“Better luck next time!” O’Neill yawped in a letter to George Tyler after learning that The Straw had closed in New York after less than three weeks; but he expressed his abiding appreciation for Tyler’s courage in backing his “hopeless hope.” He wrote Saxe Commins that he wasn’t sure why The Straw had shut down before Saxe had time to attend it: “Everyone was afraid they’d catch T.B. by entering the theatre, I guess.”329 But again, O’Neill brushed aside the failure. In a 1948 interview with the New Yorker, he borrows a line from The Straw from three decades earlier: “When everybody likes something, watch out!”330 In the play, Eileen Carmody tells Stephen Murray that “everybody” at the sanatorium has read his stories and “thinks they’re fine.” “Then [the stories] must be rotten,” he replies with a smile (CP1, 784).
Over the holiday season, 1921–22, O’Neill granted an interview to Malcolm Mollan, the city desk editor from his New London Telegraph days, now a struggling freelancer, who’d threatened to fire him if he showed up drunk again. “Are you our foremost apostle of woe?” Mollan asked mischievously. “Many say you are.” O’Neill grinned. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, “there’s Volstead.” “You’ll grant, I suppose,” Mollan went on, “that there are interesting situations in life, even dramatic situations, out of which genuine happiness sometimes ensues?” “Sure, I’ll write about happiness,” came the reply, “if I ever happen to meet up with that luxury, and find it sufficiently dramatic and in harmony with any deep rhythm of life. But happiness is a word. What does it mean? Exaltation: an intensified feeling of the significant worth of man’s being and becoming? Well, if it means that—and not a mere smirking contentment with one’s lot—I know there is more of it in one real tragedy than in all the happy-ending plays ever written.”331
Mollan pressed O’Neill to clarify his apparent attempt to reform American society through drama. “I am not a propagandist,” he responded, “not consciously, at any rate—in any sense of the word. … I have tried to keep my work free from all moral attitudinizing. To me there are no good people or bad people, just people. The same with deeds. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ are stupidities, as misleading and out-worn fetishes as Brutus Jones’s silver bullet.”332 Much of this outlook was derived from Max Stirner, who proposed that good and evil are mere fantasies, since one can murder freely so long as it’s sanctioned by the state, which makes “morality nothing else than loyalty.” O’Neill’s views on morality, what would be called “moral relativism” today, also came from August Strindberg, who argued that to compose a believable fictional character demands roundness not just of personality, the simpler definition of strong characterization, but also of morality: “There is no such thing as absolute evil,” Strindberg wrote, “the summary judgments that authors pass on people—this one is stupid, that one brutal, this one jealous, that one mean—ought to be challenged by naturalists, who know how richly complicated the soul is, and who are aware that ‘vice’ has a reverse side, which is very much like virtue.”333 In kind, O’Neill never considered himself or his plays as “immoral,” he said, but rather “unmoral.”334
A later friend of O’Neill’s, the drama critic Sophus Winther, called this in 1934 a “naturalistic ethics” (also akin to the moral relativism of today). “If no one is to blame,” he wrote of O’Neill’s plays, “then moral certainty cannot exist.” Naturalistic ethics are therefore untethered by the petty notions of good and evil one finds in melodrama; rather, they give the lie to society’s ever-changing standards of morality. As early as 1914, in Abortion, O’Neill had already spelled out this worldview: “Some impulses are stronger than we are,” his protagonist Jack Townshend says to his father, “have proved themselves so throughout our world’s history. Is it not rather our ideals of conduct, of Right and Wrong, our ethics, which are unnatural and monstrously distorted? Is society not suffering from a case of the evil eye which sees evil where there is none?” (CP1, 213). Winther concludes by noting that O’Neill thus pushed society’s laws “even further in that he condemns a fixed standard as destructive of life, holding that in the last analysis it will lead to false pride, arrogant and cruel behavior, hypocrisy and a destructive fanaticism.”335
In 1957, Tennessee Williams echoed this with his own naturalistic ethics: “I don’t believe in ‘original sin,’” he wrote. “I don’t believe in ‘guilt.’ I don’t believe in villains or heroes—only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents.” In simpler terms, as O’Neill’s third wife, Carlotta Monterey, later remarked on this same point, “Gene was never shocked at what people did. He was only interested in why they did it.”336 After ten days of shepherding “Anna Christie” and The Straw onto uptown stages, O’Neill’s artistic muse had withered out of commission, and he returned to Provincetown for a an indefinite period of recovery from “the after-effects of much bad booze.” “After all the worry and bustle of rehearsals, openings, I’m all in—very much of a nervous wreck—and glad to be back up here where no one can talk theatre to me. For the nonce, I’m fed up on that subject.”337
“I am in one of my periods of uncreative doldrums,” he told Arthur Hopkins’s press agent Oliver M. Sayler. “Read only the papers and the Saturday Evening Post, think not at all, walk much, and for emotional reaction have only a great and self-blighting loathing for the world in general. But these moods of the great loathing never last very long with me when the dunes are within walking distance, and I hope to report to you in my next that I am fully resurrected.”338
Less than a week later, O’Neill reported that his “creative élan” had been “fully resurrected,” and he’d begun writing his next play, The Hairy Ape, “with a mad rush”: “Think I have got the swing of what I want to catch and, if I have, I ought to tear through it like a dose of salts. It is one of those plays where the word ‘inspiration’ has some point—that is, you either have the rhythm or you haven’t, and if you have you can ride it, and if not, you’re dead.” The Hairy Ape’s protagonist Robert “Yank” Smith is also, like Driscoll in the Glencairn plays, based on O’Neill’s old drinking partner and fellow sailor on the S.S. Philadelphia. Driscoll, O’Neill said, “committed suicide by jumping overboard in mid-ocean.” Why would such a “tough customer” do something like that? “It was the why of Driscoll’s suicide that gave me the germ of the idea.” The rough draft was done in three weeks, “without interruption save for writer’s cramp.”339
The First Man was scheduled to open at the Neighborhood Playhouse on March 4, five days before The Hairy Ape at the Provincetown Playhouse. This was just as well. O’Neill admitted that he wished he’d destroyed The First Man, and The Hairy Ape offered diverting cover. Even George Jean Nathan tore The First Man apart: “Eugene O’Neill’s new drama, ‘The First Man,’” Nathan wrote, “is the poorest full-length play that he has written. While not without certain minor merits, it discloses its distinguished author in a tedious and profitless vein, with all of his most obvious faults magnified and with his sardonic point of view trembling perilously at the brink of burlesque.”340 “You let it down too easy,” O’Neill told him. “It is no good.”341
The Hairy Ape, on the other hand, was a masterwork of avant-garde theater. O’Neill wrote a gushing note about the play to Kenneth Macgowan immediately upon completing it in early January 1922: “I don’t think the play as a whole can be fitted into any of the current ‘isms.’ It seems to run the whole gamut from extreme naturalism to extreme expressionism—with more of the latter than the former. I have tried to dig deep in it, 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. And the man in the case is not an Irishman, as I at first intended, but, more fittingly, an American—a New York tough of the toughs, a product of the waterfront turned stoker—a type of mind, if you could call it that, which I know extremely
well. … Suffice it for me to add, the treatment of all the sets should be expressionistic, I think.” O’Neill’s patchwork of dialects, his unique blending of “isms,” his terrifying indictment of the industrial world order, made The Hairy Ape seem to many as if it had been written a century ahead of schedule. The Hairy Ape, Macgowan declared after witnessing its opening night that March at the Provincetown Playhouse, “leaps out at you from the future.”342
From the Provincetown Players’ earliest stage, Hutchins Hapgood and Neith Boyce’s cottage during the summer of 1915, to their breakup at the Macdougal Street theater in 1922, the amateur drama group produced an astonishing ninety-seven original plays by forty-six playwrights, all but two of them American. The foundation had been set for serious American drama on a mass scale. The triumph of The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape in 1922 and the Pulitzer Prize awarded to “Anna Christie” that same year would galvanize, just as the Players predicted, a theatrical revolution in the United States. Although the majority of the many hundreds of new American plays to follow replicated the naturalism of “Anna Christie,” it was The Hairy Ape, with its groundbreaking blend of naturalism and expressionism, what O’Neill called “super-naturalism,” that would prove to have the longest lasting impact.
“The greatest day of the Provincetown Players was between 1919 and 1922,” Mary Heaton Vorse declared. “A great contribution was made then to the American stage.” The pioneering novelist John Dos Passos agreed: in his provocative 1925 essay “Is the ‘Realistic’ Theatre Obsolete?” Dos Passos warned that if theater was to survive as an art form, it must progress in the ways O’Neill had shown in The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape. Dos Passos declared that “the throb of the drum in The Emperor Jones cleared many a pair of ears that had been until that time tuned only to suburban comedy. The chesty roar of The Hairy Ape made several people forget to read how The Well Dressed Man would wear his cravat.”
A year after the Players’ historic finale in 1922, O’Neill would join forces with Kenneth Macgowan and Robert Edmond Jones to form a new production team: the Experimental Theatre, Inc. At the same time, the American Laboratory Theatre was established, producing such theatrical luminaries as Harold Clurman and Lee Strasburg. (Strasburg’s Group Theatre would subsequently introduce “method acting” to the American stage in 1931.) By the mid-1920s, moreover, “The Great White Way” was no longer the enemy of serious drama. The number of new Broadway productions had more than doubled since the 1915–16 season, just one year before the opening of the Playwrights’ Theatre and the New York debuts of O’Neill and Glaspell. To this day, the 1925–26 season remains the historical peak of Broadway activity, with a staggering 255 new productions. (The 2013–14 Broadway season, in comparison, had 44.) The previously despised Shubert Brothers—the owners, in fact, of the Plymouth Theatre, where The Hairy Ape would achieve its success—were no longer reviled out of hand as lording over a greedy syndicate of philistines and knaves working at cross-purposes with risky innovation. Now they were behind-the-scenes allies striving, in their fashion, to help usher in this increasingly sought after New American Drama.
O’Neill and the Theatre Guild, formerly the Washington Square Players, even got over their mutual aversion in time. The Guild had begun to produce cutting-edge American dramatists like Elmer Rice, John Howard Lawson, Sidney Howard, DuBose Heyward, and others, and in 1928, it accepted its first O’Neill plays, Marco Millions and Strange Interlude; the latter would earn O’Neill his third Pulitzer Prize. O’Neill’s most accomplished work of this period, Desire Under the Elms (1924), Strange Interlude (1927), and Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), embodied the blend of naturalism and expressionism that came to dominate twentieth-century drama, what has since become known as the “American Style.”
ACT III: The Broadway Show Shop
It is too soon yet to be committed about O’Neill, though young as he is, he is already a quantity to make one wonder at the truth of the above assertion.
—WILLIAM FAULKNER, 1922
I question the moon above Broadway, “Where do I get off at? Where do I fit in?”
—EUGENE O’NEILL, 1926
Prometheus Unbound
WHEN O’NEILL read The Hairy Ape out loud to the Players gathered at the Macdougal Street theater, he did so without performance or embellishment. After the last line, though, he stood up, faced the group, and shouted, “This is one the bastards [uptown] can’t do!” The Players, stunned by the play’s bold originality, cheered in agreement. What they didn’t yet know was that O’Neill had already begun courting the uptown producer Arthur Hopkins to produce it before the script was even ready for the Players. He sent copies to both in the same mail—a detail the press agent Oliver M. Sayler publicized, to O’Neill’s embarrassment, in the New York World. “Oliver, as a friend I love you as a brother,” O’Neill berated him gently, “but as a publicity man … you must know what an utterly depraved, conscienceless character you are in that role.”1
The Emperor Jones’s breakout success signaled both the overture of experimental American drama and the coda for the Provincetown Players. Back when Saxe Commins had been drilling and bridging and extracting away inside O’Neill’s mouth, in April 1921, Boulton, in a chat with Jig Cook in Provincetown, learned of his intention to build a theater exclusively for O’Neill, Glaspell, and a couple of others he’d cultivated. She reminded him that new O’Neill plays now had uptown draw. “If we have this theater,” Cook rejoined, “will Gene want any of his work done uptown? I think Gene sees by this time that the uptown commercial game is no good. … I think Gene will want us to do all his plays.” “Now,” Boulton wrote her husband that same day, “do you, or don’t you, think it rather presumptuous on Jig’s part to feel that when they have this new theatre, which will seat 299 people, that they can count on the pick of your work?”2
Boulton’s response to the exasperated Cook might have struck him as Lady Macbeth–like, but he knew it was well founded: O’Neill’s move uptown was an inevitability. That February 1922, O’Neill, Cook, Glaspell, Fitzie Fitzgerald, Cleon Throckmorton, and Edna Kenton convened a secret meeting with their attorney Harry Weinberger to decide, once and for all, whether to disband. The vote was unanimous: “We would call in some outside director and new actors from somewhere, and call it the end,” Kenton said. “All this we did.”3 On February 24, they legally incorporated the Provincetown Players, holding onto the name and the theater but with no plan for the future. They wouldn’t make the announcement of their breakup until season’s end, until after they’d produced what they all knew would be their crowning achievement, O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape.
The Hairy Ape consists, like its precursor The Emperor Jones, of eight scenes. The first four take place on an ocean liner and the second four in Manhattan while the protagonist, Robert “Yank” Smith, a coal stoker on the steamship, is on shore leave. Yank proclaims that industrial technology is the future, where he “belongs,” a word, with variations for parts of speech, used over forty times in the play. O’Neill’s subtitle, “A Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life,” accurately describes the play insofar as “ancient” refers, in part, to Greek tragedy: Yank is a “tragic hero” figure of the Greek tradition, doomed by hubris, or unwarranted and excessive pride. The subtitle also harks back to our Darwinian ancestry, just three years before the infamous Scopes “Monkey” trial in which a Tennessee high school teacher would be indicted for teaching the theory of evolution. That O’Neill regards The Hairy Ape as a “comedy” seems like morbid irony; its meaning, however, can be found in the “happy ending” of Yank’s doom, since death provides his sole escape from the cages thrown up around him by modern times.
Yank’s overblown sense of belonging rapidly deflates when a wealthy young woman slumming in the stokehole, Mildred Douglas, faints after witnessing his grotesque behavior. Before losing consciousness, Mildred utters, “Filthy beast,” though Yank’s shipmates remember it later as “hairy ape,” an insult that tears Yank’s confidence ap
art. He then embarks on an existential quest to “belong” that ends at the gorilla cage of the city zoo. At first Yank feels as if, with this caged primate, he might at last have found a place where he belongs; recognizing his mistake, he says to the gorilla, “I ain’t on oith and I ain’t in heaven, get me? I’m in the middle tryin’ to separate ’em, takin’ all de woist punches from bot’ of ’em. Maybe dat’s what dey call hell, huh? But you, yuh’re at de bottom. You belong! Sure! Yuh’re de on’y one in de woild dat does, yuh lucky stiff!” (CP2, 162). Yank mistakes the gorilla’s alternating growls, roars, and cage rattling for fraternal sympathy and jimmies open the lock, whereupon the great ape slowly exits his cage. Yank holds out his hand to shake on their allegiance, but the gorilla lunges and crushes him with a “murderous hug.” He then flings Yank’s body into the cage, shuts the door, and wanders off. “Perhaps,” O’Neill writes in the final line of his stage directions, it’s only in death that “the Hairy Ape at last belongs” (CP2, 163).
The Hairy Ape’s premiere on March 9, 1922, was a widely hailed victory in the press, most amusingly wrought by critic Arthur Pollock in his rhapsodic write-up for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle: “We didn’t learn anything at all in high school, but the only thing we regret not having learned is a knowledge of how to make ear-splitting noises with two fingers in the mouth. … The accomplishment would have been so useful a thing the other night at the opening of Eugene G. O’Neill’s ‘The Hairy Ape.’ … It was the best play by an American we have ever seen. The audience shouted at the end. Some of the auditors whistled. But they weren’t very good at it. We wanted to try the two finger noise, tried it and failed. Which was humiliating. And there wasn’t a critic present who could do it. Critics are a limited crew.”4 Notices like these poured in, though not all were as unequivocal as Pollock’s. Much of the chatter revolved around the style of the play and its origins. The critics had heard of European expressionism, but not many had actually witnessed it aside from The Emperor Jones (which few at the time identified as expressionism) and the Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom (1909), which had just been translated into English and produced by the Theatre Guild the previous summer.
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 27
