"Strange Interlude", by Eugene O'Neill, has got to be the worst play ever written by a major playwright. (If you think "The Iceman Cometh" is tedious, you ain't seen nothin' yet.) I once belonged to an amateur theater group that actually got together for a party for the express purpose of reading "Strange Interlude" for laughs. I don't think we were able to finish it.

I figure "Strange Interlude" must have been written when the concept of "interior monologue" and "subtext" were new, and Freudianism was all the rage. O'Neill's technique -- and the whole point of the play, actually -- was to make the subtext explicit. Every time an actor delivers a speech -- in the normal way, addressed to another character -- he immediately delivers an "aside" to the audience, and says what he "really" thinks.

The plot is pure soap opera. Will Nina run off with Ned, or stay with her husband, Sam? It's so hard to decide when she's secretly mourning Gordon, her true love, who was killed in the war!

This play might have seemed profound at a time when people were just considering for the first time the possibility that people might routinely say one thing and mean (or think) something else, but the idea is so familiar in our day that the play seems ridiculously naïve.

In our time, the technique is used sparingly and usually for comic effect. Just think of the narrator's voice-overs in "The Wonder Years." But O'Neill was deadly serious, and the asides ran through the WHOLE FRIGGIN' PLAY.

It seems hard to believe, but "Strange Interlude" was made into a movie in 1932 and again in 1987. I can't say how faithful the films were to the original script, but I believe the asides were transformed into voice-overs in the 1932 version.

There is a brief scene in a Marx Brothers movie - I forget which one - in which Groucho begins to talk to himself and then says, "I think I'm having a strange interlude."