Hughie by Eugene O’Neill

"Hughie," one of Eugene O’Neill’s last works, takes place in a seedy New York hotel lobby at 3:00am on a hot night in the summer of 1928. Erie Smith, a small-time gambler, down on his luck and at the end of his rope, shows up after a three-day bender, brought on by the death of “Hughie,” a night clerk at the hotel and always a willing listener to Erie’s yarns of his life’s imaginary successes. But Hughie is gone now, and Erie has only his dull, disinterested replacement to listen to him as he tries to boast and lie his way through his grief, loneliness, and despair. Only now, with Hughie dead, a guy he always considered a dope and a sucker, does he realize the desolate emptiness of his life. in this powerful, haunting piece, as in The Iceman Cometh, O’Neill draws a heartbreaking portrait of longing and loss, of the loneliness of the human condition, and the desperate hunger to overcome it.