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:
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:
“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:
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 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 the audience 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”):
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:
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:
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 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.
