Now I Ask You by Eugene O’Neill

Predictable free-love farce

Eugene O’Neill

After reading all of Eugene O’Neill’s best-known plays, I decided to dive deeper into his complete works. Doing so has brought my attention to a number of obscure dramas, some of which O’Neill himself wished to be forgotten. One such play is Now I Ask You, which O’Neill wrote in 1916. It was not performed on stage, however, until a 2010 production in St. Louis.

Tom Drayton is engaged to Lucy Ashleigh. Tom would like to marry Lucy, but she, being a modern woman, values her independence above all else. Luckily, Tom has his mother in law, Mrs. Ashleigh, on his side. She tells Tom that all of Lucy’s bohemian affectations and talk of feminism and free love is just an act. Mrs. Ashleigh assures Tom that if he calls Lucy’s bluff, Lucy will back down and eventually assume the role of the devoted wife that he desires. Tom reluctantly goes along with Mrs. Ashleigh’s plan, hoping it will pay off as she predicts. Lucy deigns to marry Tom if he signs a contract stating that theirs is an open marriage, with each party free to pursue their own interests, loves, and liaisons. Tom agrees. After the wedding, Tom keeps waiting for his wife to drop the modern-woman act, but contrary to his mother in law’s assurances, his calling Lucy’s bluff doesn’t seem to have paid off for him.

The fact that free love is even a topic in this play was probably very risqué for 1916. One can imagine O’Neill, like Lucy, envisioning himself as a bohemian artiste who dares to challenge his audience with such a controversial issue. The play in which he explores this theme, however, is about as conventional and predictable as it could be. It seems clear that O’Neill wrote this drama to appeal to a mainstream audience, hoping to make some money off of it. In that regard, however, Now I Ask You obviously didn’t pan out for him.

Over a century later, the free-love debate in this play is rather antiquated, but nowadays we still have to deal with characters like Lucy, counterculture posers who pretend to be more radical or woke than they really are. This is an aspect of the play with which modern readers can identify. Now I Ask You seems to be satirizing such posers, but in this play it’s often difficult to tell when O’Neill is trying to be funny and when he’s trying to be serious. Unless one has their grandparents’ sense of humor, the 21st-century reader really can’t be sure how much of the comedy here is intentional. One interesting piece of progressive-era slang that I picked up from this play is the expression, “I’ll blow you,” which apparently means “I’ll treat you (to dinner, drinks, or whatever the case may be).”

Any debate in this drama over free love, feminism, or modern marriage is overshadowed by the mystery of why Tom would ever want to marry Lucy in the first place, given that she is a truly unpleasant and simply mean person. In fact, Tom is the only sympathetic character in a cast full of arrogant and annoying players. Like the prime-time soap operas or reality TV of today, however, sometimes it is entertaining to observe a train wreck. Now I Ask You is tolerably mediocre and predictable for most of its length, but the epilogue is ridiculously bad, enough to make one lose respect for theatre audiences of 1916 that they would sit through such tripe. A century later, Now I Ask You is little more than a curious novelty that will only appeal to O’Neill completists.