Eugene O’Neill doesn’t let us hide from our demons. They are at the core of all his writing. Photo by Edward Steichen / Condé Nast / Getty

In seventh grade, my English teacher, Mr. Grubbs, suggested that I audition for a local revival of “Take Me Along,” the 1959 musical adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness!” He recommended that I read the original, so I checked the book out of the school library—a small hardcover with a green-and-orange dust jacket, which included that play and two others, “Beyond The Horizon” and “All God’s Chillun Got Wings.” I was curious to find out who this Eugene O’Neill person was. I’d never heard of her.

Nothing prepared me for what I found in that little volume. “Ah, Wilderness!,” ironically, I could take or leave, but the other two plays had a shattering effect on my young mind. The force of the writing made me feel as though I were on the receiving end of an untamed blast of feeling and thought. O’Neill’s characters were ugly, twisted, unhinged, embarrassing. The emotional stakes in the plays were enormous and unmanageable, which—for a budding adolescent—meant that they felt entirely normal. There was a kind of primordial fierceness to the worlds the characters inhabited, and a homeliness to the language they used. They talked and behaved as though their psychological skins had been ripped off.

“All God’s Chillun Got Wings” tells the story of an interracial couple whose love for each other cannot transcend the cultural stigma that their families, friends, and they themselves place on their relationship. Jim, a black man, dreams of becoming a lawyer, but repeatedly sabotages himself when taking the bar exam, out of an innate sense of racial inferiority. As years of confusion and failure pile up, Ella, his partner, who is white, begins to fear that her skin is slowly turning black and starts to carry on conversations with an African mask that the couple keeps hanging on the wall of their home, accusing it of tormenting her. (In his stage directions, O’Neill describes the mask as growing progressively larger in each succeeding scene.) She eventually goes mad, at one point attempting to kill Jim with a carving knife.

“Beyond the Horizon” also tracks a young love that turns sour, as unmet expectations and unforeseen challenges pile up in the course of a series of months and years. These frustrations create a volatile mass of unspoken resentment that explodes in a series of confrontations, stripping away any veneer of domestic tranquility:

RUTH: What do you think—living with a man like you—having to suffer all the time because you’ve never been man enough to work and do things like other people. But no! You never own up to that. You think you’re so much better than other folks, with your college education, where you never learned a thing, and always reading your stupid books instead of working. I s’pose you think I ought to be proud to be your wife—a poor ignorant thing like me! [Fiercely.] But I’m not. I hate it! I hate the sight of you! Oh, if I’d only known! If I hadn’t been such a fool to listen to your cheap, silly, poetry talk that you learned out of books! If I could have seen how you were in your true self—like you are now—I’d have killed myself before I’d have married you!

I grew up outside fairly provincial Hartford, Connecticut, and reading O’Neill was a jolt to my consciousness. The ferocity of his plays overwhelmed me; his untethered passions and imagination allowed mine to be untethered, too.

During the ensuing months and years, I became an O’Neill fanatic. I read everything that he ever wrote and saved up my modest weekly allowance to purchase studies of his work and books about his life—a biography as dramatic as any of his plays. In high school, I somehow convinced my parents to allow me to attend a weekend-long conference, in Boston, organized by the Eugene O’Neill Society, where I was one of about a hundred attendees—probably the only one there younger than forty, and certainly the only one under age sixteen. In college, I produced and directed O’Neill plays, and after graduation I briefly relocated to Los Angeles for the chance to study with José Quintero, the great O’Neill director whose legendary productions of “The Iceman Cometh,” at Circle in the Square, and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” on Broadway, both in 1956, effectively cemented O’Neill’s reputation as America’s greatest playwright.

When I finally landed in New York, twenty years ago, my first job was as a research assistant for Arthur and Barbara Gelb, royalty in the small but potent world of O’Neill obsessives; the Gelbs had been writing devotedly about O’Neill for half a century. Even after establishing my own career, I continued to help them with their work, right up until the completion of the recently published book “By Women Possessed: A Life of Eugene O’Neill,” their third (third!) and final full-length biography of the playwright. (Arthur passed away in 2016; Barbara followed him last year.) O’Neill engenders this kind of devotion. Quintero returned to him again and again, often with his two most famous collaborators, the actors Colleen Dewhurst and Jason Robards. Since Quintero’s death, in 1999, the O’Neill directing mantle has been taken up by Robert Falls and Ivo van Hove, both of whom have mounted numerous searing productions of O’Neill’s plays. As Quintero once said, almost by way of surrender, “Once he gets hold of you, he will not let go.”

Although most associate O’Neill with his relatively quiet, brooding final works—“Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” “The Iceman Cometh,” and “A Moon for the Misbegotten”—these plays were written after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1936, and their style bears little resemblance to the lurching, wild-eyed experimentalism of his earlier work. In mostly forgotten dramas like “The Great God Brown,” “Dynamo,” “Marco Millions,” “The Fountain,” and “Strange Interlude,” he employed a host of brazenly stylized devices—shrinking walls, beating drums, spoken thoughts, ghosts—in an attempt to resurrect the spirit of grandeur, ritual, and catharsis of the Greeks. These emotionally savage works represent the early adolescence of American theatre, and are often thought of as such—insufferable, overwrought, cringe-worthy, and best forgotten. This is an injustice, both to O’Neill and to ourselves, as anyone who’s ever seen an unflinching production of one of these plays can attest.