Books: New Views of a Playwright's Long Journey: Eugene O'Neill

“It was my work which first awakened the outside world to the fact that an adult American drama existed which could be considered as something beyond mere theatrical entertainment.” Eugene O’Neill wrote this self-assessment in a 1944 letter, and the judgment, while hardly modest, still seems incontrovertible 35 years after his death and a century after his birth. As a young playwright, O’Neill inherited a theater tradition that was principally a frame for gaslighted frivolities. By the time he got through with it, the U.S. stage had become electric, and had learned to accommodate native-grown murder, madness, alcoholism, dark sexuality and the howling tensions of family life. Opening the curtain on such subjects might not have seemed the surest path to public success, yet O’Neill was one of the most admired and honored writers of his time. Four of his plays won Pulitzer Prizes, and in 1936 he became the first (and is still the only) American dramatist to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

On the occasion of his 100th anniversary, O’Neill’s revolutionary accomplishments are nowhere questioned, certainly not in the land of his birth. But the continued vibrancy of his plays — their ability in performance to command the attendance and attention of a live audience — has become a matter of some dispute. The centenary has, to be sure, sparked revivals of some of his works by theater groups across the country. But a mere handful of his 50 plays are now resurrected for the theater with any regularity. And of this small sample, which includes Ah, Wilderness! and The Iceman Cometh, only one seems surefire with playgoers and critics alike: A Long Day’s Journey into Night, which was published after O’Neill’s death and then performed first in 1956 despite his stated wish that it “never ((be)) produced as a play.”

In truth, O’Neill’s reputation has moved steadily away from the footlights toward reading lamps, a process that began during his lifetime. That, at least, is one of many conclusions to be drawn from Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill (Yale University; 602 pages; $35). Editors Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer have chosen 560 examples, some published for the first time, of the roughly 3,000 surviving O’Neill letters. The result is a fragmented but fascinating autobiography that shows its subject growing disillusioned with the theater even while he was furiously engaged in expanding its possibilities.

Early on, the aspiring playwright announced his intention to become “an artist or nothing,” and he never let practical concerns stand in the way of that intention. After his one-act productions proved successful, O’Neill began pushing the limits of the stage and of his producers’ wallets. He reluctantly shelved an eight-act version of Marco Millions; in its shorter incarnation, the play still called for opulent sets representing scenes in Venice, Syria, Persia, India, Mongolia and Cathay. And that only took care of Act I. Lazarus Laughed required approximately 165 actors wearing a variety of masks. Strange Interlude ran an astonishing nine acts; the curtain went up at 5:15 in the afternoon, and playgoers were given a 90-minute supper break at 7:30, after Act V. This endurance test turned out to be wildly popular. The play earned O’Neill his third Pulitzer and became a best seller when published as a book. Even this acclaim did not satisfy the author. He wrote a fellow playwright: “I’d be a liar if I said the money wasn’t welcome, even though I feel the play earned it under the false pretenses of a ballyhooed freak.”

Ironically, O’Neill’s personality, as revealed in his letters, seems unsuited to the collaborative demands of the theater. His private visions lashed him forward, but he was nearly always disappointed with what he finally saw onstage. He grew increasingly frustrated by “the inevitable compromises and distortions of production.” In 1934, the Nobel Prize still two years away, he wrote a friend: “I take my theatre too personally, I guess — so personally that before long I think I shall permanently resign from all production and confine my future work to plays in books for readers only.”

The anniversary tribute that might therefore please him most is the publication of his Complete Plays (Library of America; 3,203 pages; 3 volumes, $35 each; boxed set, $100), the most thorough and accurate collection of his work ever printed. These handsome books present O’Neill’s plays in the order of their composition, making it possible to trace the evolution of his skills and ideas. It is also easy, turning these pages, to see why he grew so grumpy about the restrictions of the theater. He often prefaced his plays with lengthy treatises, not only describing characters and settings in obsessive detail but providing historical or sociological information that could not possibly be conveyed in production. And his stage directions regularly ballooned beyond any possibility of being accurately mimed, or even parsed. This, from The Iceman Cometh, is typical: “Larry stares at him, moved by sympathy and pity in spite of himself, disturbed, and resentful at being disturbed, and puzzled by something he feels about Parritt that isn’t right.”

The printed page cannot reproduce the magical, concentrated intensity of theater at its best. But the Library of America volumes display O’Neill more thoroughly than any playhouse ever could. And it is now easier to see his vaulting ambition as both his glory and his curse. He began by simply trying to put life as he had actually known and seen it onstage — a far more daring concept in the America of his youth than it might now seem. But if small scenes worked, why not bigger ones? And if one character, why not dozens? This relentless amplification compelled the hushed attention of several generations of playgoers, but it also led the playwright farther and farther afield. Believing that more is actually more, O’Neill finally found that an evening’s entertainment could not contain everything he had to say. Much of his work thus displays the flaw of hubris, the pride that refuses to bow to the demands of contingency. This drama, his struggle against his own art, may be his most memorable achievement.

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