacency with witty one-liners and increasingly convoluted misunderstandings.