Strange Interlude by Eugene O’Neill

Mature psychological drama slightly overdone

I’ve been gradually working my way through the complete works of American playwright Eugene O’Neill, proceeding mostly in chronological order. It has been a bumpy ride with some true masterpieces scattered amid mediocre offerings, failed experiments, and some real stinkers. Strange Interlude, published in 1928, is one of the good ones. Here O’Neill has reached his mature, Nobel-worthy style. In this play, O’Neill employs a modern technique of stream-of-consciousness soliloquy which was groundbreaking for its time, although it feels tame compared to the later modernist weirdness of avant-garde playwrights like Samuel Beckett or Eugene Ionesco. Strange Interlude won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1928, the year it premiered. The play consists of nine acts and at full-length takes about five or six hours to perform on stage.

The play opens in the home of Henry Leeds, a professor at a New England university. Nina Leeds, his daughter, grieves the loss of her fiancé Gordon Shaw, who was killed in World War I. Nina wanted to marry him before the war, but she suspects her father dissuaded Gordon from pre-deployment nuptials. Thus, she was never able to consummate her union with Gordon, whom she worshipped, and she resents her father for it. A friend of the family, Charles Marsden, has known Nina since childhood and is obviously in love with her, but she has placed him firmly into the friend category. Nina, distraught from her fiancé’s death, leaves her father’s house to nurse wounded soldiers and embarks on several sordid sexual escapades. As a sort of penance, she agrees to marry Sam Evans, an affable boob whom she likes but doesn’t love. Sam’s best friend Ned Darrell, a physician, is also attracted to Nina, and the feeling is mutual. The play is essentially an extended power struggle between these four (and later a fifth) main characters. The three men each love Nina in their own selfish ways, and she manipulates them to satisfy her own neurotic needs. Though Gordon Shaw is deceased before the play begins, his presence looms large in Nina’s memory, and all the men feel they have to compete with the unrealistic ideal he left behind.

The aforementioned technique of soliloquy makes it possible for the audience to know what’s going on in the characters’ heads. In dialogue scenes, the characters speak to each other, but they also speak their thoughts out loud, as if those in the room can’t hear them. In movies, such interior monologue would be done with voice-overs (as in the 1932 film adaptation of Strange Interlude starring Clark Gable), but it’s unclear exactly how this would work on a stage. In the text, the stage directions and punctuation set these soliloquies apart.

For a Broadway play of 1928, Strange Interlude deals with some admirably challenging subject matter: sexual promiscuity, mental illness, infidelity, abortion. It’s refreshing to hear sexuality handled in a realistic manner after the more prudish theatrical conventions of earlier years. In Strange Interlude, O’Neill demonstrates the psychological insight and authenticity that would mark his later masterpieces like The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night. The dynamics between the characters feel real. Their interactions read like a chess game of wills, desires, and jealousies. Compared to the sexual politics, the discussion of mental illness feels a bit antiquated, and overall, the drama is somewhat drawn-out and repetitive. I don’t know if I’d want to sit in a theatre for five hours to watch this play, but to read it off the page over the course of a week made for a compelling experience.