Greece in New England

(See front cover)

Solely to amuse themselves, a group of friends at Provincetown, Mass., 16 summers ago, went over to Hutchins Hapgood's verandah and put on a couple of plays. Susan Glaspell was there; so were George Cram ("Jig") Cook, rebel John Reed, Mary Heaton Vorse. Robert Edmond Jones, a young man of talent and resource, fashioned scenery out of porch furniture, odds-&-ends. The Almighty supplied the backdrop, a tumbling ocean. Next year the play-acting fad persisted. Mary Vorse turned over a shack on her wharf to the enterprise and someone named Eugene Gladstone O'Neill, a lank, bushy-headed fellow with no money but "a trunkful of plays," contributed to the second bill a one-acter called Bound East For Cardiff. Sick with stage fright, "Gene" O'Neill spoke a few lines as the mate. Lending a particularly happy atmospheric effect, under the feet of an audience of 30 lapped the restless sea.

At four p.m. one afternoon last week, a crowd of people who were not quite sure how to dress for the occasion bustled into the neo-Andalusian splendor of Manhattan's Guild Theatre. They, too, were going to see an O'Neill play--an important one backed by the resources of the world's most ambitious experimental theatre, performed by great Actresses Alice Brady and Alla Nazimova, the work of a mature genius of 43.

The Play, Mourning Becomes Electra, had been in the mind of many a theatregoer for over a year. Rumor about it had been rife. It would be three independent pieces. It would take three days to see it. Each unit would run a week and it would take three weeks to see it. Not until ten days before production was the matter definitely cleared: the trilogy would run continuously with an hour's intermission for dinner, would last five hours. One wag remarked, "We won't go home until Mourning Becomes Electra." Admission: $2-$6.

When coats were stowed under seats, house lights extinguished, the audience was shown the exterior of a large New England home, a portico of deathly paleness only partially masking the building's sepulchral grey face. Here dwell the Mannons. With swift, sure strokes a long story is told.

The Mannons are a strange lot, proud, rich, a family 200 years old. They hate well, too. Ezra, general and judge, and his son Orin are expected home from the Civil War. One who wants Ezra back is his stark daughter Lavinia (Miss Brady). One who does not want him back, hates him, wishes him in his grave is his wife Christine (Miss Nazimova). Beautiful, full-blown, she has fallen in love with a seaman, Brant. It does not take long to find out that Brant is a Mannon, too. His father was Ezra's uncle, who got a hired girl in trouble, had to marry her and leave town. Lavinia, who finds out about the affair, loathes her mother a little bit more, threatens to tell her father about it unless Christine dismisses Brant. Out of this situation arises the first of Mourning Becomes Electra's four deaths. Tired of war, sick, wishing to patch it up with his wife, Ezra returns. It is hard for him to forget four years of carnage. "That's always been the Mannon's way of thinking," says he. "They went to the white meeting house on Sabbaths and meditated on death. Life was a dying. Being born was starting to die. Death was being born to live." As the next grey dawn shadows his sleepless bed, Ezra Mannon is "born to live." Christine poisons him.

When Orin comes home a struggle between the two Mannon women waxes bitter. Orin is not a little attached to his mother, Oedipus-wise. He never liked his father. But when Lavinia makes him track down their mother's rendezvous with Brant on his ship, Orin's eyes open. He shoots his mother's lover. His mother returns home, commits suicide. That accounts for Parts I and II, "Homecoming" and "The Haunted."

"The Hunted," which winds up the play, finds Orin in sorry shape. He mourns his mother's death, blames himself for it. Lavinia has taken him on one of the Mannon ships to China. The trip does only one of them good. Lavinia, having tarried on a Pacific isle long enough to have had a sentimental interlude with a native chief's son, has grown as beautiful as her mother. Orin's mind has become deranged. Peter Niles wants to marry Lavinia, his sister wants to marry Orin. But Orin threatens to air the family's bloody linen if Lavinia leaves him. Seeking peace in a "bottomless hell," he then proposes to his sister that they live together as man-&-wife. His reaction to her disgust is to shoot himself. Her fiance guesses, quite correctly, the worst.

On the gloomy verandah, Lavinia, aware that "the damned don't cry," speaks her elegy to faithful Seth, the gardener: "I'm bound here--to the Mannon dead! Don't be afraid. I'm not going the way mother and Orin went. That's escaping punishment. . . . I'll never wear anything but mourning again. Life doesn't fit the Mannons. Only death becomes them!"

Significance. Even before they went out to dinner, it was fairly obvious to first-afternooners that Playwright O'Neill had moved Greece to New England. Those who knew their Euripides were quick to detect a parallel between Mourning Becomes Electra and the classic tragedy, recalled how Agamemnon, returning from the Trojan War, was killed by his wife (Clymnestra), how the long-lost son Orestes finally killed his mother's lover and his mother at the instigation of Elektra.

Significant is the O'Neill treatment of the theme: simple, straightforward. Spectators who came expecting asides, theatrical tricks such as those employed in Strange Interlude were disappointed. Spectators who hoped to see an elaborate job of mental vivisection, such as Playwright O'Neill displayed in Strange Interlude, were disappointed, too. Prime point of criticism of Mourning Becomes Electra is its bareness. Six hours is a long time to have to sit and watch a family obliterate itself, motivated by unrelieved hatred and lust.

Playwright O'Neill, an experimenter at heart, seldom uses exactly the same method twice. He is voracious. Life, and life as portrayed in the theatre, is a business that must be attacked on many fronts. The only thing that serious Mr. O'Neill can inevitably be counted on to avoid is a touch of humor. Like his fellow-Hibernian Synge, he loves "all that is salt in the mouth, all that is rough to the hand, all that heightens the emotions by contest, all that stings into life the sense of tragedy."

The record of Playwright O'Neill easily establishes him as the nation's greatest. The tom-tom which thudded through The Emperor Jones (1920) sounded a new pulse on the U. S. stage. With Beyond the Horizon (1919), Anna Christie (1921) and Strange Interlude (1929) he has thrice won the Pulitzer Prize. His published works number 28. If you would like a copy of Thirst & Other One-Act Plays, his first printed volume, it will cost you $75.

The most important epoch in Eugene O'Neill's life is not his dismissal from Princeton in 1907 for hijinks, not the period in which he bummed about on ships, not even his long association with the Provincetown Players. It begins on Christmas Eve, 1912, when drink and irregular habits sent him into the Gaylord Farm (Wallingford, Conn.) sanitarium, a tuberculous patient. His biographers note that he went in a boy and came out a man. At least, that was where he started writing seriously. Up to that time his sorely-tried father, Actor James O'Neill, thought his son was just "crazy." Eugene O'Neill had been a beachcomber at Buenos Aires, a seaman, a reporter on the New London Telegraph, had trouped with the parental Monte Cristo road company.

Mourning Becomes Electra was largely written last year at his house near Tours, France. Returned to the U. S. this summer for rehearsals, seven weeks of them, he said he would never live abroad again. He has three children: Eugene Jr., who won a Latin prize at Yale last year (TIME, June 8) of which his father is very proud, Ona and Shane. He is also attached to a Dalmatian named Blemie.

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill can afford to relax his stern face occasionally and smile on life. Equipped with proven genius, he is comparatively a young man. Money rolls in from Strange Interlude, still on the road. The kudos he has received may be only a sample of what is to come. Above all a living writer, he looks steadfastly to the future, scorns any present estimate of his work, explains: "It seems to me that there is too damned much of that sort of thing being done in America."

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