Theater scholar’s culminating work unpacks masterpiece of the American stage

 

William Davies King was a math-and-science kid in boarding school when a reading assignment in a literature class opened his young mind to the power of the arts. From that point on, his life tracked in a new direction.

 

His homework on that fateful evening was to start reading the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Long Day’s Journey into Night” by American playwright Eugene O’Neill. King, who was 14 at the time, finished it in one sitting. “The play awakened me to what art can do, the power it has to bring meaning and sympathy to the painful reality a person might encounter within a family,” he said. “I reread it the next evening, and by the time I graduated from high school, I had read all of O'Neill’s plays and a biography and I had seen the Sidney Lumet film of the play and a community theater production, and I decided to go to Yale where the O'Neill papers were archived.” Those were just King’s first steps toward a four-decade career in theater history with frequent revisits to the work of the 1936 Nobel Prize winner.