Old Play in Manhattan

Desire Under the Elms (by Eugene O'Neill) opened a new season for the American National Theater & Academy. As a choice-on-paper, this major O'Neill effort is far happier than most of ANTA's previous offerings. As an actual stage piece, it leaves much to be desired under the elms. In it O'Neill boldly grappled with the most rooted intensities and twisted passions. But for all its insistent starkness, Desire lacks stature, and the ANTA production, by acting everything out in italics, tends to accentuate the play's shortcomings.

O'Neill's mid-19th-century chronicle of the greeds, lusts, hates and frustrations of a New England farming family centers in a fierce struggle for possession of the farm. For it, children wish their father dead, brother schemes against brother, a young woman marries a fanatical old man, then seduces his son to obtain an heir. But Desire Under the Elms concerns more than an actual fight over land: its harsh primitivism seeks to lay bare a crippling Puritanism, to paint a gaunt New England landscape of the mind and will.

To all this O'Neill brought his brooding, unflinching sense of the dark mass of things, but not the art -- or even the articulateness--to give it genuine shape. Desire emerges as neither realistic drama nor poetic tragedy, but as something clumsily in between. Most of the writing, in a rather stylized dialect as factitious as it is folksy, lacks reverberation. Hence, too much of the action has the quality of mere clodhopper melodrama. The last act is dramatically effective; but the last act, reaching up to the redemptive power of love, should be tragically exalted.

The posed, almost didactic production reduces the lifelikeness without achieving anything larger than life. Desire Under the Elms need only be compared with the great run of facile, cut-to-measure plays to reveal how uncompromisingly O'Neill aspired. But it need only be compared with brooding, grey-toned work that does possess breadth and grandeur--Thomas Hardy's, for instance--to reveal how distinctly O'Neill fell short.

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