[On 18 April, I reported on The Hairy Ape on Rick On Theater. Given the importance of Eugene O'Neill
to American and world theater, I think it’s worthwhile to have a look at some
reviews of a recent biography of the playwright, Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts (Yale University Press, 2014) by
Robert M. Dowling. Below are notices from the Washington
Post, Modern Drama, and the Wall Street Journal. At
the end, I’ve appended an essay by Dowling that appeared in the Hairy
Ape program at the Park Avenue Armory.
[Eugene Gladstone O’Neill (1888-1953) is the first (and so far only) U. S.
playwright to have won a Nobel Prize for Literature (1936). That he is still regarded as the country’s
foremost playwright, and has been since the Provincetown Players began to
present his plays in 1916, is reason enough for O’Neill to have been an
influence on many later playwrights like Tennessee Williams. Indeed, if the Provincetown had not broken
with the commercial pap then being offered in New York, and had it not started
presenting the experimental and innovative works of O’Neill, the American
theatre might not have been ready for Williams or his contemporaries and
successors when they came along.
[O’Neill, the son of the famous 19th-century
actor James O’Neill (1847-1920), known nationwide for his portrayal of the
Count of Monte Cristo, was born in New York and into the world of the
theatre. He learned the craft by direct
contact, but eschewed his father’s field and went off to experience life at
sea. O’Neill turned to writing because he
was confined to a sanatorium for months in 1912-13 when he contracted
tuberculosis and he spent the time thinking about his life. When he was released in 1913, he began
writing plays, mostly about life at sea, and in 1916, he joined with a group of
amateur artists from New York’s Greenwich Village who took their notions to
Provincetown, Massachusetts, and launched their company with productions of
O’Neill’s sea plays. He and the troupe
were an almost immediate success and they moved back to New York and later that year, established themselves in
Greenwich Village, the bohemian art center of the city and the country.
[O’Neill debuted on Broadway in 1920 with Beyond the Horizon and his career as the preeminent playwright in the
United States was launched. O’Neill became
world-famous, the first U.S. dramatist to attain an international reputation. At the end of 1931, Mourning Becomes Electra opened in New York accompanied by
extraordinary press attention (including a Time cover). From that point on, no
theatre student or would-be stage artist of any level could be immune from
O’Neill’s influence to one degree or another.]
“BOOK WORLD: BIOGRAPHY LOOKS BEYOND THE
DEMONS
THAT TORMENTED AN AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHT”
by Wendy Smith
Eugene O’Neill:
A Life in Four Acts by Robert M. Dowling,
Yale; 569 pp.; $35
Robert M. Dowling’s thoughtful book restores balance to the
slightly skewed 21st-century reputation of America’s greatest playwright. The
ubiquity on world stages of Eugene O’Neill’s three crowning achievements — “The
Iceman Cometh,” “Long Day’s Journey into Night” and “A Moon for the Misbegotten”
— has led to a narrow perception of him as the grimly naturalistic purveyor of
a desolate worldview formed by his horrific family history. These late-career
masterpieces have overshadowed the many groundbreaking works that preceded
them, fostering the notion that O’Neill was exclusively concerned with his
internal drama.
On the contrary, Dowling reminds us, O’Neill’s plays
consistently voice his lifelong contempt for American materialism, imperialism,
racism and puritanism. His empathy for the oppressed and outcast is evident in
the seafaring dramas that first made his reputation in 1916-17. He believed
audiences wanted more than trivial, phony entertainment, and he was proved
right in the years between the two world wars, when his innovations in
theatrical form and content gave him a string of unexpected hits. Dowling
selectively highlights key moments that demonstrate the playwright’s “ripple
effect . . . on American theater and culture,” dividing his narrative into four
“acts” linking O’Neill’s experiences with historic shifts in American theater.
The first act depicts a childhood shadowed by his mother’s
drug addiction and his father’s perpetual touring in “The Count of Monte
Cristo,” a profitable, artistically negligible melodrama. Dowling sensibly
relies on Louis Sheaffer’s pioneering research in “O’Neill: Son and Playwright”
(1968) and “O’Neill: Son and Artist” (1973) for most biographical facts. But
while Sheaffer sees O’Neill’s relationship with his parents as central to his
life and work, Dowling contends that O’Neill’s turn to playwriting was part of
the process of “abandoning the child-self that had possessed him for too long.”
In the book’s second part, Dowling spotlights O’Neill’s
collaboration with the Provincetown Players, a Greenwich Village group that
shared his desire to smash outworn theatrical conventions. The playwright had
two successful Broadway productions during this period (“Beyond the Horizon” in
1920 and “Anna Christie” in 1921 ), but Dowling focuses on his downtown
experiments with effects such as the use of colored lights and beating drums.
He argues persuasively that O’Neill primarily was interested in discovering new
ways to move and challenge audiences. His explorations were triumphantly
justified in 1920 by “The Emperor Jones,” the first popular American play to
make use of European expressionist techniques (such as symbolic scenes and
sound effects to portray emotional states) and to star an African American
actor supported by a white company.
O’Neill continued to mingle theatrical and social
provocation in his productions of the 1920s and early ‘30s, refusing to
bowdlerize his material to suit contemporary prejudices or commercial
imperatives. He didn’t have to, Dowling demonstrates in the third part of the
book , which follows O’Neill from the Village to the Broadway theater as it succumbed
to the revolution he and his comrades had wrought in the little theater
movement.
The downtown shows were radical. “The Hairy Ape” (1922)
dramatized working-class rage. “All God’s Chillun Got Wings” (1924) portrayed
an interracial marriage. “Desire Under the Elms” (1924) made brilliant use of
symbolist scenery and lighting to make palpable the play’s themes, but critics
noticed only its sexual frankness, which led to censorship battles across the
country. “The Great God Brown” employed the ancient device of masked actors to
illuminate contemporary psychological conflicts.
O’Neill’s Broadway productions were just as radical. “Strange
Interlude” (1928) aimed for the freedom of a novel, voicing its characters’
private thoughts in a new kind of soliloquy. “Marco Millions” (1928) satirized
Marco Polo as a Babbitt-like businessman interested only in making money. “Mourning
Becomes Electra” (1931) created an American equivalent for Greek tragedy by
relocating the Oresteia to Civil War-era New England. All were box office
successes. O’Neill had forced the commercial theater to accept him on his own
terms. The Nobel Prize in 1936 capped the decades of his greatest celebrity and
influence.
In the last section of the book, Dowling takes us from that
high point through the dark years of declining health that made it impossible
for O’Neill to write after 1943. “The Iceman Cometh,” which received mixed
reviews in 1946, and “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” which closed out of town in
1947, were the last plays produced while he was alive. O’Neill destroyed the
incomplete manuscripts of his 11-play cycle about the dire spiritual
consequences of Americans’ lust for success. He forbade publication of the
nakedly autobiographical “Long Day’s Journey into Night” until 25 years after
his death, which came in 1953.
Dowling covers this bleak period briefly. Although he
serviceably relates the major events in O’Neill’s life, including his three
marriages and struggle with alcoholism, readers looking for a comprehensive
biography would do better with Louis Sheaffer’s two volumes. What makes this
book a valuable complement to them is Dowling’s emphasis on the playwright’s
engagement with the world and the theater.
Glib journalists often condescend to O’Neill as someone who
spewed forth his personal demons in badly written plays that occasionally
turned out to be great almost by accident. Dowling reclaims him as a
self-conscious, committed artist who strove to break through the limits of
production and get as much of the human condition onstage as possible. The
freedom he seized and bequeathed to subsequent playwrights — from Arthur Miller
and Tennessee Williams to Tony Kushner and Sarah Ruhl — transformed the
American theater. Compelling though his tragic personal story is, that is the
more important story, perceptively recounted in “Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four
Acts.”
[Wendy Smith’s review appeared in the “Style” section
of the Washington
Post of 2 December 2014. Smith is a writer in New York who frequently
reviews books for The Washington Post.]
“EUGENE O’NEILL: A LIFE IN FOUR ACTS
BY ROBERT M. DOWLING (Review)”
by Alexander Pettit
University of North
Texas
Robert M. Dowling. Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts.
New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.
Pp. xiv + 569,
illustrated. $35.00 (Hb)
The storyline is well known. Born “in a goddamned hotel room”
in 1888 and fated (the word seems apt) to die in another one sixty-five years
later, Eugene O’Neill, in the intervening years, endured a mother’s indifference
and a father’s panicky fear of penury; survived tuberculosis; quit college,
read widely, and shipped out to sea; bludgeoned himself with drink; abandoned a
wife he barely knew and beat two whom he loved; treated two of his children
with biting cruelty; declined slowly and horribly, unable to write and battered
by emotional warfare; and, of course, made American drama do and mean things it
hadn’t previously done or meant, earning a Nobel Prize and several Pulitzers in
the process. O’Neill’s best biographers have found their tonal palettes
limited: their subject, the arch anti-sentimentalist, resists sentimental
representation by lending himself poorly to the roles of victim and scoundrel
and not at all to the role of hero. In a self-reflective summation at the end
of his impressive new biography, Robert M. Dowling defers to O’Neill’s third
wife, Carlotta Monterey O’Neill: “Don’t sentimentalize him . . . He was a
simple man. They make a lot of nonsense and mystery out of him. He was
interested only in writing his plays” (472).
Carlotta presumably intended to disparage mythopoeia, on the
one hand, and fancy-pants criticism on the other. She would have appreciated
Dowling’s lack of interest in either. Unlike Steven A. Black, whose 1999 biography
rose and fell on the relative strength of its psychoanalytic readings, Dowling
has no particular version of O’Neill to peddle. Nor is he interested in the
juxtaposing of voluminous oral histories and trenchant close readings practised
by Louis Sheaffer, in his two-volume biography of 1968–73. Dowling’s passages
on the written texts are concise summaries, punctuated occasionally by brief,
pointed observations framed in sensible prose. At first, there seems something
timid about his even-handedness, but the impression abates as one realizes that
Dowling regards the biographer as principally an archivist, secondarily a
stylist, and only incidentally a critic. Indeed, the few occasions on which he
favours argument over exposition seem misplaced. Notable is an intermittent
inquiry into O’Neill’s putative desire to write novels rather than plays. The
evidence is compelling, but this seems more the stuff of the essay than the
biography.
The years since the publication of Black’s biography have
been busy ones in O’Neill studies, and this book’s currency is conspicuous
among its merits. As Dowling notes, his is the first life to benefit from the
discovery of a copy of the autobiographical, one-act Exorcism, which he presents as “a prequel of sorts to Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (77),
thus making O’Neill the autobiographer easier to discern and less beholden to
inference than he had been. Dowling’s mastery of canonical and recent
scholarship – as recent as four months before the book’s release, in one
instance – is always evident. An attentiveness to William Davies King’s
post-1999 work on O’Neill’s wives, for example, allows Dowling to flesh out
episodes that are necessarily sketchy in prior biographies.
When Dowling notes that he has introduced “a wealth of
previously overlooked materials” (21), he gets to the nub of the matter: one
marvels at the athleticism with which he has exhumed and incorporated
documentary materials housed in government offices, regional archives, private
collections, and academic repositories. A judgment until recently sealed in a
county courthouse suggests that O’Neill may not have legally married his second
wife, Agnes Boulton. In an unpublished 1928 treatise, O’Neill regretted the
preference for music over “mechanical sound” that had prevented some of his
plays from being produced in a suitably “modern”
manner (359; emphasis in the original). An interview from the Sheaffer-O’Neill
Collection has a young Marlon Brando fumbling through an audition for The Iceman Cometh and declaring the play’s
author “nuts,” within earshot of O’Neill (451). According to a first-hand
account, Carlotta Monterey O’Neill violated her husband’s injunction against
prompt publication of Long Day’s Journey
into Night in order to thwart the calumny of “whore[s]” who might otherwise
have claimed after her death – tenuously, I’d think, given Carlotta’s
well-known talent as a gate-keeper – to have bedded O’Neill during the play’s
composition (481). And so on, marvellously.
Dowling’s accounts of O’Neill’s opening nights, the best on
record, are enlivened by reviews, interviews, and anecdotes, many of them
unfamiliar. His treatment of the premiere of All God’s Chillun Got Wings demands special notice. Dowling
reanimates the “racially charged firestorm” (275) by reproducing, in
provocative counterpoint, the commentary of respondents black and white,
thoughtful and hateful, witty and pious, all grappling passionately with a play
that still challenges us. I have never read a more engaging history of a play’s
reception, and I find myself hoping that the book’s paraprofessional readers
will recognize how much deeper than the Internet the historical researcher must
dig and will appreciate the melding of honed instinct and time-killing
commitment that this work demands.
Sometimes documentary inclusiveness works against Dowling. I
would love to believe that Orson Welles predicted Oona O’Neill’s marriage to
Charlie Chaplin after reading her palm. Dowling’s crediting of the account to a
celebrity bio doesn’t allow me to, however, nor does the more circumspect
representation of the alleged incident in that source. The assertion that Babe
Ruth attended the premiere of The Iceman
Cometh falls short for a similar reason, although, in this instance, the
odds seem a bit better. But these are the sorts of quibbles that one feels
obligated to indulge on such occasions, and I indulge them here reluctantly.
This remains a book to celebrate: a master class in research methods, an
exuberant acknowledgement of the scholar’s obligation to delight as well as
instruct, and an arresting life of a man who, as Carlotta Monterey O’Neill’s
appraisal suggests, cared little for living. Dowling says that he has written
with a “general audience” partly in mind (20–21), and I suspect he will reach
that elusive demographic without alienating more discriminating readers. The
analogy to O’Neill should be obvious.
[This book review was
originally published in Modern Drama [Toronto] 58:3
(2015). Alexander is the University Distinguished Teaching Professor of English
at the University of North Texas. He
specializes in the study and teaching of modern drama and has recently
published essays on Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Luis Valdez, Caryl
Churchill, and American Indian drama. ]
* *
* *
“A FEARFULLY
IMPERFECT LIFE”
by Robert Brustein
Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts
By Robert M. Dowling
Yale, 569 pages, $35
‘The intellect of man is forced to choose,” wrote Yeats, “perfection
of the life or of the work.” Eugene O’Neill chose the
work. A few of his biographers, regrettably, choose his life.
The qualities we normally associate with the art of Eugene O’Neill are
intensity, repetition and length. After his early one-act ”sea sketches,”
inspired by the playwright’s own youthful days at sea, O’Neill rarely
wrote a play under three hours – “Strange Interlude” (1923) and a number
of others can take much longer. “Mourning Becomes Electra” (1931) is a 12-act trilogy,
and his unfinished cycle, “A Tale of Possessors Dispossessed,” was
designed to be a marathon of nine plays, performed on nine successive
evenings. Neither of his two late masterpieces, “The Iceman Cometh” (first
performed in 1946) and “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (first
performed in1956) are meant to be performed in less than four hours
(though Jonathan Miller’s brisk, semi-farcical rendition of the latter cut it
almost in half). Except for an uncharacteristically late one-acter, “Hughie,”
composed in 1941, virtually all of O’Neill’s mature plays are
written in at least four acts.
Robert M. Dowling’s biography of O’Neill is
subtitled “A Life in Four Acts,” and like his subject’s
plays it is also very long, intense and repetitious. Some might ask why this
book was necessary, given that O’Neill has already been the subject
of a number of fine critical biographies, most notably those of the
late Arthur Gelb and his wife, Barbara – “O’Neill” (1962) and “O’Neill: Life with
Monte Cristo” (2000), a revised version of their earlier work.
Mr. Dowling makes a few references to
the Gelbs in his footnotes, in addition to minimal nods
towards other critical studies. More than critics or scholars, however, he
prefers the company of librarians, curators and archivists. He consults primary
sources whenever possible (letters, interviews and especially manuscripts from
the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library) and adds a mountain
of fresh biographical facts to those already known, exposing virtually every
incident in O’Neill’s 65-year life to microscopic scrutiny.
As a result, it seems as if we are being told a great
deal more about the playwright than we actually want to know – perhaps because
we are being insufficiently instructed about why we would want to know it. Mr. Dowling has
performed a monumental feat of investigative research. Virtually
every aspect of O’Neill’s daily life, right down to his bathing
habits and the letterheads on his stationery, comes under discussion. Would
anyone complain if a biographer had uncovered as much detail about
Shakespeare’s life?
I think there might indeed be some protest, if the
Shakespeare biographer had fully explored daily events and only synopsized the
works. Because Mr. Dowling largely reduces O’Neill’s plays to
plot summaries and their productions to incidents in the biography of
the playwright, we rarely feel that his overstuffed satchels of facts contain
anything that could enhance or clarify O’Neill’s art.
Another problem with Mr. Dowling’s approach is that the
playwright’s personal history is insufficiently various to keep the general
reader from nodding. Much of his life seems to have been a cycle
of illness, depression, fistfights, drunken debauches, rehabilitations, wife
beatings, extramarital affairs, divorces, suicide attempts, recriminations and
remorse. When asked by an interviewer why he writes about O’Neill, Mr. Dowling replied:
“Because I am an Irish-American male who grew up in Connecticut and
New York and feels at home in dive bars. I also love plays. And if
they’re set in dive bars, all the better.” This suggests that Mr. Dowling is
attracted to O’Neillmainly because he identifies with the ethnic lineup at
Jimmy the Priest’s saloon, the Fulton Street dive that inspired “The Iceman
Cometh.” But apart from an affection for plays with boozy settings (he names
every pub where O’Neill ever lifted a glass and every brand
of bourbon he ever consumed), Mr. Dowling never seems to probe very
deeply into the creative soul of his subject.
Mr. Dowling’s species of alcoholic biography is
characterized by generous blow-by-blow descriptions of the innumerable battles O’Neill had
with his three wives and his abject failures as a husband and father.
His first wife, Kathleen Jenkins, mother of Eugene Jr., divorced him
because he was having an affair with another woman. O’Neill had a similar
odi-amo (love-hate) relationship with his second wife, Agnes Boulton, mother of
Shane and of Oona O’Neill. Agnes divorced him after he reportedly punched
her in the face and threw a novel she was writing into the
fire. His last marriage, with the snobbish, anti-Semitic actress Carlotta
Monterey, was a dustup from beginning to end, though it admittedly
constitutes the most lively portions of the book.
O’Neill’s extramarital activities drove Carlotta crazy. The
playwright once leveled a gun at her, and she went at him with a butcher
knife. (He later tried to get her committed to an insane asylum.) But somehow
the marriage lasted, and Carlotta became the major caretaker of his talent, making
the wise decision to produce “Long Day’s Journey,” first in Sweden,
then on Broadway, soon after his death in 1953, despite O’Neill’s
stipulation that it be withheld for 25 years. The dedication of “Long Day’s
Journey” to Carlotta – “I mean it as a tribute to your love and
tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my
dead at last and write this play” – is among the most tender descriptions
extant of a literary marriage, even though this one was marked by
constant brawls.
O’Neill’s relationships with his children were even more
disordered. He never wanted them, and he didn’t like them – his Dalmatian dogs
were treated with more affection. He told his daughter Oona, a would-be
actress, that if she ever went to Hollywood he would refuse to see her again
because she was “trading on my name.” (She responded by marrying the
54-year-old Charlie Chaplin when she was barely 18.) Although Oona ended up in Switzerland
rather than Hollywood, O’Neill kept his promise. He never saw her
again, or any of his eight grandchildren.
As for his two boys, Shane was a deadbeat,
addicted to heroin, while Eugene Jr. made some effort to follow in his
father’s footsteps by teaching classical drama at Yale and publishing the
invaluable anthology “Complete Greek Drama” with Whitney J. Oates. The two sons
rewarded O’Neill with the unusual paternal distinction of both
committing suicide. (Shane jumped out of a window, and EugeneJr.
cut his wrists, Roman-fashion, in a bathtub.)
O’Neill may have been aggressive toward his wives and
indifferent to his offspring, but the closest relationships reflected in his
plays are with the older generation of his family – his father, mother and
older brother, Jamie. His father, James O’Neill Sr., after sharing
the American stage with Edwin Booth in classic Shakespeare plays,
made the fateful decision in midcareer to spend the rest of his
professional life playing the lucrative leading role in ”The
Count of Monte Cristo.” According to his son, his father always regretted this
sell-out (“What the hell was it I wanted to buy, I wonder”). The roiling family
resentments – O’Neill’s bitterness toward his father for not sending him
to a proper sanitorium to cure his tuberculosis, Jamie’s love-hate
for his brother’s talent, the family’s despair over the drug habit of their
mother – form the autobiographical basis for what is universally considered the
greatest play in the American language, “A Long Day’s Journey
Into Night.”
O’Neill had written many semi-autobiographical works
before this, particularly about his failed love affairs and marriages. None
possessed such a burning capacity for self-revelation. Even the names
of O’Neill’s dramatic characters reveal some family secrets. All the
Tyrones’ Christian names are the same as those of the O’Neill family –
except for the author, who calls himself Edmund. As has often been observed,
Edmund is also the name of Eugene’s brother who died in infancy,
and the playwright may have been expressing here a desire never to
have been born. But Edmund (Edmond Dantes) is also the title character in ”The
Count of Monte Cristo,” so intaking that name, O’Neill may have
been thinking not only about his own extinction but unconsciously about his
uneasy relationship to his father’s career.
Mr. Dowling’s obstinate biographical approach is most
compelling while discussing this extraordinary autobiographical play. Elsewhere
“Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts” often seems
irrelevant and unvaried. As a result, the book may strike one as ascholarly
version of today’s celebrity gossip, where, instead of celebrating the quality
and content of an artist’s or performer’s work, the media publicize every
childhood illness, every marital failing, every false step, every drunken
quarrel, every displaced bra strap, every nude photograph, drowning us in a sea
of irrelevant scandal. There is no question that such material has its entertainment
value. It is also a distraction from the true nature and purpose of
art. O’Neill used his disturbed personal experience in his
plays, but unlike his biographer, he knew how to use this material selectively.
His intellect clearly chose perfection of the art over a fearfully
imperfect life. Robert M. Dowling has done prodigious research
on his subject, but we must continue our hunt for the real O’Neill in his
plays.
[The review above first ran in
the Wall
Street Journal [New York] on 8 November
2014 (sec. C). Robert Brustein,
longtime theater critic of the New Republic, is an emeritus professor at Harvard and the founder of the Yale
Repertory Theatre. (New Haven, Connecticut) and the American Repertory Theatre (Cambridge, Massachusetts). His most recent book is Winter Passages.]
* *
* *
“EUGENE
O’NEILL’S THE HAIRY APE:
A CLOSE
ENCOUTER WITH THE SUPER-NATURAL”
by Robert M. Dowling
March 9, 1922,
New York City: After the final curtain had fallen on the premiere of The
Hairy Ape at the Provincetown Playhouse, a cramped theater space in the
heart of Greenwich Village, the audience leapt to its feet. Louis Wolheim, who
played the anti-hero Robert “Yank” Smith, received a deafening ovation, and the
packed auditorium then echoed with cries of “Author! Author!” Their shouts
carried on after the house lights went up; but once it became clear that the
“author” wouldn’t be appearing, everyone slowly headed for the exit, still
eagerly glancing over their shoulders for a potential last-minute, delayed
entrance by playwright Eugene O’Neill.
A glowing New York Times review was printed
the next morning, in which the theater’s auditorium was described as “packed to
the doors with astonishment . . . as scene after scene unfolded.” Though the Times’
critic, Alexander Woollcott, contended that O’Neill’s script was “uneven,” he
nonetheless acknowledged that “it seems rather absurd to fret overmuch about
the undisciplined imagination of a young playwright towering so conspicuously
above the milling mumbling crowd of playwrights who have no imagination at all.”
O’Neill’s mélange of dialect writing, his melding of
dramatic techniques, and his terrifying indictment of the industrial world
arguably made The Hairy Ape the most revolutionary American
play yet performed on a stage. The Hairy Ape, his friend and
future producer Kenneth Macgowan breathlessly declared after attending its
opening, “leaps out at you from the future.”
When the thirty-three year old playwright first read his
script to the Provincetown Players, the avant-garde “little theater” company
who’d discovered his talent back in 1916, he did so without theatricality or
embellishment. But after slowly muttering the last lines, he stood up, faced
the assembly and shouted, “This is one the bastards [uptown on Broadway] can’t
do!” Stunned by the play’s bold originality, the Players all cheered in
agreement. Of course they soon realized that the commercial “bastards” would,
inevitably, produce the play. And when it opened on April 17, 1922, at the
Plymouth Theatre on Broadway, O’Neill’s name shone upon the marquee in electric
lights as a heady draw for uptown theatergoers. This fact alone was an
extraordinary leap for an American playwright—the marquee was where the star’s
name went, never the playwright’s. Broadway plays had nearly always been
written and produced with moneymaking stars in mind, and their authors were
principally viewed as hired guns rather than artists.
The Hairy Ape builds upon the thematic structure
of O’Neill’s pioneering “race play” The Emperor Jones, which also
enjoyed a popular run on Broadway after its 1920 downtown premiere. Each takes
place over eight scenes, during which the protagonists are incrementally stripped
of their grandiose delusions. Of the two, however, The Hairy Ape notably
contains a more all-inclusive catalogue of O’Neill’s grievances against the
unstoppable tide of technological “progress”—class conflict, materialism,
alienation from the self and society, dehumanization, and disillusionment. “I
have tried to dig deep in it,” O’Neill said of his newest achievement, “to
probe in the shadows of the soul of man bewildered by the disharmony of his
primitive pride and individualism at war with the mechanistic development of
society.”
The Hairy Ape was bestowed rave notices after
both the Greenwich Village and Broadway productions, yet much of the
after-hours barroom chatter revolved around the play’s uncertain style and its
origins. New York’s drama critics had vaguely heard of European expressionism,
but not many had actually witnessed it aside from O’Neill’s The Emperor
Jones (which few at the time identified as expressionism) and the
Hungarian Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom (1909), a play just
translated into English and produced by New York’s Theatre Guild the previous
summer. (In 1945, Liliom returned to Broadway
as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical adaptation Carousel.)
Even after The Emperor Jones, O’Neill was still
largely identified with his naturalistic dramas based on life at sea, which as
a young man he’d experienced firsthand. The Pulitzer Prize was awarded to
O’Neill’s naturalistic sea play “Anna Christie” in the same
year The Hairy Ape appeared, and two years earlier he’d won
his first Pulitzer for Beyond the Horizon, also a work of
naturalism. The school of literary naturalism is a grittier form of realism
(the two terms are often mistakenly interchanged), which believably renders the
philosophy that an individual’s fate is determined by biological, historical,
circumstantial, and psychological forces beyond their control. But by the
1920s, O’Neill had found naturalism too limiting for his imaginative scope.
“Naturalism is too easy,” he said in 1924. “It would, for
instance, be a perfect cinch to go on writing Anna Christies all my
life. I could always be sure to pay the rent then….Shoving a lot of human
beings on a stage and letting them say the identical things in a theatre they
would say in a drawing room or a saloon does not necessarily make for
naturalness. It’s what those men and women do not say that usually is most
interesting.” Hence his adoption of, or semi-conscious appropriation of
expressionism, a method that originated with Central and Northern European
dramatists such as Molnár, Germany’s Frank Wedekind, and Sweden’s August
Strindberg (O’Neill’s self-styled mentor). Expressionist plays depict grotesque
exaggerations of character and setting in order to represent distorted
psychological states. Also unlike naturalistic plays, they “express” inner
conflict through fantastical staging: “King Lear is given a storm to rant in,”
one of the Provincetown Players explained, whereas “the Expressionist hero in
anger walks on a street, and all the perspectives of the walls, windows and
doors are awry and tortured.”
O’Neill’s true innovation, though, was to combine the two.
“It isn’t Expressionism,” he remarked of The Hairy Ape. “It isn’t
Naturalism. It is a blend—and, as far as my knowledge goes—a uniquely
successful one.” (He nevertheless instructed that the set designs “must be in
the Expressionistic method.”) It was this merger, what he later termed
“super-naturalism,” that would prove to have the longest lasting impact on
theater history. Throughout what O’Neill called the “Mad Twenties,” he kept
working in this style with plays like All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1923), Desire
Under the Elms (1924), The Great God Brown (1925),
and Strange Interlude (1927), which won him a third Pulitzer. The
Hairy Ape thus signaled O’Neill’s complete transformation from an
unruly naturalist to one of the consummate avant-garde modernists of the 1920s,
and ultimately led to his becoming, in 1936, a Nobel laureate.
As late as 1946, after O’Neill’s writing career was cut
short by an incapacitating, ultimately fatal neurological disease, a reporter
asked him which of his plays he “liked the best.” He responded that this was
really two questions: which play he liked the best and which
he thought was the best. For the second question, he hedged a
bit, but named The Iceman Cometh (its Broadway premiere was
about to open). For the first, O’Neill was unequivocal: “I like The
Hairy Ape.”
[Robert M. Dowling, Eugene
O'Neill scholar and Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain,
is
the author of the new biography Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts, which was a
finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography in 2014. He participated in a panel discussion of “A Hairy Ape for the 21st Century” alongside director Richard Jones
and actor Bobby Cannavale of the Armory production of The Hairy Ape. This essay was originally written for Jones’s
Old Vic mounting of O’Neill’s play.]
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