The Ashcan in Eugene O’Neill

Eugene O’Neill and the Ashcan Artists

This book presents the centrality of New York City on Eugene O’Neill’s imagination—the notorious Tenderloin section, Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, Fifth Avenue, and Gramercy Park—and treats the urban drawings, etchings, and paintings of George Bellows and John Sloan as if they were scene designs for O’Neill’s plays. What I try to get at is the emotional impact and the visual art (60 images) is a means to articulate aha! moments.

Forthcoming in Fall 2024

McFarland Books

Magnum Opus

Magnum Opus: The Cycle Plays of Eugene O'Neill

This new monograph debunks prevailing myths about O’Neill’s massive project in the 1930s, advances a female Irish immigrant as protagonist in a tale of ambition, love, greed, and corruption in America, and suggests ways that a production could be staged as an epic event that combines A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions.

Yale University Press

Action and Consequence in Ibsen, Chekhov and Strindberg

Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov and August Strindberg--innovators of modern drama--created characters whose reckless pursuits of irrational objectives blind them to better options.

Amazon

American Drama in the Age of Film

American Drama in the Age of Film examines the strengths and weaknesses of both the dramatic and cinematic arts to confront the standard arguments in the film-versus-theater debate. Using widely known adaptations of ten major plays, Brietzke seeks to highlight the inherent powers of each medium and draw conclusions not just about how they differ, but how they ought to differ as well.

Amazon

Aesthetics of Failure

The Aesthetics of Failure

Critic Clive Barnes once called Eugene O'Neill the "world's worst great playwright" and Brooks Atkinson called him "a tragic dramatist with a great knack for old-fashioned melodrama." These descriptions of the man can also be used to describe his work. Despite the fact that O'Neill is the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and his last works are some of America's finest, most of his published works are not good. This work closely examines how O'Neill's failures as a playwright are inspiring and how his disappointments are reflections of his own theory that tragedy requires failure, a theory that is evident in his work.

Amazon