The Personal Equation by Eugene O‘Neill

The Hairy Ape lite

Eugene O’Neill

After having read several of Eugene O’Neill’s better-known plays, I became a fan of his writing and decided to set about reading his complete works. Doing so has led me to some rather obscure works of his, some unjustly obscure and some deservedly so. The Personal Equation, one such O’Neill rarity, falls somewhere between the two. Written in 1915 as a class project when O’Neill was at Harvard, The Personal Equation didn’t make it to the stage until over a century later, when the Provincetown Players performed the work in 2019. O’Neill himself wished for many of his earlier plays to remain forgotten, because they weren’t up to his later high standards, but The Personal Equation is certainly not the worst of his early efforts (the worst would likely be Welded, with Bread and Butter and Servitude close behind). Nevertheless, when O’Neill won the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature, it is unlikely that The Personal Equation factored into that decision.

The fact that The Personal Equation is an issue-driven play makes it more interesting than the romances and relationship dramas from O’Neill’s early career. This play deals with labor issues of the World War I era, which if nothing else lends some historical value to the drama. Tom Perkins is a member of the IWE—International Workers of the Earth—a thinly veiled surrogate for the real-life IWW—Industrial Workers of the World (nicknamed the Wobblies). While working clandestinely as a labor organizer and agitator, Tom has a day job working in the offices of the Ocean Steamship Company. He associates with a cell of other IWE activists, including his girlfriend Olga, with whom he cohabitates, a rather daring and progressive arrangement for an unmarried couple in those days. The IWE charges Tom with a dangerous mission to blow up the engines of the Ocean Steamship Company’s ship the SS San Francisco, in hopes that the action will inspire shipworkers to revolt in a general strike. Complicating matters, however, is the fact that Tom’s father, Thomas Perkins Sr., is the second engineer on that very same SS San Francisco and a loyal company man who loves his job, his ship, and his engines. Regardless, to prove his loyalty to the IWE, Tom accepts the sabotage mission.

Early in his adult life, O’Neill worked for several years on merchant marine vessels and joined the Marine Transport Workers Union of the IWW. The platform of the IWW was a mix of socialist, anarchist, and syndicalist principles. In The Personal Equation, O’Neill deliberately distances the fictional IWE from the “Socialists,” presumably meaning the Socialist Party of America. Though O’Neill may have been a member of the IWW, his depiction of the IWE in this play is not entirely positive. One gathers that he believed in the party line of the IWW, but he was disappointed with the management of the organization and its ineffectiveness in living up to its ideals. He also criticizes how the IWW and other leftist radicals abandoned their antiwar stance in the face of World War I jingoism.

Much of the first half of The Personal Equation is predictable, but the ending is rather cleverly unexpected. The premise of the play sets up some contrived scenes, particularly the father vs. son conflict, but if you think of this as political symbolism and don’t expect too much realism, one can appreciate the care and craft with which O’Neill constructed this drama to convey his intended message. Ultimately, however, The Personal Equation ends up feeling like a watered-down rough sketch for O’Neill’s later, greater, and much more powerful allegory of labor unrest and class struggle, The Hairy Ape. Still, if you are a fan of O’Neill’s work, and The Hairy Ape in particular, then The Personal Equation is a well-drawn rough sketch that’s worth a look.