A Tortured Soul
By Gerald Jonas

Eugene O'Neill's alter ego, Edmund.

Eugene O'Neill's career as America's foremost playwright was founded on two apparently contradictory notions, which O'Neill himself summarized with characteristic vigor.

On the one hand, he was dedicated to Art with a capital A. In a letter asking to be admitted to the famous playwriting course taught by Harvard professor George Baker Pierce, the 26-year old O'Neill explained that he had already read "all the modern plays I could lay my hands on, and many books on the subject of the Drama . . . . With my present training I might hope to become a mediocre journeyman playwright. It is just because I do not wish to be one, because I want to be an artist or nothing, that I am writing to you."

On the other hand, he was a man of the theater through and through; everything he wrote was meant to be performed by flesh-and-blood actors in front of live audiences. Not for O'Neill was an abstract "closet drama" that failed to dirty its hands with the business of stagecraft. When asked how one became a playwright, O'Neill responded: "Take some wood and canvas and nails and things. Build yourself a theater, a stage, light it, learn about it. When you've done that you will probably know how to write a play -- that is to say if you can."

O'Neill was the son of an actor who became rich and famous giving audiences what they thought they wanted; James O'Neill Sr. starred more than 6,000 times in the popular 19th-century melodrama "The Count of Monte Cristo." Growing up with a contempt for "the old, ranting, artificial romantic stuff" that sustained his father, the young Eugene O'Neill discovered a theater he could embrace in the revolutionary work of European writers like Henrik Ibsen, W. B. Yeats, and, especially, August Strindberg.

O'Neill's great breakthrough came in 1916. A group of radical intellectuals and writers from New York City's Greenwich Village had started an amateur theater group in the little fishing village of Provincetown, MA, under the leadership of George Cram Cook. Cook's idea was simple enough: there were no great American playwrights because they had no place in the commercial theater of the time. Create a theater hospitable to them, he reasoned, and they will come. The 27-year-old O'Neill, who had been writing and drinking in the Village, showed up in Provincetown in the summer of 1916 with a trunk full of plays in manuscript. Among them was a one-act called "Bound East for Cardiff," about a dying sailor confiding his dreams and regrets to a sympathetic mate. Professor Baker at Harvard had seen nothing in it, but Cook and his associates knew better. Performed in their Wharf Theater, which had been converted from an old fishing dock, the rough eloquence of O'Neill's seamen, drawn from his own experiences at sea, struck a chord in the audience. That winter, when the "Provincetown Players" opened a small theater in Greenwich Village, "Bound East for Cardiff" was on the opening bill.

James and Mary share a tender moment.

O'Neill was fortunate to find, during his apprentice years, a theater where he could try out his ideas and see what worked on stage and what didn't. His attitude toward stagecraft remained ambivalent. He repeatedly complained about having to attend rehearsals, insisting, "When I finish a play, I'm through with it." Yet he is famous for his elaborate stage directions, which not only stipulate every gesture and facial expression but also go into great detail about lighting, scenery, and other elements of stagecraft.

The Provincetown Players introduced all of O'Neill's early one-act plays. But his first full-length play, "Beyond the Horizon," was commercially produced on Broadway in 1920. Against all odds, this exercise in tragic realism -- about love misplaced and death as redemption -- was a critical and popular success, earning O'Neill over $6,000, including the thousand-dollar award that came with the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes.

Even as he was making a name as a playwright with a grimly realistic vision of American life, O'Neill was experimenting with other modes of expression. "The Emperor Jones" tracks the destruction of an ex-Pullman porter who has seized control of a West Indian island, only to fall victim to the violence he has unleashed. In a series of dream-like scenes, the protagonist confronts specters out of his personal and racial past; the heavily symbolic action is accompanied by a drumbeat that begins at what O'Neill calls "normal pulse beat -- 72 to the minute" -- and grows faster and louder until the now terrified Jones dies at the hand of the natives he has oppressed. The Provincetown Players production not only introduced audiences to O'Neill's vividly expressionistic side; it made history by casting as Jones an out-of-work actor named Charles Gilpin, who became the first African-American to play a major role in a white American company.

In 1922, O'Neill won his second Pulitzer for "Anna Christie," a realistic drama with one of the playwright's more upbeat endings. Overcoming her father's objections, Anna, a reformed prostitute, looks forward to marriage with her sailor-lover, while offstage foghorns remind us that in a world buffeted by mysterious forces, human happiness is a fragile thing.

Expounding on what he called "the only subject worth writing about," O'Neill told a theater critic a few years later: "I'm always acutely conscious of the Force behind -- (Fate, God, our biological past creating our present, whatever one calls it -- Mystery certainly) -- and of the one eternal tragedy of Man in his glorious, self-destructive struggle to make the Force express him instead of being, as an animal is, an infinitesimal incident in its expression."

O'Neill continued to search for ways to bring this all-encompassing vision to the stage. In "The Hairy Ape," he mixed realism and expressionism to portray the agony of Yank Smith, an unlettered ship's stoker who learns to "t'ink," with disastrous consequences, and dies in a gorilla cage in the Central Park Zoo.

Mary Tyrone cannot escape her past.

"Desire Under the Elms," which premiered at the Greenwich Village Theater in 1924, has been called "the first important tragedy to be written in America." Set on a 19th-century New England farm, drawing on Freudian psychology and Nietzschean philosophy as well as classical Greek theater, this brooding drama offers compassion and even redemption to a woman who cements her bond to her stepson-lover by murdering their baby.

Having introduced masks onstage in both "The Emperor Jones" and "The Hairy Ape," O'Neill made this device central to the performance of "The Great God Brown" (1926), in which characters reveal different aspects of themselves by changing masks.

"Strange Interlude," produced by the Theater Guild in 1928, brought O'Neill his third Pulitzer Prize. This dark tale of adultery, incest, abortion, and other consequences of human desire ran five hours; audiences were invited to eat dinner during the hour-long intermission halfway through. Instead of masks, the characters resort to long asides to the audience to voice their unconscious (repressed) attitudes while the other actors freeze.

With increasing command of his gifts, O'Neill moved away from experimental staging toward an emotionally charged realism that spoke directly to a broader range of play-goers. His two most successful plays of the 1930s, "Mourning Becomes Electra" (1931) and "Ah, Wilderness!" (1933), achieve their effects without what one commentator has called the "technical exhibitionism" that O'Neill displayed in the 1920s. In other ways, of course, no two plays could be more different.

"Mourning Becomes Electra" parades its debt to Greek tragedy in its title, although O'Neill takes as many liberties with his classical antecedents as the ancient Greek dramatists did with theirs. Lavinia Mannon, the Electra figure, loves Ezra, her father, who is returning from the Civil War, and hates Christine, her mother, who has been having an affair in Ezra's absence and who murders him when he arrives home. Lavinia persuades her brother, Orin, to avenge their father by killing Christine and her lover. When Orin murders the lover, Christine commits suicide. Sick at heart and realizing that he has transferred his incestuous love for his mother to his sister, Orin kills himself. Lavinia, accepting her guilt, turns her back on life and hope and, in a famous finale, shuts herself up in the family homestead as the curtain descends.

"Ah, Wilderness!" is O'Neill's only full-fledged comedy. Written in a four-week burst of creativity, the play is seen by most observers as a companion piece to "Electra" and as a tribute to O'Neill's third wife, a one-time actress known as Carlotta Monterey, whose companionship brought him unaccustomed joy -- for a time. In it, O'Neill conjures up the happy adolescence he might have had under other circumstances, in an earlier America recalled here with charitable nostalgia.

O'Neill was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1936, the first American playwright so honored. But he was hardly content to rest on his laurels. Already suffering from the neuromuscular disorder

Jamie Tyrone was based on O'Neill's brother, Jamie.

that would eventually prevent him from writing, he embarked on ever more ambitious projects. A projected 11-play cycle about the Irish in America was eventually abandoned. His brief interlude of happiness with Carlotta gave way to incessant tension and periodic blow-ups. He disowned Oona, his only daughter, after her marriage while still in her teens to the film star Charlie Chaplin, who was almost exactly her father's age. His second son, Shane, was arrested on charges of heroin possession, and revealed to be a hopeless drug addict. His oldest son, Eugene Jr., committed suicide. During these years he wrote the two plays generally considered to be his finest, "The Iceman Cometh" and "Long Day's Journey into Night."

In 1946, "The Iceman Cometh" became the last of O'Neill's plays to reach Broadway during his life. "A Moon for the Misbegotten," which explores with tenderness the final days of Jamie Tyrone, his stand-in for his brother Jamie O'Neill, had a brief try-out in Columbus, OH, in 1947, but did not make it to New York until 1957, four years after Eugene O'Neill's death.

All told, Eugene O'Neill wrote more than 60 plays, and saw more than 40 of them produced. His great theme was our inability to break free of forces beyond our control, especially the dead hand of the past. Suffering is a given, hope an illusion. Yet only by recognizing our predicament and striving, however helplessly, to rise above it, can we achieve the stature that makes our suffering worthwhile.

If ever a man were compelled to write from his tortured soul, it was Eugene O'Neill.

In the spring of 1940, struggling with illness, dispirited by the onset of war in Europe, he found the composition of "Long Day's Journey Into Night" slow going. "With so much tragic drama happening in the world," he conceded, it was "hard to take the theater seriously." But a few weeks later, he returned to the bitter consolations of his art with this typically unsparing self-assessment: "You can't keep a hophead off his dope for long."

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