Peter Sellars Character Analysis

Peter Sellars is a director. In his interview, he compares Eugene O’Neill’s tragic play Long Day’s Journey into Night to the riots. In the play, a self-centered patriarch becomes wrapped up in cultural ideals of success at the expense of his family, leaving them to suffer. Sellars sees the riots as a similarly misguided act of self-sabotage on the part of white LA residents. Much of Los Angeles’s affluent white population, he suggests sees the riots as separate from their own lives. But he suggests that in reality, their lives are connected to the Black people living in LA and participating in the riots by virtue of living in the same city. Sellars uses the metaphor of a burning house to prove his point, noting how a person isn’t safe if the fire is in the basement and they’re on the top floor, since the fire will inevitably spread until it destroys the whole house (suggesting that the issues Black LA residents suffer will eventually affect white residents). Sellars sees O’Neill’s play and the riots as examples of the failure of the American dream.