Desire Under the Elms is a 1924 play written by Eugene O'Neill .
Like Mourning Becomes Electra, Desire Under the Elms signifies an attempt by O'Neill to adapt plot elements and themes of Greek tragedy to a rural New England setting.
It was inspired by the myth of Phaedra, Hippolytus, and Theseus.
A film version was produced in 1958, and there is an operatic setting by Edward Thomas.
The following descriptions are taken from the text of the play.
Eben - He is twenty-five, tall and sinewy.
His face is well-formed, good-looking, but its expression is resentful and defensive.
His defiant, dark eyes remind one of a wild animal's in captivity.
Each day is a cage in which he finds himself trapped but inwardly unsubdued.
There is a fierce, repressed vitality about him.
He has black hair, moustache, a thin, curly trace of beard.
He is dressed in rough farm clothes.
Simeon and Peter - [They are] tall men, much older than their half-brother [Simeon is thirty-nine and Peter thirty-seven], built on a squarer, simpler model, fleshier in body, more bovine and homelier in face, shrewder and more practical.
Their shoulders stoop a bit from years of farm work.
They clump heavily along in their clumsy thick-soled boots caked with earth.
Their clothes, their faces, hands, bare arms and throats are earth-stained.
They smell of dirt.
Ephraim Cabot - [He] is seventy-five, tall and gaunt, with great, wiry, concentrated power, but stoop-shouldered from toil.
His face is as hard as if it were hewn out of a boulder, yet there is a weakness in it, a petty pride in its own narrow strength.
His eyes are small, close together, and extremely near-sighted, blinking continually in the effort to focus on objects, their stare having a straining, ingrowing quality.
He is dressed in his dismal black Sunday suit.
Abbie Putnam - [She] is thirty-five, buxom, full of vitality.
Her round face is pretty but marred by its rather gross sensuality.
There are strength and obstinacy in her jaw, a hard determination in her eyes, and about her whole personality, the same unsettled, untamed, desperate quality so apparent in Eben.
Young Girl Two Farmers The Fiddler A Sheriff.
Sahara Publisher Books Desire under the elms by ugene oneill, paperback/eugene o'neill
