Strange Interlude
1920s play by Eugene O'Neill
Strange Interlude is an experimental play in nine acts by American playwright Eugene O'Neill. It won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Strange Interlude is one of the few modern plays to make extensive use of a soliloquy technique, in which the characters speak their inner thoughts to the audience.
O'Neill began work on it as early as 1923 and developed its scenario in 1925. He wrote the play between May 1926 and the summer of 1927, and completed its text for publication in January 1928, during the final rehearsals for its premiere performance. Strange Interlude opened on Broadway on January 30, 1928, with Lynn Fontanne in the central role of Nina Leeds. It was also produced in London at the Lyric Theatre in 1931. It was included in Burns Mantle's The Best Plays of 1927-1928.
Because of its length, around five to six hours if uncut, the play has sometimes been produced with a dinner break or on consecutive evenings. The play's themes – a woman's sexual affairs, mental illness, abortion, and deception over
paternity – were controversial in the 1920s.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Strange Interlude” is 1920s play by Eugene O'Neill. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Strange, Interlude and 1920s, not as a finished interpretation.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7621410. VIAF identifies the subject as 194761899. The Library of Congress control number is n2017053580. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1928, 1923, 1925 and 1926.
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This entry incorporates text from “Strange Interlude” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.