The evolution of the Monte Cristo Award

T he Monte Cristo Award is gathering a rich history since its first edition, honoring Jason Robards, a titan of the American stage and the foremost interpreter of Eugene O’Neill’s plays.

Named after the house at 325 Pequot Ave. that was the O’Neill family’s summer home, purchased with the earnings from actor-father James O’Neill’s lifetime of performances as The Count of Monte Cristo, it was also the only permanent residence the young Eugene ever knew between his father’s extended tours.

It is the playwright’s commitment to excellence that stands behind the honor, bestowed by the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. Distinction in O’Neill’s plays has been a mark of other honorees such as Brian Dennehy, a longtime friend of Monte Cristo Cottage, an O’Neill Center Trustee, and heir to Robards’ throne.

Can Denzel Washington, a brilliant actor who has just now established himself as an O’Neill star, be far behind?

This year’s award to Lin-Manuel Miranda was especially significant. Not only was work on his break-out musical, “In The Heights,” finished and polished at the O’Neill Center (other playwrights, August Wilson and Wendy Wasserstein, have been “home grown”), but Miranda is also a graduate of Wesleyan University (as is director Thomas Kail). That Connecticut institution collaborated with the nascent Playwrights Conference, leading to a successful quest for assistance from the Rockefeller Foundation. That assistance made the subsequent leaps from those baby steps possible.

A part of that collaboration included a pilot training program for in-service secondary school theatre teachers, which later became a part of the blueprint, (along with a graduate thesis outline from Wesleyan), for the now 50-year run of the National Theatre Institute.

Perhaps the most impressive measure of the place that the O’Neill Center holds in modern American theater history can be found in the evolution of Monte Cristo Award. From early honorees Robards and Zoe Caldwell as examples, whose greatness was part of Broadway history before the O’Neill Center existed, to those such as Michel Douglas and Judith Light, in attendance at the Miranda event, whose early careers were started or advanced in Waterford. Others, such as Dennehy and Edward Albee, came to the O’Neill as friends and advocates.

And last, but certainly not least, is the design of the award itself. It is no abstraction, but a sculptural representation of the young Eugene O’Neill, pen and notebook in hand, crafted by Old Lyme artist Norman Legasse. The award is a reduction of Legasse’s life-size work that sits at the edge of New London Harbor. It both commemorates the achievement of the nation’s only playwright to be awarded a Nobel Prize and encourages the next generation of new voices, something the O’Neill Center has taken to heart.