In seventh grade, my English teacher, Mr. Grubbs, suggested that I
audition for a local revival of “Take Me Along,” the 1959 musical
adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness!” He recommended that I
read the original, so I checked the book out of the school library—a
small hardcover with a green-and-orange dust jacket, which included that
play and two others, “Beyond The Horizon” and “All God’s Chillun Got
Wings.” I was curious to find out who this Eugene O’Neill person was.
I’d never heard of her.
Nothing prepared me for what I found in that little volume. “Ah,
Wilderness!,” ironically, I could take or leave, but the other two plays
had a shattering effect on my young mind. The force of the writing made
me feel as though I were on the receiving end of an untamed blast of
feeling and thought. O’Neill’s characters were ugly, twisted, unhinged,
embarrassing. The emotional stakes in the plays were enormous and
unmanageable, which—for a budding adolescent—meant that they felt entirely
normal. There was a kind of primordial fierceness to the worlds the characters
inhabited, and a homeliness to the language they used. They talked and
behaved as though their psychological skins had been ripped off.
“All God’s Chillun Got Wings” tells the story of an interracial couple
whose love for each other cannot transcend the cultural stigma that
their families, friends, and they themselves place on their
relationship. Jim, a black man, dreams of becoming a lawyer, but
repeatedly sabotages himself when taking the bar exam, out of an innate
sense of racial inferiority. As years of confusion and failure pile up,
Ella, his partner, who is white, begins to fear that her skin is slowly
turning black and starts to carry on conversations with an African mask
that the couple keeps hanging on the wall of their home, accusing it of
tormenting her. (In his stage directions, O’Neill describes the mask as
growing progressively larger in each succeeding scene.) She eventually
goes mad, at one point attempting to kill Jim with a carving knife.
“Beyond the Horizon” also tracks a young love that turns sour, as unmet
expectations and unforeseen challenges pile up in the course of a series
of months and years. These frustrations create a volatile mass of
unspoken resentment that explodes in a series of confrontations,
stripping away any veneer of domestic tranquility:
RUTH: What do you think—living with a man like you—having to suffer
all the time because you’ve never been man enough to work and do
things like other people. But no! You never own up to that. You think
you’re so much better than other folks, with your college education,
where you never learned a thing, and always reading your stupid books
instead of working. I s’pose you think I ought to be proud to be
your wife—a poor ignorant thing like me! [Fiercely.] But I’m not.
I hate it! I hate the sight of you! Oh, if I’d only known! If I hadn’t
been such a fool to listen to your cheap, silly, poetry talk that you
learned out of books! If I could have seen how you were in your true
self—like you are now—I’d have killed myself before I’d have married
you!
I grew up outside fairly provincial Hartford, Connecticut, and reading
O’Neill was a jolt to my consciousness. The ferocity of his plays
overwhelmed me; his untethered passions and imagination allowed mine to
be untethered, too.
During the ensuing months and years, I became an O’Neill fanatic. I read
everything that he ever wrote and saved up my modest weekly allowance to
purchase studies of his work and books about his life—a biography as
dramatic as any of his plays. In high school, I somehow convinced my
parents to allow me to attend a weekend-long conference, in Boston,
organized by the Eugene O’Neill Society, where I was one of about a
hundred attendees—probably the only one there younger than forty, and
certainly the only one under age sixteen. In college, I produced and
directed O’Neill plays, and after graduation I briefly relocated to Los
Angeles for the chance to study with José Quintero, the great O’Neill
director whose legendary productions of “The Iceman Cometh,” at Circle
in the Square, and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” on Broadway, both in
1956, effectively cemented O’Neill’s reputation as America’s greatest
playwright.
When I finally landed in New York, twenty years ago, my first job was as
a research assistant for Arthur and Barbara Gelb, royalty in the small
but potent world of O’Neill obsessives; the Gelbs had been writing
devotedly about O’Neill for half a century. Even after establishing my
own career, I continued to help them with their work, right up until the
completion of the recently published book “By Women Possessed: A Life
of Eugene
O’Neill,”
their third (third!) and final full-length biography of the playwright.
(Arthur passed away in 2016; Barbara followed him last year.) O’Neill
engenders this kind of devotion. Quintero returned to him again and
again, often with his two most famous collaborators, the actors Colleen
Dewhurst and Jason Robards. Since Quintero’s death, in 1999, the O’Neill
directing mantle has been taken up by Robert Falls and Ivo van Hove,
both of whom have mounted numerous searing productions of O’Neill’s
plays. As Quintero once said, almost by way of surrender, “Once he gets
hold of you, he will not let go.”
Although most associate O’Neill with his relatively quiet, brooding
final works—“Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” “The Iceman Cometh,” and “A
Moon for the Misbegotten”—these plays were written after he won the
Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1936, and their style bears little
resemblance to the lurching, wild-eyed experimentalism of his earlier
work. In mostly forgotten dramas like “The Great God Brown,” “Dynamo,”
“Marco Millions,” “The Fountain,” and “Strange Interlude,” he employed a
host of brazenly stylized devices—shrinking walls, beating drums, spoken
thoughts, ghosts—in an attempt to resurrect the spirit of grandeur,
ritual, and catharsis of the Greeks. These emotionally savage works
represent the early adolescence of American theatre, and are often
thought of as such—insufferable, overwrought, cringe-worthy, and best
forgotten. This is an injustice, both to O’Neill and to ourselves, as
anyone who’s ever seen an unflinching production of one of these plays
can attest.
In “The Great God Brown,” the characters use masks when they are
interacting with the world, removing them only in private, when they
feel safe enough to expose their true selves:
DION: [With a suffering bewilderment.] Why am I afraid to dance, I
who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter? Why am I
afraid to live, I who love life and and the beauty of flesh and the
living colors of earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid of love, I who
love love? Why am I afraid, I who am not afraid? Why must I pretend to
scorn in order to pity? Why must I hide myself in self-contempt in
order to understand? Why must I be so ashamed of my strength, so proud
of my weakness? Why must I live in a cage like a criminal, defying and
hating, I who love peace and friendship? [Clasping his hands above
in supplication.] Why was I born without a skin, O God, that I must
wear armor in order to touch or to be touched? [A second’s pause of
waiting silence—then he suddenly claps his mask over his face again,
with a gesture of despair, and his voice becomes bitter and
sardonic.] Or rather, Old Graybeard, why the devil was I ever born
at all?
“There is no body of work in America that is as expressionistic,” the
Wooster Group’s Elizabeth LeCompte told me, of O’Neill’s plays. “The id
is right out on top.” In the nineties, she and her company created
indelible mountings of two early works by O’Neill, “The Emperor Jones”
and “The Hairy Ape.” Both productions were theatrically mesmerizing and
sang with a kind of vernacular, rough-hewn musicality that seemed
entirely in keeping with the playwright’s vision. “I saw both pieces as
music-driven and was surprised so little was mentioned in the press
about it,” she told me. “Both plays are written phonetically, and we
approached the language—the syllables—as notes of music.”
In “The Hairy Ape,” O’Neill sets the early scenes of the play “in the
bowels of a ship,” where “the room is crowded with men, shouting,
cursing, laughing, singing—a confused, inchoate uproar swelling into a
sort of unity, a meaning—the bewildered, furious, baffled defiance of a
beast in a cage.” O’Neill’s evocative stage directions are pugnacious
challenges to any director who is brave enough to accept them. In one
early scene, Yank and his fellow coal stokers hold forth on their view
of the world outside:
YANK: [With abysmal contempt.] Hell! Governments!
ALL: [Repeating the word after him as one with cynical mockery.]
Governments! [The word has a brazen, metallic quality as if their
throats were phonograph horns. It is followed by a chorus of hard,
barking laughter.]
Emerging onto a corner of Fifth Avenue, on a Sunday morning, in the
scene that follows, the protagonist beholds the disorienting world of
New York civilization:
The crowd from church enter from the right, sauntering slowly and
affectedly, their heads held stiffly up, looking neither to right nor
left, talking in toneless, simpering voices. The women are rouged,
calcimined, dyed, overdressed to the nth degree. The men are in Prince
Alberts, high hats, spats, canes, etc. A procession of gaudy
marionettes, yet with something of the relentless horror of
Frankensteins in their detached, mechanical unawareness.
The use of sound as the propulsive engine behind O’Neill’s text was also
apparent in Richard Jones’s recent revival of “The Hairy Ape,” as perfect a production of
that play as any of us are ever likely to see. Jones told me that
he simply took his cues from the internal rhythms of the play itself.
“In the beginning,” he said, “Yank [the protagonist] believes that he
belongs, that he has a place in the world. The language is therefore
staccato, empowered, in a major key . . . operatic even. As he begins to
unravel, it becomes softer, meeker, until by the end it has a sort of
chamber-like quality.” In Jones’s production, steam whistles, sirens,
bells, the clacking and clattering of factories and city traffic, the
yowls and whispers of the characters combined to create a sonic
tapestry that, together with the expressionistic set and light design
and the dance-like, stylized staging, puts to shame the so-called
immersive-theatre experiences now in vogue. “The Hairy Ape” engulfs theaudience in O’Neill’s furious vision.
“Strange Interlude,” another rarely produced O’Neill play, was recently
revived Off Broadway, by the Transport Group, in a production that it
billed as featuring “David Greenspan (and only David Greenspan).”
“Interlude” has nine acts and eight characters, and Greenspan played
them all in an evening lasting six hours, with intermissions and a
dinner break—a feat of chutzpah worthy of O’Neill’s own outsized
ambitions. The concept came from Greenspan, who had clearly been infected by
the O’Neill contagion.
During rehearsals, he came to understand that O’Neill was dealing with
archetypes as much as characters, which is why his plays seem to unfold
on an elevated dramatic plane, removed from the everyday reality that
we’re used to seeing in film, television, and theatre, which, in turn,
often takes its cues from those forms. He experienced the sort of
alchemy that occurs when O’Neill is embraced on his own terms, the
seemingly leaden-sounding dialogue slowly revealing itself to be
theatrical gold. As in “The Great God Brown,” the characters in “Strange
Interlude” keep their innermost thoughts hidden. Rather than using
masks, however, in “Interlude,” O’Neill famously employs the use of
interior monologues that none of the other characters can hear (a device
parodied in the Marx Brothers’ classic film, from 1930, “Animal
Crackers”):
NINA: How weak he is! . . . he’ll never do anything . . . never give me my
desire . . . if he’d only fall in love with someone else . . . go away . . . not
be here in my father’s room . . . I even have to give him a home . . . if he’d
disappear . . . leave me free . . . if he’d die . . .
The language of the play, Greenspan told me, “at first seemed kind of
clunky; the sentences were hard to grapple with . . . The clauses seemed
strange or inverted somehow.” But he and his director, Jack Cummings
III, had made a commitment not to tamper with the text. O’Neill rewarded
their loyalty by revealing a surprising, hidden, internal rhythm that
lay just beneath its surface—the same sort of crude poetry, created
through the tempo and texture of the dialogue, that LeCompte and Jones
uncovered, effectively making the words far greater than the sum of
their parts.
O’Neill was meticulous about his craft, tirelessly refining his dialogue
in draft upon draft until he arrived at the effect that he was after. Quintero called O’Neill’s plays “symphonic.” Falls
completely agrees. “He’s writing a score,” Falls told me, cautioning
against those who try to fight the playwright’s instincts.
Jones, van Hove, Falls, LeCompte, and George C. Wolfe (currently in
rehearsals for the Broadway revival of “The Iceman Cometh,” which begins
previews this week) all take issue with the knocks on O’Neill that he
couldn’t write, that he had a tin ear, that his plays are too long, too
repetitive, too depressing. “If an audience feels that way, then that’s
the fault of the actors, or the director, isn’t it?” Jones said,
insisting that it is the job of theatre-makers to “solve the language”
and elevate the play. Wolfe concurs. “The language sings if you have the
skill set for the notes.”
Van Hove, who is Belgian, has, at times, even upped the ante on
O’Neill’s in-your-face theatricality, putting live cows on stage for his
production of “Desire Under The Elms,” and staging a fully nude
wrestling match in his “More Stately Mansions.” “There is a huge
misunderstanding, especially in America, I think, that O’Neill’s plays
should be played realistically,” van Hove told me. “O’Neill was only
interested in what he called ‘the reality of the soul.’ The language is
a constructed one. It is poetic. People make a problem out of this.
There is no problem.” He feels that O’Neill’s plays “come from his
deepest, deepest core—his deepest anxieties, his deepest fears, his
deepest wishes. He is interested in the hidden world. About how to live
life. About how to become ourselves.”
This is a refrain repeated by Wolfe. “O’Neill is about
confronting that part of your existence that you’re most terrified of,”
he said of “Iceman,” a play that he first read in college and didn’t
immediately connect with. Once rehearsals began, however, it was a
different matter. “Oh, my God!” he exclaimed on a recent break from tech
for the show. “It is brilliant. It is dangerous. It is a monster. The
language pulsates with rhythm. It is astonishing. Masterful, and
muscular, and frail, and so, so moving.”
“Iceman” may be O’Neill’s darkest play, and is arguably his greatest. It is
set in a dingy saloon, where the alcoholic denizens are challenged, by a
teetotalling old pal named Hickey, to sober up and face their illusions
about themselves. The results are not pretty:
LARRY: [With increasing bitter intensity, more as if he were
fighting with himself than with Hickey.] I’m afraid to live, am
I?—and even more afraid to die! So I sit here, with my pride drowned
on the bottom of a bottle, keeping drunk so I won’t see myself shaking
in my britches with fright, or hear myself whining and praying:
Beloved Christ, let me live a little longer at any price! If it’s only
for a few days more, or a few hours even, have mercy, Almighty God,
and let me still clutch greedily to my yellow heart this sweet
treasure, this jewel beyond price, the dirty, stinking bit of withered
old flesh which is my beautiful little life! [He laughs with a
sneering, vindictive self-loathing, staring inward at himself with
contempt and hatred. Then abruptly he makes Hickey again the
antagonist.] You think you’ll make me admit that to myself?
HICKEY: [Chuckling.] But you just did admit it, didn’t you?
We all have illusions (or, as O’Neill refers to them, “pipe dreams”). We
create and sustain these fictions about ourselves, in varying degrees,
out of psychological necessity. We don’t want to look at what’s really
going on in our innermost psyches: that we’re afraid of dying, that our
lives are passing us by, that we’ve somehow failed to reach our
potential, that the love we profess for others and ourselves can be
infected with dissatisfaction and disappointment. We don’t want to look
at the fact that we keep secrets, that we are haunted by regret, by
shame, by self-loathing, that whatever faith we have is completely
irrational. O’Neill doesn’t let us hide from these demons. They are at
the core of all his writing. “Few have probed the human condition as
deeply as O’Neill has,” Falls told me, “He demands that you stare into
the abyss. He demands that you face the truth. It’s absolutely
exhilarating.”
Perhaps we are desirous of O’Neill’s brutal intensity now, when our
everyday lives can seem bombarded by craven inauthenticity. Wolfe’s
imminent “Iceman” production, starring Denzel Washington, is only three
seasons removed from Falls’s own revival of the play, at BAM. The Bristol Old Vic
production of “Long Day’s Journey,” starring Jeremy Irons and the
recently Oscar-nominated Lesley Manville, arrives at BAM in May. “O’Neill has such
passion,” Greenspan marvelled. “It’s unrelenting. And it’s rare to
encounter that today.”
Quintero dreamed of an American theatre devoted only to O’Neill and
deemed all his plays worthy of production, bemoaning the fact that the
majority of the fifty-odd of them are rarely, if ever, seen. Before
Greenspan tackled it, the last major New York revival of “Strange
Interlude” was in 1985, starring Glenda Jackson, and the bizarro plays
that immediately precede and follow it in the O’Neill œuvre are
virtually unknown today: “Lazarus Laughed,” a pageant play that has
never had a major New York production, and “Dynamo,” which has not been
revived since its début, in 1929. Falls told me that he would love to
take a stab at obscurities such as “Marco Millions” or “Days Without
End.” “Even flawed O’Neill is better than most American plays,” he said.
Thorny as they are, these plays contain ideas and a kind of visionary
boldness that can be shocking to encounter today. They crackle with
strangeness and raw humanity. They belong to the fabric of our culture,
as much a part of us as the paintings of Albert Pinkham Ryder, the
fiction of Carson McCullers, the recordings of Thelonious Monk, the
films of John Cassavetes. They remain as outside today as they were when
first written.
The tragedy for us is that, unless these plays are performed, they may
as well not even exist. Outside the classroom, we as a culture are not
in the habit of reading dramatic literature—a fundamental shift since
the time of O’Neill, when the publication of one of his new plays was
seen as a major literary event. (“Strange Interlude” was a best-seller
when it hit bookstores, in 1928.) O’Neill may never have envisioned a
day when the bulk of his work would virtually disappear from the canon
of American literature.
Plays deserve to be included in the things we read. If our theatre lacks
the conviction to keep these rarely, if ever, revived works alive for
us, there’s nothing that says we can’t do so ourselves. As a high-school
freshman, at the height of my O’Neill passion, I lobbied the school’s
English department to mandate the teaching of his plays (my campaign
left them somewhat nonplussed) and founded an after-school play-reading
group devoted to reading O’Neill and his influences. Apparently, my
evangelism has not completely abated, though it has hopefully softened
with age. Recently, I helped assemble a group of friends to read
“Dynamo” out loud together, for fun and investigative purposes.
In the play, an electrical dynamo becomes a stand-in for both the
protagonist’s dead mother and his god. The power plant in which the
giant contraption resides eventually serves as the setting for the
play’s dénouement:
RUEBEN: [Strangely.] You’re beginning to see, Ada. It is alive!
Alive with the mighty spirit of her eternal life! [Then with a
start, he pushes her away from him roughly.] What the hell are you
doing? Don’t press against me, I tell you! I’m wise to your dirty
game—and I won’t stand for it! Don’t you realize we’re in her temple
now?
ADA: [Pitifully.] Rube! Please don’t talk like that—when you know
how I love you!
RUEBEN: [Clutching her arm fiercely.] You mustn’t say you love me
in here, you fool, you! Don’t you know all this is
watching—listening—that she knows everything! Sssh! I want to hear if
she’s angry with me! [He stands in a strained attitude of attention,
listening to the dynamo’s hum from below . . . ]
On hand for the informal read-through was the performer and director
Paul Lazar, a stalwart of the downtown theatre scene who also happened
to have appeared in both of the Wooster Group’s O’Neill treatments. Like
most, he had never encountered “Dynamo” before. “It’s amazing to me that
this play was written by the same person who wrote ‘Long Day’s Journey,’
” he said afterward. “As a manifestation of pure authorial energy, it’s
thrilling. It’s nuts. It’s much weirder than either ‘The Hairy Ape’ or
‘The Emperor Jones.’ As a director, I think it would be impossible to do
a credible version of this thing, but, man, I would love to try.”
This is exactly the quality that first got me hooked on O’Neill. There
is nothing halfway about him, nothing safe, nothing comfortable. He
dares us. He dives deeper and pushes harder than what is typical,
acceptable—tasteful, even—and he dares us to follow him. When he fails,
he fails spectacularly, a seething, thrilling, crepuscular glow
emanating from his struggles. “The people who
succeed and do not push on to a greater failure are the spiritual middle
class,” he said. “The man who pursues the mere attainable should be
sentenced to get it—and keep it. Let him rest on his laurels and
enthrone him in a Morris chair, in which laurels and hero may wither
together. Only through the unattainable does man achieve a hope worth
living and dying for—and so attain himself.”
O’Neill’s disdain for the status quo, his intolerance for
superficiality, his contempt for gauche materialism, his unwillingness
to sacrifice integrity, and his insistence on emotional honesty are as
relevant and vital today as ever—maybe even more so. “O’Neill can give
us everything Shakespeare gives us,” Falls told me.
“Unforgettable characters and stories, philosophy, music, politics,
history, spirituality, remarkable intimacy—it’s all there. His plays are
about nothing less than what it means to be a human being,” or what my
friend the composer and performer Jerome Ellis calls “the gasp of being
alive.”
“O’Neill gives you evidence that there is a deeper
truth in your life, that the hope you have in your heart that you are an
individual, that you are somebody, is real,” van Hove told me. “He
pushes us to find ourselves.” Indeed, it may be that O’Neill’s greatest
strength is his unspoken admission of weakness, the underlying
vulnerability inherent in all his plays. I want to belong, they all seem
to say. I’m frightened. I want to understand. I want to know and feel
more than what I have already, more than what I perceive to be possible.
Life is terrifying, and confusing, but perhaps—through the ritual and
ecstasy of theatre, of communally pushing into the darkness, into the
abyss—a sense that there is something more, something greater, something
beyond our comprehension can be felt, even touched. This is what first
gripped me as at age twelve and has never really let me go,
thirty-five years later. This is the theatre of Eugene O’Neill, the
uncomfortable, churning sound of his raging hymns to the unknown.
Sourse: newyorker.com
