Being the son of a famous romantic actor, Eugene O’Neill was well acquainted with the American theater of the late XIX - early XX centuries and passionately hated him. I hated melodramas written in bad language, did not recognize the acting style and the lack of ensemble, full of cliches, and rejected the naturalness of scenography. Speaking as an innovative playwright, he sought to create a completely different type of theater. O’Neill's early plays are a riot against an established commercial theater tradition. In O’Neill’s early plays, the main characters were social types of the lower strata of society who had never before occupied a central place in American drama: sailors, port workers, prostitutes. The heroes of Broadway comedies and melodramas spoke the average language, consisting of stamps. O’Neal made his heroes speak jargon - a language as close to real life as possible. The slurred, rude language of the heroes of the early dramaturgy of O’Neill sounded naturalistic and, at the same time, had symbolic meaning, as he indicated universal loneliness and uncommunicativeness.
