Eugene O'Neill's Philosophy of Difficult Theatre

Pity, Fear, and Forgiveness

Jeremy Killian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367519209
• eBook ISBN: 9781000546132
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: American Drama

Through a close re-examination of Eugene O'Neill's oeuvre, from minor plays to his Pulitzer-winning works, this study proposes that O'Neill's vision of tragedy privileges a particular emotional response over a more "rational" one among his audience members.

In addition to offering a new paradigm through which to interpret O'Neill's work, this book argues that O'Neill's theory of tragedy is a robust account of the value of difficult theatre as a whole, with more explanatory scope and power than its cognitivist counterparts. This paradigm reshapes our understanding of live theatrical tragedy's impact and significance for our lives. The book enters the discussion of tragic value by way of the plays of Eugene O'Neill, and through this study, Killian makes the case that O'Neill has refused to allow Plato to define the terms of tragedy's merit, as the cognitivists have. He argues that O'Neill's theory of tragedy is non-cognitive and locates the value of a play in its ability to trigger certain emotional responses from the audience.
This would be of great interest to students and scholars of performance studies, literature and philosophy.

1 Puzzle

DOI: 10.4324/9781003055693-2

In July of 1956, the opening performance of Long Day’s Journey into Night “exploded like a dazzling skyrocket over the humdrum of Broadway theatricals.”¹ Such superlatives reverberated through the press, with Brooks Atkinson proclaiming that with the release of the previously sealed play, “American theatre acquires size and stature.”² Though Long Day’s Journey into Night was not the last play Eugene O’Neill wrote during his lifetime, this play, produced for New York audiences three years after his death, seemed his magnum opus, the culminating dramatic work for which all his other plays had prepared the way. The above accolades foisted upon Long Day’s Journey could doubtless be used by many to describe the impact O’Neill’s body of work writ large had on the American theatre. It seems uncontroversial to claim that Eugene Gladstone O’Neill, son of a romantic actor renowned for melodramatic performances of The Count of Monte Cristo, set a new, grand trajectory for American theatre, resisting the temptations of “The Great Trite Way,” instead forging an American tragic voice that altered the course of American—and perhaps global—theatrical history.

There is a mythology that has sprung up about O’Neill’s work as America’s premier dramatist, akin to the mythology of the American dream. This myth, described by Michael Wikander in “Eugene O’Neill and the Cult of Sincerity,” predicts that with hard work and “sheer force of character,”³ a man can overcome his limitations and achieve greatness. According to many critics, the story of O’Neill’s own greatness follows this pattern, and this myth animates how critics have come to see O’Neill’s many personal and literary failures. O’Neill’s canon is very mixed in terms of quality, with many of his plays derivative and plodding, exhibiting a “clumsiness of language,” and a “reliance upon pop-psychology and resynthesized versions of ancient myth.”⁴ It appears that within O’Neill’s body of work, his moments of brilliant playwrighting actually serve as the exception and not the rule. Many of his plays verge on hackneyed Romanticism, and even late masterpieces The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night have significant technical deficiencies. Theatre historian Joseph Wood Krutch observes that “to a very unusual degree, O’Neill exhibits both astonishing virtues and limitations which would be painfully obvious even in a much lesser writer.”⁵ To be fair, all who experiment, as O’Neill did, with the limits of theatrical performance within their time will likely find failure more often than success, but the reception of O’Neill’s work is remarkable in that critics are willing to overlook so much failure in characterizing him as America’s foremost dramatist.

Krutch is an early defender of what one might refer to as the “emergence narrative” of O’Neill’s talent: the narrative that describes O’Neill as realizing his genius through hard work and persistence. Of O’Neill, Krutch remarks that the history of his development is the history of a persistent, sometimes fumbling attempt to objectify his emotions, accompanied by a persistent hope that this or that opening suggested by some intellectual faction would provide the opportunity for which he felt the need.⁶

Many O’Neill commentators have seen O’Neill’s dramatic experimentation along the lines Krutch suggested, and perhaps this explains why these critics have adopted the emergent narrative, seeing even his weakest plays as stepping stones in the development of his stronger works. To be sure, this charitable approach to interpreting O’Neill has its advantages; however, it does not serve to explain away how O’Neill has come to be regarded as the father of American drama. Perhaps O’Neill’s defenders merely lionize him because his own (albeit limited) successes map onto the conception Americans have of themselves as on the verge of greatness if only for the effort. O’Neill stayed true to himself, the story goes, and in the end, that steadfast sincerity and commitment to the work fashioned his genius. While this may be a favorable way to understand O’Neill’s success, it remains unclear how he ought to be regarded as America’s foremost dramatist.

The puzzle deepens when one contrasts O’Neill’s work with the great playwrights America has produced in its brief recorded theatrical history. Since O’Neill began experimenting with dramatic expression in 1916 with the Provincetown Players, American giants have expanded dramatic form in significant and powerful ways. Tony Kushner, Susan Glaspell, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and many others have made significant contributions to the American theatrical experience, yet for some reason O’Neill retains his status as The American Tragedian. Given the uneven quality of O’Neill’s writing throughout his career, the esteem with which he is regarded does seem strange. This phenomenon is not lost on O’Neill’s critics, many of whom seem altogether mystified by his veneration in the American theatrical tradition.

One possible explanation for O’Neill’s lasting significance in American theatrical history is simply that he was the first successful American playwright to attempt to write plays of broader impact than Broadway box-office returns. Perhaps the reason O’Neill is so highly regarded has little to do with the quality of his work as compared to those who followed him, but more to do with the fact that he was one of the first American playwrights to attempt to write serious theatrical literature that would rival literature performed on European stages. Such a conception of O’Neill is a bit of a caricature, to be sure, as there were other important American playwrights with similar ambition making important contributions to the stage, but often caricature lies at the heart of myth, and the myth of Eugene O’Neil as America’s foremost playwright is a formidable and lasting one. The purpose of this book is not necessarily to offer a defense of O’Neill’s standing, but this puzzle will animate how we come to understand the true value of O’Neill’s work.

O’Neill and America’s young theatre

O’Neill’s legend grew as the American theatre grew, perhaps because he was so closely acquainted with it, as his family history was tied to America’s theatrical industry. O’Neill was deeply familiar with Broadway’s commercial influence upon theatrical art, as his father James had made his name and fortune in what had become an almost entirely commercialistic theatrical industry in the United States. James O’Neill’s personal success preceded the era of Broadway domination, but he profited from its expanding influence throughout his career. The story of “modern” American theatre really begins at the turn of the twentieth century, although its roots can be traced from the late 1800s. In the decades before the Civil War, nearly every major American city had at least one resident stock company,⁷ but by the end of the 1800s, that system had largely eroded, so that playhouses in the United States almost exclusively hosted traveling shows. These touring groups were referred to as combinations, and they were organized around one or more stars. Combinations had ready access to towns and cities across the country because 130,000 new miles of track had been added by expanding railroad companies between the years of 1860–1880.⁸ This system is what allowed James O’Neill, the star of the colossally successful theatrical adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, to make a small fortune by performing in only one production throughout most of his career. This system was financed by large monopolies of theatre owners and producers, and “plays that appealed to conventional tastes and were likely to be profitable took precedence over innovation, experimentation, and literary merit.”⁹ Eugene was born in a New York hotel in 1888, during one of James’ touring seasons, and before he was sent to boarding school and for several seasons as a young adult, he traveled extensively with his mother and father as James performed the lead role in Count.

By the time O’Neill began writing plays, the American theatrical scene was almost entirely relegated to New York. Daniel Watermeier remarks, “Indeed, ‘Broadway’ and ‘American theatre’ had become synonymous terms.”¹⁰ Because of rising production costs and other factors, the “star” model of touring shows diminished, and most theatre appeared on Broadway. Plays on Broadway were financed in the same way the touring combinations had been funded. The lion’s share of productions that appeared on Broadway during this time were backed by large conglomerates apparently more concerned about profit than artistic integrity. As a result, sentimental and melodramatic plays such as Peg O’ My Heart, Abie’s Irish Rose, and The Count of Monte Cristo dominated the Broadway theatrical scene, making investors a great deal of profit and providing audiences exciting but rarely challenging theatrical experiences. The plays performed were familiar, thrilling, and mostly conventional, and audiences consumed such experiences in great numbers.

Though American theatre was dominated by the influence of Broadway’s commercialized approach, there were numerous members of the industry who were concerned about Broadway’s artistic trajectory. Serious actors, critics, and playwrights often spoke out against the cultural trend toward commercial, “popular” entertainment to the detriment of “legitimate” theatrical production, but their voices were largely stymied by the power of the monopolies and audience reception of Broadway’s repertory. William Winter, perhaps the most prominent American theatre critic of his day, mourned that theatre had moved away “from the hands either of Actors who love and honor their art or of men endowed with the temperament of the Actor and acquainted with the art and its needs.”¹¹ While serious dramatic artists such as Zoë Atkins, Ethel Barrymore, Clyde Fitch, and Edward Sheldon were represented on Broadway, few of their plays saw significant theatrical success compared to plays such as Abie’s Irish Rose, Tobacco Road, Abraham Lincoln, and The Gold Diggers.

In this context, O’Neill began his earliest experiments in 1912 with a naturalistic, “European” theatrical style influenced by Ibsen and Strindberg, a style that sharply contrasted the work of most of his contemporaries in the States. Failing to appreciate the European influence on O’Neill’s style, critic Barrett Clark claimed that O’Neill’s voice was “uniquely American,” and his plays rejected many of the dramatic devices of the era in favor of an authentic and sincere depiction of life as he saw it. When reflecting upon the promise of the young playwright’s second volume of plays, Clark wrote that O’Neill “never seeks to construct an effective vehicle for a star.”¹² Most of O’Neill’s earliest plays depicted characters with whom he was familiar because of his time as a merchant seaman: drunks, derelicts, prostitutes, and down-on-their-luck sailors—characters on the fringes of modern society. These characters spoke in the direct, unvarnished, and vulgar language that O’Neill had heard on the high seas and in ports around the Atlantic between 1909 and 1912. The coarse, realistic style of O’Neill’s sea plays was out of step with the melodramatic, Romantic prose that dominated Broadway stages, and had it not been for the experimental and avant-garde group formed by George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1915, it is unlikely that O’Neill’s plays would have graced the boards of any American theatre.

Aside from a short course of study with George Pierce Baker at Harvard in 1914, O’Neill had no formal training in playwrighting, and part of his experimental style was probably borne out of determining in real time what worked in theatrical performance, and what did not. The Provincetown Players’ theatrical troupe provided the young playwright a venue for his experiments and also a vehicle for “breaking through” in New York, as the Players moved from Massachusetts to Greenwich Village for the fall season of 1916, where they staged several of his plays. These productions began to receive critical attention and raised O’Neill’s profile as an interesting up-and-coming writer, and his earliest plays received largely warm reviews in New York papers. Louis Sherwin claimed in 1918 that no other young playwright working in American theatre had more promise that O’Neill, for O’Neill knew not only how “people of the sea” spoke, but “what they feel and hope and how destiny mocks their pathetic ambitions.”¹³

As with his one-act plays, O’Neill’s first successful full-length play—a play for which he was awarded the newly founded Pulitzer Prize—was acclaimed for bringing authentic and sincere language to Broadway. One reviewer reported that unlike typical Broadway fare, Beyond the Horizon (staged in 1920 at the Morosco Theatre), did not deal with “saccharinish sentiment” but instead gave voice to a new American tragic style, a display of the wasted lives and dashed hopes of ordinary people with uniquely American ambitions.¹⁴ Critics recognized that O’Neill did not employ the theatrical techniques and tricks of his contemporaries, and more than one worried that lack of “lowbrow” audience enthusiasm would cause the play to close without receiving the recognition and veneration it deserved.¹⁵ There was a sense among critic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Puzzle
• 2 Paradigm
• 3 Passions
• 4 Pity
• 5 Fear
• 6 Forgiveness
• 7 Paradox
• 8 Finis
• Bibliography
• Index