American Flashcards
Summary of Long Day’s Journey into Night?
• A play by Eugene O’ Neill
Long Day’s Journey into Night is a drama play in four acts in 1956
• He won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Long Day’s Journey into Night.
• Mary Tyrone and James Tyrone and there sons are facing a life crisis. Mary is addicted to morphine and Edmund has tuberculosis. The play takes place in one day. James is a workless actor who is self-indulgent and Mary takes a retreat into Morphine because of her feeling of inferiority. James doesn’t want to recognise the illness of Edmund and that is why there is a confrontation between father and sone which reveal a lot about the relationship of dependence between the family members.
Summary of The Hairy Ape?
• A play by Eugene O’ Neill
The Hairy Ape is a 1922 expressionist play
• Plot: Yank is a labourer on a ship who feels powerful over the ship and his men, but when he is referred as a filthy beast by the daughter of an industrialist, his mental and physical deterioration starts. He leaves his job and goes to Manhatter to wander around the place. He find himself to have no place to identify with neither the rich nor the labourers, He becomes to feel like an ape after being defeated by a real one.
• The play is a social commentary on the industrialization and its social impact.
Summary of The Emperor Jones?
• A play by Eugene O’ Neill
The Emperor Jones is a 1920 play
Plot: Brutus Jones is a pullman porter jailed for killing another black man in a dice game. He escapes to a Caribbean Island which is away from the civilization and becomes its emperor. He has to run for his life after rebels of the island are chasing him in a jungle. He is recollecting the events of the past during his escape.
Streetcar Named Desire?
A Streetcar Named Desire opened on Broadway on December 3, 1947.
He won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for that year.
• it concerns the mental and moral disintegration and ultimate ruin of Blanche DuBois, a former Southern belle. Her neurotic, genteel pretensions are no match for the harsh realities symbolized by her brutish brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski.
• Blanche Dubois is visiting her sister Stella and her brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski after her family has become bankrupt and she has become neurotic. It creates a stir in the family and we comes to know about the hard life she had to live in order to survive. Her young husband had died. She feels hopeful about her relationship with Mitch, but that doesn’t result in anything. When Stella leaves to give birth to their child, Stanley is seen to take Blanche forcefully to the bed. In the end, Blanche is forced by a doctor and a matron to come with them to the asylum.
Summary of The Glass Menagerie?
The Glass Menagerie is a memory play which premiered in 1944
• The play has strong autobiographical elements, based on its author, his histrionic mother, and his mentally fragile sister Laura.
• Amanda Wingfield is always telling her children romantic stories of her early life. Laura finds comfort in glass animals as she is shy and wears a leg brace. Tom, her son is the person through whose memory we are seeing the narrative. He wants to get away from the family life and his job at a warehouse. He brings Jim O’ Corner, Laura feels flattered by his attention, but reveals later that he is already engaged. Amanda blames Tom for that, after which he leaves the home and Laura isolated herself.
Summary of Death of a Salesman?
Death of a Salesman (1949).
Plot: Linda, Willy Loman’s wife wants him to ask his boss to let him working New York, so that he doesn’t have to travel to other places as a salesman. Willy is in the belief that he has failed as a father and a husband as his sons Happy and Biff are failures in life. He goes into the past where it was much better. At the end, Biff starts preparing to leave, but an arguments starts with Willy where he reveals him being in jail and mocks his father’s belief in “a smile and a shoeshine.” Willy commits suicide after feeling completely shattered.
Summary of Who’s Afraid of Viginia Woolf?
Edward Albee
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Was first staged in 1962.
Plot: George and Martha, are quarrelling with each other after being drunk from a faculty party. Nick, a biology professor with his wife Honey stop at their place. This starts a continuous fights and plans, humiliations, confrontations and sarcasm, where everything about them is revealed and all the illusions about each other are broken. George had invented a son for their solace after being childless for long, but now he reveals about that. At the end, both of them face the truth and stand in front of the world to share their grief.
