Overrated Eugene O’Neill has been credited by critics and scholars with introducing modernist themes into American drama and rescuing our theater from the claptrap that dominated the commercial stage since before the turn of the twentieth century. When he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1936, his reputation rested on six plays: The Emperor Jones (1920), The Hairy Ape (1922), Desire Under the Elms (1924), The Great God Brown (1926), and, most particularly, Strange Interlude (1928) and Mourning Becomes Electra (1931).

But all his so-called new themes are derivative. Echoes of Ibsen and Strindberg are everywhere in his work, debased by O’Neill’s tin ear for dialogue. The dialect in The Emperor Jones might have come from a minstrel show. Equally artificial is the tough talk of Yank, the stoker in The Hairy Ape , which ends with one of the most unintentionally humorous scenes in all of serious drama, when Yank is crushed to death in the embrace of a gorilla.

Strange Interlude is a nine-act soap opera; Mourning Becomes Electra , O’Neill’s version of The Oresteia , set in the aftermath of the American Civil War, is the pseudo-Freudian and melodramatic account of the sordid crimes of a particularly unpleasant family.

O’Neill was aware of his shortcomings. Near the end of his life he finally wrote a masterpiece, about his own family this time, the posthumously produced Long Day’s Journey Into Night . In it Edmund, the stand-in for O’Neill, is told by his father that he has the makings of a poet. Edmund replies, “The makings of a poet? No, I’m afraid I’m like the guy who’s always panhandling for a smoke; he hasn’t even got the makings, he’s only got the habit.”

Underrated Like Captain Ahab, many critics lack the low-enjoying power. They prefer tragedies to comedies and are always likely to overpraise plays of high seriousness. But the best American plays written during the twenties and thirties were comedies, plays of low seriousness.

I was tempted to nominate as my most underrated playwright George Kelly, of the family that included Walter, Grace, and Jack. Kelly was the author of two comedies, The Show-off and The Torch Bearers , that reveal him to be not only a skillful entertainer but also an astute, often acerbic, social critic. Or I might have chosen George S. Kaufman, who alone ( The Butter and Egg Man ) or in collaboration ( You Can’t Take It With You and The Man Who Came to Dinner ) wrote wiseacre comedies that set a new standard for wit in the commercial drama.

But I finally settled on John Murray and Alien Boretz, the authors of Room Service , one of the most perfect farces ever written by an American, or by anyone else for that matter.

My admiration for Room Service , which ran for 500 performances at the Cort Theater