Monte Cristo Cottage and the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center have a lot in common.
Of course they share the same Gene, and the center owns the cottage, but unfortunately their most common trait is that most people don't notice them.
Monte Cristo Cottage, where O'Neill summered with his family and later used as the setting for Long Day's Journey Into Night, is set back off Pequot Avenue and obscured by tall hedges.
The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center is located out of sight, on a dirt road off a sharp corner on Route 213 and it looks more like a farm or a reconstituted Impressionism colony.
But now the Monte Cristo and the O'Neill are moving center stage.
Last year, the O'Neill created the position of director of community outreach and tapped Chicago native but New York-based playwright Sophia Chapadjiev for the role. Chapadjiev has leapt at the opportunity, setting up workshops in several area high schools, including Waterford High, instructing teenagers in the ancient art of writing plays.
Many of the students in the workshop will be submitting plays to be worked on at the Young Playwrights Festival to be held in May.
"We wanted Sophia to maybe start setting up some workshops in the local schools," said Jill A. Mauritz, the O'Neill's general manager, "but she has really run with this."
She's also been getting the Monte Cristo Cottage into the act.
"We'd like to turn this into more of an education center," she said. "Eugene O'Neill was a real person and this is where he lived."
The Monte Cristo, which is inconspicuously set on a bluff about 60 yards off Pequot Avenue in New London, belonged to O'Neill's father, the actor James O'Neill.
The elder O'Neill, who is buried in New London, became famous for the role of Edmund Dantes in the theatrical version of Dumas' melodramatic novel The Count of Monte Cristo.
The O'Neills spent summers at the small cottage, which the notoriously cheap James starkly furnished with prefabricated railings and wares.
Well before he became the only American dramatist to win the Nobel Prize, Eugene was a reporter for the New London Telegraph, who delighted in writing poetic versions of news stories, without supplying trivial things like names and times.
"He was always more interested in the descriptions," Chapadjiev said.
Setting a precedent for future New London reporters, O'Neill preferred to spend his time at the bar, specifically the place now occupied by The Dutch Tavern.
O'Neill, it is said, hated New London as much as people in the city hated the trouble-making young writer. Nevertheless, he returned to the city for Long Day's Journey Into Night, his posthumously published classic.
The play is set in the living room of Monte Cristo, with its view of the stairs, and depicts the numbness of the unfortunate Tyrone family.
"It's really haunting," Chapadjiev said.
On an early morning late last month, Gay Collins' English classes from Waterford High, who are studying O'Neill, got a tour of the cottage.
Chapadjiev had the students picture the fabled room in their minds as she read along the stage directions in Long Day's Journey.
"This is really inspiring," said Laura Neff, a
junior.
Collins said she wanted to use the Monte Cristo "to awaken and reinforce the local connection to O'Neill," for her students.
"That's something that's important," she said. "A lot of the kids had no idea what the O'Neill Center is, or who Eugene O'Neill was."
Collins said, however, the Monte Cristo could be even more of an attraction for the area.
"The house should come to life," she noted.
Collins also is confident Chapadjiev will make improvements to the cottage.
The O'Neill Center bought the home in 1976 and began a restoration project as the house had fallen into disrepair.
Monte Cristo Cottage also underwent a renovation in 2004 and reopened in 2005.
Mauritz said the Monte Cristo is a linchpin in the O'Neill's efforts to reach out to the community, something that the center is excited about.
"Preston [Whiteway, the executive director] and I are single young people who live in New London," she said. "We'll be able to get out more, maybe more than staff who have families."
And Maurtiz said the O'Neill has been participating in events in downtown New London, as well as attending high school basketball games in Waterford.
And that visibility, both Mauritz and Chapadjiev assure, will start with the Monte Cristo.
"I tell the students," Chapadjiev said, "in between the walls of every house, there is a story."