Experimental O'Neill. Eugene O'Neill
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highly stylized The Hairy Ape, appearing two years after The Emperor Jones first established O’Neill’s international reputation, was a fitting culmination to the dramatist’s incredibly productive, mutually beneficial six-year tenure with the Provincetown Players.
Although somewhat controversial for its “squalid” dialogue—the NYPD unsuccessfully tried to close the production down for using obscene language—reviewers of the play generally found aesthetic value in its slang-filled dialogue and, especially, in the play’s theatricality, which included masked characters. Critic Walter Prichard Eaton, for example—who saw The Hairy Ape during its original run at the Provincetown Players’ “dingy little playhouse on Macdougal Street”14—suggests that the drama’s theatricality was central not only to the work’s success, but also to the future of American theater:
Certainly, never on our stage has such use been made of the rank realism of vulgar speech… We may say also quite as certainly, I think, no such fusion of dialogue and scenery, of the intellectual, the emotional, and the pictorial, into a single thing which is only to be described by the word theatrical, has ever before been accomplished by an American playwright… In Eugene O’Neill the new art of the theater in America has found its playwright at last. To see “The Hairy Ape” is to see the bright promise of what is to come, not the pale promise of what has been.15
Indeed, the Provincetown Players’ production of The Hairy Ape, the last of O’Neill’s dramas that the company would produce, “stood apart as a leading theatrical event not just of the season, but the decade.”16
Old-School Criticism and the Great American Playwright
Although many of his plays were highly theatrical, much criticism of O’Neill remains rooted in a dated approach to literature and theater that prioritizes not only realism, but also biographical interpretation. This is due, in large part, to the enormous impact of O’Neill’s autobiographical Long Day’s Journey Into Night, considered one of the greatest plays of modern drama, as well as to the oft-consulted, still-influential “definititve” biographies by Louis Sheaffer, Travis Bogard, and Arthur & Barbara Gelb, which in addition to covering O’Neill’s life, interpret most of his plays biographically. Plus, O’Neill’s Irish-Catholic family history—which includes being raised by a conflicted, drug-addicted mother, as well as a famous actor-father from Ireland (who grew up dirt poor) against whom O’Neill rebelled, socially and aesthetically, on his way to becoming “the first great American playwright”—is quite dramatic in itself, and thus further encourages biographical readings of the plays.
The over-reliance on biographical literary analysis is not, however, the only reason for an under-appreciation of some of O’Neill’s early plays. Although highly theatrical dramas such as The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape resist simple biographical interepretation, those plays, along with the rest of O’Neill’s early dramas, are frequently depicted as earnest “apprentice work.” Subsequently, O’Neill’s early, experimental playwriting (and much experimental drama in general) is viewed as being less mature, and thus inherently less effective, than the later realistic drama. In his critique of a standard bearer of O’Neill criticism, Travis Bogard, Thomas F. Connolly points to the limitations of this sort of scholarship, which can drastically distort and diminish O’Neill’s wide-ranging accomplishments as an innovative playwright:
Such commentary sees O’Neill’s body of work as a dramaturgical Road to Damascus. O’Neill’s true dramatic mission is to be a realistic writer steeped in bourgeois psychology, rendered unique via O’Neill’s aesthetic of autobiography. All past plays are prologue to Long Day’s Journey Into Night.17
In spite of this type of all-too-common criticism which suggests otherwise, the main focus of O’Neill’s career was not on writing plays that adhered to the conventions of mainstream realism. While the late masterworks are, indeed, high points of American drama, except “for [those] final, putatively autobiographical plays—O’Neill has scant interest in conversation plays.”18
The Wooster Group and the
Importance of Form
The Wooster Group, too, has little interest in conversational realistic plays, or in staging them in conventional ways. According to Elizabeth LeCompte, her process of directing a written play always entails reinvention rather than a simple restaging of the text. What she says of her approach to a work by another groundbreaking playwright of modern drama, Anton Chekhov, is equally relevant to her direction of The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape: “I’m not just going to do Chekhov [or O’Neill]. I’m trying to—I’m trying to make it present for me. Which means literally reinventing. I mean—‘reinventing’ it—it’s an over-used word. I mean reinventing it from the ground up.”19
Even if LeCompte were to reverse her renovative aesthetic inclinations and try to stage O’Neill (or any dramatist) in a traditional manner, she could not simply return to the theatrical past of the Provincetown Players and remain there for the duration of an O’Neill one-act play. Besides, such theatrical time-travel—especially from the twenty-first century—would prove antithetical to the relentless experimentation of both the Provincetown Players and O’Neill during the nineteen-tens and -twenties, not to mention the Wooster Group. Plus, as Brecht reminds us, “Literary forms [of the past] have to be checked against [current] reality.”20 Yet the reality of the present is, like O’Neill’s texts, also tethered to the past, while performance takes place in the here and now. Thus, the presentation of a written play will always contain inherent tensions—between history and “the now,” the anterior existence of the written script (and the rehearsal period, etc.) and live performance—although conversational realism will often attempt to conceal such tensions.
As O’Neill continued to develop and experiment with an aesthetically diverse body of dramatic work during the nineteen-twenties, Bertolt Brecht, of whom O’Neill was surely unaware at the time, began exploring drama’s inherent tensions within his epic theater. Similar tensions were also being explored by Walter Benjamin, a friend of Brecht’s who, in addition to writing about Brecht’s theater and other products of modernity, encouraged a non-linear, montage-based approach to history that may have been influenced by epic theater. Benjamin believed that, since it is impossible to efface the present and “show things as they really were,” the historian should show history as “time filled by the presence of the now.”21 In other words, the historian must brush history against the grain because traditional history, treating the past as if it exists in itself, reifies the past and thus engenders mystification. In a passage reminiscent of Brecht’s belief that traditional (with-the-grain) realistic drama encourages passive (rather than active) spectatorship, Benjamin observes that “the history which showed things ‘as they really were’ was the strongest narcotic of the century.”22 Similarly, a “faithful” (i.e., traditional) (re)production of a hundred-year-old play which purports to show the work “as it was meant to be” could narcoticize spectators into thinking that they’re seeing “what really was,” and thereby discourage them from becoming aware of a work’s dialectical tensions, as well as its relationship to their own historical moment, and vice versa.
Herbert Blau, evoking the distancing techniques of both Brecht’s epic theater and, indirectly, Benjaminian historiography, suggests that directors should exploit theater’s inherent tensions by taking “things [including plays themselves] out of perspective, restoring them to history.”23 Brecht wrenches conventional perspectives away from spectators by disrupting their empathetic identification with the play’s characters, and by utilizing montage-like juxtapositions that require the audience to fill in gaps in order to find meaning. While lacking—at least on the surface—Brecht’s interest in social change, the Wooster Group’s experimental aesthetics similarly disrupt conventions, but in more extreme ways that move performance even further beyond traditional realism. Although a Wooster Group-style production of a play by O’Neill will inevitably show the text in a new light, it is important to keep in mind that even realistic productions of a particular work will always create, from production to production, a somewhat different experience for the play’s respective audiences. As Marvin Carlson observes,
a dramatic author…must recognize that his characters are in a much more radical sense only partly his own, since