O’Neill in 1922 at Cape Cod with wife and daughter

     As an American playwright, Eugene O’Neill wanted his American audience to see life as it truly is, though the public may have needed allusions to themselves to better identify with. An early twentieth century American could not count on their political leaders to speak to them in their own language, intrinsically speaking.

It was up to the playwright to reveal to his or her audience who they truly were underneath the mundane and prosaic.

Amongst all the driving ambitions that the American public was supposed to have, the playwright did onstage what the social philosopher attempted to in a piece of literature. The conditions of freedom, specifically in America, enabled everyone to do what they wanted. The problem with this concept is that nobody knew what they truly wanted to be or create based on their own identity. O’Neill picked up very quickly from his short time spent at Princeton and Harvard, that Americans see themselves as their peers see them and occupy this identification with the opinions of others. What was lost to modernity was the crucial and important practice of self-reflection as a means of becoming better in tune and knowledgeable of your-self than others.

Modern America, through O’Neill’s eyes, left the public uninformed of any rational taste for the desirable and with hardly any way to become self-aware. Only with his plays did his audience find real slices of human experience with all of its beautiful disruption, emotional outburst and blissful inevitability.

     A hopeful America, recovering from the Great Depression and celebrating outcomes from the war in Europe, predictably did not want to hear O’Neill’s self-defeating characters that were full of melancholy and failure. These post-war years, in which O’Neill’s later plays were produced in, the American public had somewhat come to terms with their fear after Roosevelt’s famous line, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” In several ways, America had defeated adversity and was reluctant to art forms that suggested otherwise. O’Neill’s characters were the self-defeated ones, acting according to their nostalgic fascination with the past and lack of hope. All of O’Neill’s characters have apparently seen better days and in his plays, they have little to fantasize about. Furthermore, they are lost in that fog that imagines a past that never was and his characters become increasingly unable to deal with the present and never able to fully grasp reality.

In the Beginning

   O’Neill had come late to playwriting with some minor journalism publications, poetry criticism and a few lack luster one act plays he wrote in 1914 while he was in Gaylord Farm Sanatorium with tuberculosis. Thirst and Other One-Act Plays was only the beginning of his amateur playwriting in the teens of the twentieth century. His meeting in 1916 with the dedicated amateurs who were to form the Provincetown Players drew him out of isolation and his long and unchanging dissatisfaction that had characterized his earlier existence (he had attempted suicide in 1912 while residing at Jimmy-the-Priest’s tavern and room house in lower Manhattan.) Suddenly, he had associates in an endeavor – playwriting – that was to eventually and ultimately, to his satisfaction, consume his life. After the production of Bound East for Cardiff in 1916 on the Provincetown wharf stage, O’Neill moved forward. It was not long before his work, staged at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village and published in the pages of avant-garde literature, attracted respectful attention

O’Neill on stage of Bound East for Cardiff (left)

     To amateurs like O’Neill and his new friend Kenneth MacGowan, elements of sensuous and psychological drama like that of the previously mentioned play and even later works by O’Neill, were risky concepts in the transforming American theatrical scene. MacGowan followed suit of another theatrical revolutionary of the time, Sheldon Cheney, whose European approach to stagecraft influenced him tremendously. A new aesthetic in stage design was being developed (new stagecraft) and called for more realistic scenes to match the “super-naturalism” of O’Neill’s and other playwrights’ imaginations. O’Neill, however, was aware of the new ideas but transitioned more slowly into these new stagecraft constructions and concepts. George Pierce Baker, another of O’Neill’s colleagues and theatrical companions, urged him in his study of drama to stay the course of his minor successes. Before O’Neill’s next big triumph in 1920, he had decided to stick with a more reminiscent style of writing, based more so on the Irish school than of the European continental theatre.

George Pierce Baker

     February 17, 1920, two weeks after the first production of Beyond the Horizon which won him his first Pulitzer Prize, Macgowan sent a letter to O’Neill inviting the now popular playwright to a dinner for the New York Drama League in which MacGowan was the Executive Director. The date indicates when and where O’Neill began to receive serious recognition for his work and the movement towards questionable art forms becoming more and more popular (the American Armory show was only seven years prior to O’Neill’s earliest successes.) O’Neill declined the invitation due to three upcoming productions and his limited interest in attending public functions which was of one of his more out-cast qualities that made him and his work fit so well into the avant-garde.

     Letters one through twenty-eight, documented in The Theatre We Worked For were written from February 17, 1920 to October 12, 1924, a year after O’Neill’s younger brother James died and the same year two of his most critically acclaimed plays were produced. The correspondence here between MacGowan and O’Neill details the combining process of Edmund Jones, yet another theatrical companion and revolutionary in terms of his stage and costume design, with them to create the triumvirate, a partnership between the three men to run and operate the Experimental Theatre at the increasingly famous Provincetown Playhouse.

Moreover, this team of growing professionals, surrounded by characters like Emma Goldman, a well-known anarchist and inspiration for two characters in O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (1946), and Floyd Dell, a literary critic best known for his promotion of American Modernism, needed individuals like this to inspire their imagination, to continually push the boundaries and limits of American theatre and to test their audiences constantly with creative and avant-garde productions.

     Quickly and enthusiastically, O’Neill accepted MacGowan as a playwright’s mentor and began toying, experimenting and finally creating productions such as The Fountain (1925) and Marco Millions (1928) that O’Neill wrote intending them to be, “unique or nothing.” (Letter 18)

Marco Millions performed Summer 1931

     Historically, it is difficult to say exactly how much he or anyone else contributed to the direction of the plays in the creative collective of the Provincetown Playhouse. Sometimes one person began directing and another member would take over, which was an increasingly important aspect of this growing experimental movement in theatrical productions. O’Neill later claimed that he had little to do in the rehearsals because he had not yet quit drinking and was drunk most of the time.

In early productions, a lack of professionalism stained some actors that would go on to have more successful careers in acting and other performing arts. As time passed, actors like Charles Gilpin, Louis Wolheim and Paul Robeson were recruited to particular roles in O’Neill’s plays. Working with committed amateurs created a communal feeling among the Greenwich Village scene and was a catalyst for imaginative and original American theatre.

Paul Robeson (left) Charles Gilpin (right)

     Stories about Charles Gilpin create the picture of a performer with minor or trivial experience in the performing arts. He was hired as an elevator operator by a few members of the Provincetown Playhouse between floors of a building in Harlem. In fact, Gilpin was a thorough professional with experience in film and onstage. When Gilpin became more involved in the Playhouse production, he was to participate in several aspects, like many of the actors O’Neill chose to perform his plays. The Provincetown theatre thought their organization to be a creative collective in the sense that all cast members and stage hands helped to construct the plays interiorly and exteriorly. O’Neill even painted some scenery, arranged the props and took to participating in rehearsals once he had become definitively sober. For his first production, Bound East for Cardiff, he as director, casted himself in the smallest of roles and helped to build the setting, a skill and talent he had learnt while traveling with his father.

Notoriety

     O’Neill’s most important, historically speaking, and more experimental work before his meeting with MacGowan was The Emperor Jones, produced in 1920, the year after his second son Shane was born. MacGowan, that same year, commented on the production that O’Neill had, “done more with the eye than any playwright has attempted on the [American] stage.”

Charles Gilpin, a new and gifted black performer of the time, played the lead role of Brutus Jones, an empirical ruler of an island somewhere in the West Indies. Some view The Emperor Jones as an incidentally African-American play because any man could have played Brutus Jones. Here was the absence of a stereotypically blackface actor that white audiences were used to in the later years of the nineteenth century. The role of Brutus Jones was incredibly demanding, aurally and physically because the actor was onstage almost the entire time, and much of the play is a long soliloquy. Gilpin had to run, shout, crawl and engage in other physical aspects of the production that contributed to the growing experimental form of the modern theatre. One of the over-looked aspects the audience does not pay much mind to is the number of costume changes required for the role. Jones begins the performance in a quite elaborate and grand uniform with gold braid and patent leather boots with spurs but eventually is stripped of his clothing as he tries to escape the natives who are in revolt against him. The costume becomes more and more torn so that at the end he is in what the audience would make out to be a loincloth. Exaggeration doesn’t have a place in this description and here we see O’Neill mentally and literally stripping his character down to the most primitive of layers.

Film Adaptation poster(s) for O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones

     Word spread that the performance was going to be especially extraordinary and the Provincetown Playhouse was overrun with requests for tickets and new subscriptions as soon as the production opened to the public, despite the fact that play reviewers were lost in seemingly more important premieres of now-forgotten plays. The Emperor Jones was so successful that it was moved to a theatre uptown, taken on tour across the country and finally to London. The critics generally praised Gilpin and an air of unanimity in most of the critiques celebrated his tremendous ability to perform such a demanding role over and over again.

     Gilpin’s role was one that became more popular in the years that would become identified with an American modernist movement. The old order of theatrical affairs was passing and the new world of theatrical realism and aesthetics had not yet been entirely born because of the reluctance that American audiences exemplified. O’Neill ushered in the twentieth century, with all its innovativeness and passion with his work in the American theatre.

Gilpin performing as Brutus Jones

     A culture hero or dramatist some call him but most would agree that he was a theatrical revolutionary who pushed the boundaries of naturalism and realism like other playwrights in the early twentieth century. The traditions, backgrounds, practices and ideals which had created actors like Edwin Booth (O’Neill’s father had worked alongside him) and comics such as William Warren were slowly weakening and would eventually transform or shift to those necessary for actors like Gilpin to succeed in the new, original and creative theatre. Brutus Jones identified with an exposed and defenseless audience, that fell victim to fear of the uncontrollable but ultimately our deep-seated primitive nature like that of Yank in The Hairy Ape. (1922)

     Yank is a part of an industrialized environment which is presented as hazardous and inhumane. O’Neill uses Yank’s character as an archetype to compare those less privileged Americans who feel as if they don’t “belong” in an ever-growing industrious world of bustle and chaos. Mary Tyrone is subjected to guilt and harassment from her family because of her past problems, and like anyone who constantly has to look over their shoulder to see if their being watched, succumbs to her own yearning for bliss and a balanced state of mind which morphine provides in this instance.

Louis Wolheim as Yank in The Hairy Ape

     O’Neill’s characters tend to be free-willed individuals and they underlying argue that humans are responsible for their own actions. Alternatively, they sometimes take on the role of the determinist which relieves them, temporarily, of some assumed responsibility. The characters O’Neill created were very diverse and in doing so made them more human, natural and realistic.

Acting in the Family

     O’Neill himself had very little desire to be an actor. Early in his playwriting/ experimenting he created fictional stories that elaborated on his acting experiences as a teenager and young adult. He acted shortly in his father’s company, which traveled the country re-producing The Count of Monte Cristo in which his father played the title role. O’Neill viewed his father, James, as a sell-out because of his willingness to commit himself to a single role his entire life. Eugene found acting to be a terrible experience, however, his opinion was set in the same time that he had a quite negative vision of the world and in turn tried to take his own life. This digression only stained his early life and produced itself later in his career when writing and creating characters from his past.

James O’Neill’s promoted reproduction

     O’Neill’s Irish background carried as much pain as it did pride. As exemplified by many Irish immigrants of the nineteenth century, the older O’Neill family had remembered and been haunted with memories of the potato famine in the 1840’s. Like other Irish Americans, O’Neill’s father saw the Irish’s plight as that of British policy and the dejectedness it left on Ireland’s history. The Irish immigrant portrait is best displayed in all its truth in O’Neill’s autobiographical play, Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

A Transparent Playwright

     It’s difficult to find a distinctively American play that is so leavened with autobiographical facts than Long Day’s Journey Into Night. O’Neill’s plays are slightly characterized by his own life experiences, particularly with his family that colors a lot of his later work. This play makes it the most obvious that he was, in fact, using his family and friends to make characters in his productions. This point in his plays has led to an enormous fascination in mapping out the autobiographical background for much of his plays. It is a legitimate fact, but to ignore other factors like the emergence of a distinctively American modernism in his work leaves out some of his greatest influences.

     All of the characters in Long Day’s Journey had an attitude that was urged forward by a motivation to escape feelings of shortcoming and self-consciousness. Throughout the play, they blame themselves for the suffering all of them collectively endure and live with every day. Guilt is sensed by all characters in the play, some more victimized than others. By means of drugs with Mary Tyrone, the mother, and alcohol with James Tyrone, the father and the two sons, James Tyrone Jr. and Edmund Tyrone, the narrative seeks to focus on a hopeless dream that Mary will not use morphine anymore and, in turn, her strength would trickle down to the rest of the family.

Do we not piggy back on certain family members as a crutch for bad behavior or blame them for things we don’t want to deal with such as Mary does when questioning the rest of the family’s suspicion of her? The ever-present fog outside the house of the Tyrone family, fogging Mary’s dreams and hiding the truthful realities, engages the audience’s senses. It serves as a reminder to the theme and to keep us looking through it to find meaning and a message. The description of the fog changes throughout the play and this affects the audience’s interpretation of each character’s choice in mood and dynamic.

Katherine Hepburn as Mary Tyrone

     Seeing the play performed must have been a different experience than reading the play with stage directions and an omniscient interpretation. Reading rather than seeing the play causes the audience to have a more gloomy depiction of events to come, whereas earlier in the day characters seem fresh and lively more so than they do at night, a goal the title seeks to make apparent from the beginning. The realism transformed into super-naturalism in Long Day’s Journey brought into question interpretations of O’Neill’s work. Autobiographical lenses were used justifiably when deconstructing his plays but alternative interpretations of his work existed as well, using the dysfunctional addict trope to make significance out of the characters.

The Avant-Garde

     Many of O’Neill’s playgoers looked to his performances as a connection between and into the meaning of the playwright’s life and the character’s he created to display it.

Critics of the time period used O’Neill’s plays to see past the negative childhood experiences and dysfunctional family that shaped his early life. Arguably, this position they took risks a couple of dramatic reductions in interpreting his plays. O’Neill’s creative output is explained in terms of only his personal history and reduced to the tale of his family, which was tormented with overall negative experiences. Only if O’Neill had been obsessed with auto-biographical literature, perhaps his readers wouldn’t have a problem linking only his environment and heredity to the fascinating work he created in this period where modernism, naturalism and realism were becoming the imaginative norm. But O’Neill was influenced by radicals, as you’ll come to see, who negated the romantic and challenged most of the traditional values and ideals that he supposedly inherited. His plays, more importantly, may offer some kind of insight on what it means to be an American modern.

     O’Neill had been incorporated into the Greenwich Village scene before the rise of communism and was one of the few writers at the time that knew such a movement would not work in the end. Writers like Arthur Miller, George Bernard Shaw and Clifford Odets in this American modernist period of history sympathized with Soviet Russia. This governance turned out to be the cruel allusion that would eventually take over China and much of South East Asia. Throughout O’Neill’s career he remained skeptical of that ideal form of government even when the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917. His skepticism of fantasies and revolutionary movements such as this directly connected to how he created plays and the characters they were identified with.

1944 Full Film Adaptation by Alfred Santell from Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape

 

     Attempting to change the American theatrical scene was one of the greatest challenges the modernist movement sought out to accomplish. Eugene O’Neill’s plays attempted to do something different during the first few decades of the twentieth century. They were well accepted, yet controversial and experimental making them uneasily categorized by audiences and critics in this time period.

His dramas were of a different breed and many of his contemporaries belonged to a bohemian culture or rather the avant-garde.

O’Neill’s interests lied outside realism and other popular genres of this post-war period in American theatre. “Super-Naturalism” was what America chose to call it. Unlike August Strindberg’s naturalistic plays, O’Neill was peering beneath the aesthetic surface to identify and portray real slices of human experience. He and his avant-garde contemporaries were slowly but surely breaking away from the customary tradition of stagecraft, romanticism and popular forms of drama. An American audience viewed his drama as primitive or more precisely, “super-natural” because of the way he stripped his characters of their conceived guises and portrayed the absolute soul of each. Doing so, he used life experiences and his family’s heritage to display his fascination with human experience.