Few people realize that Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which won the 1956 Pulitzer Prize, was written in California in 1939-41. After winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936, O’Neill and his third wife, the actress Carlotta Monterey, built Tao House just outside Danville, California. Realizing that his writing career was coming to an end, due to illness, he needed to find a way—literally, the tao—to write the most personal and difficult plays he had ever attempted, also including The Iceman Cometh and A Touch of the Poet.
Tao House was inspired by Chinese principles, which his California-born wife helped to implement in an effort to create a setting that was conducive to his writing these consummate works. It also reflects the Spanish colonial history of California. William Davies King’s new book argues that Long Day’s Journey, O’Neill’s most deeply autobiographical play, emerges from the tao of that house and could only have been written then and there—in that convergence of Irish, Spanish, and Chinese cultures and on the verge of World War II.
King’s book adopts an unusual form, using the diaries of Eugene and Carlotta, to suggest that the play might be read as a product of a marriage that was soon to go haywire but for a brief moment allowed for the creation of a work of genius, which was, in effect, the genius of Tao House. Long Day’s Journey was only published and produced after O’Neill’s death, thirteen years it was written, but it has been performed many times worldwide by the finest actors, and it remains the quintessential American play. Tao House has been a National Historic Site, maintained by the National Park Service, for fifty years. Professor King will take us into the site and into the play and into the marriage, and he will show us many items from his extensive collection of photographs and documents of Eugene and Carlotta O’Neill.
An in-person and virtual presentation by William Davies King, author, editor, scholar, and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Theater and Dance, University of California Santa Barbara, California