(DANVILLE, Calif.) – The Town of Danville and the Eugene O'Neill Foundation held a special event on Friday, September 11, to officially rename Front Street Park as Eugene O'Neill Park.
The new name honors one of the giants of American theater. O'Neill won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936, and not long afterward he and his wife, Carlotta, built a home in the hills above Danville called Tao House. They lived there until 1944, and those years were among the most productive of his career. He wrote some of his best-known plays at Tao House, including The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night, a deeply personal drama based on his own family.
Photo Credit: Eugeneoneill.org
For many people who live here, O'Neill's connection to Danville has been easy to miss. Tao House sits out of sight, and the downtown most residents walk through every day carries no sign of it. The renamed park changes that. A place where families picnic and kids play now carries the name of the writer who once lived nearby. Today Tao House is a national historic site, and visitors come from around the world to see where those plays were written.
The Foundation is also keeping O'Neill's work in front of the community. It is presenting Ah, Wilderness! in Danville this month. The play is one of O'Neill's lighter works, a warm comedy about a family and a teenage boy growing up in a small American town. It makes a good fit for the place that now honors him.
Danville is known today as a safe, quiet town with good schools. This park adds something else to that picture. The town is also part of the story of a great American writer.
The new name is a small change, but it gives people a reason to stop and ask who O'Neill was. For a park, that may be the best thing a name can do.
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