Unfortunately I have not read the work of O'Neill that you present us, @honeydue (nor seen any film based on it or its theatrical staging). Thanks to your detained comment, I realize that I would like very much to read it. I'll see if I can get it online, the only possible way to access that work.
I think it would not be unfounded to say that there is a marked autobiographical feature in it, not only because of alcoholism, but because of something more ungraspable (the word that comes to me): the awareness of impossibility, which is very present in all a generation of British writers of the first half of the twentieth century, and more llá (I think without a doubt in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Somerset Maughan and Samuel Beckett, for example, saving the differences between them).
I think the 'impossible dream' ("pipe dream?") Is an experience inherent in modern man. One lives in a conscious way, but the altered states or the "artificial paradises," as Baudelaire called him, are the most propitious.
I appreciate your good post, @honeydue.