‘On Contact With Chris Hedges’: Eugene O’Neill Shatters the American Myth in ‘Electra’
Posted on Apr 23, 2017
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RT via YouTube
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Editor’s note: Chris Hedges’ weekly column will run on Wednesday, April 26.
A culture saturated with artifice and false promises of success and happiness doesn’t easily accommodate the kinds of ideas playwright Eugene O’Neill made it his business to dramatize onstage. As Chris Hedges explains in this week’s episode of “On Contact,” that’s precisely why his work is so important at this moment.
Calling O’Neill “America’s most revolutionary and perhaps greatest playwright” who took on the critical project of “shattering of the American myth,” Hedges invites two people who know his work from the inside out—actor Eunice Wong and director David Herskovits—for a conversation about O’Neill’s significance. Wong, who is Hedges’ wife as well as Truthdig’s book review editor, will appear as Lavinia Mannon in the Target Margin Theater’s production of “Mourning Becomes Electra,” directed by Herskovits, at the Abrons Art Center in New York City from April 26-May 20.
Hedges remarks that O’Neill viewed the illusions that continue to power the American myth machine, “which have now largely supplanted reality itself, as a kind of disease eating away at the American soul.”
Wong describes “Electra” as presenting a “historical account of the seeds of our country—the seeds of racism, brutality, slavery.”
Watch all three in dialogue below:
A culture saturated with artifice and false promises of success and happiness doesn’t easily accommodate the kinds of ideas playwright Eugene O’Neill made it his business to dramatize onstage. As Chris Hedges explains in this week’s episode of “On Contact,” that’s precisely why his work is so important at this moment.
Calling O’Neill “America’s most revolutionary and perhaps greatest playwright” who took on the critical project of “shattering of the American myth,” Hedges invites two people who know his work from the inside out—actor Eunice Wong and director David Herskovits—for a conversation about O’Neill’s significance. Wong, who is Hedges’ wife as well as Truthdig’s book review editor, will appear as Lavinia Mannon in the Target Margin Theater’s production of “Mourning Becomes Electra,” directed by Herskovits, at the Abrons Art Center in New York City from April 26-May 20.
Hedges remarks that O’Neill viewed the illusions that continue to power the American myth machine, “which have now largely supplanted reality itself, as a kind of disease eating away at the American soul.”
Wong describes “Electra” as presenting a “historical account of the seeds of our country—the seeds of racism, brutality, slavery.”
Watch all three in dialogue below:
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