Empty Bottles, Empty Dreams:
The Iceman, Alcohol, and O’Neill
A Talk with Professor Steven Bloom
June 27th, 7:30pm, in Studio 120
Eugene O’Neill is still the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1936); he also won four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. He is arguably America’s most important dramatist. The Iceman Cometh is widely considered one of his two greatest plays (the other being Long Day’s Journey into Night), both written after he had won the Nobel Prize and among the last plays he wrote. Why, you may ask, or at least why so long? And why so much drinking? At this forum, we will address these questions and more, as we consider how, in the context of the TampaRep’s production, O’Neill raises profound (and sometimes disturbing) questions that go to the very heart of what it means to be a human being.