Dynamo by Eugene O’Neill

Failed attempt at profundity

I’m gradually working my way through the complete works of Eugene O’Neill, great American playwright and winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. O’Neill also won four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama, but this lesser-known play was definitely not one of his award winners. Dynamo premiered on the stage in 1929, with future movie star Claudette Colbert in one of the lead roles. The production ran for 50 performances, but that was considered a failure compared to O’Neill’s more successful efforts. After the stage debut, O’Neill made significant revisions to the text—including adding some new scenes and deleting a few characters—before publishing Dynamo in book form.

As the curtain rises, the set consists of a pair of two-story houses on the stage. Living rooms are on the bottom floors, bedrooms above. In some scenes, the front-facing wall of a house is removed; revealing the occupants within; in others, the walls remain, and the rooms are concealed. Characters frequently lean out of windows and converse with other individuals outside. In the house on the right lives the Light family: the Reverend Hutchins Light, his wife Amelia, and their son Reuben. In the house on the left lives the Fifes: Ramsay Fife, his wife May, and daughter Ada. Hutchins Light is a sanctimonious Christian, and Ramsay Fife is a confrontational atheist. The two fathers, therefore, have a natural and intense antipathy for one another. Ramsay Fife works at the local power plant, but Mr. and Mrs. Light look down on the Fife family as if they were trash.

Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, the two young adults, Reuben and Ada, are in love with each other. Mother and father Light in no way want their son involved with Ada. Fife, on the other hand, seems to view the relationship as a satisfying prank—his daughter dating Reuben is a great way of sticking it to that pompous self-righteous Reverend Light. The play is primarily concerned with Reuben’s growth into manhood. As he pursues his relationship with Ada, and witnesses some hypocritical behavior by the adults, Reuben’s ideas on love, sex, and religion change over the course of the play.

A debate between Atheism and Christianity would seem like a good premise for O’Neill, the master of dramatic realism, but here in Dynamo he takes it in such a weird direction, the play often feels like a comedy. Electricity is a theme that runs throughout the play, in the imagery of lightning, the power plant and its dynamo, and as a symbol for materialistic atheism. One character sees electricity—or in a larger sense, atomic forces—as the higher power in the universe. That’s not too far off from what many materialists, determinists, monists, or pantheists believe. When said character starts worshipping electricity as a god, however, O’Neill has taken that idea too far into silly territory.

We generally remember O’Neill for his classic plays about dysfunctional families, alcoholics, or sailors, but he occasionally wrote plays that were more experimental in nature. While some of those forays into more avant garde fare are interesting, this is one of O’Neill’s failed experiments. Dynamo might have had something worthwhile to say about the place of faith in the modern world, but O’Neill paints his symbolism with too broad a brush.

The Delphi Classics Collected Works of Eugene O’Neill

Complete up to a point

Eugene O’Neill is one of the greatest playwrights in the history of American theatre. He won four Pulitzer Prizes for drama and the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. Over the years, I have enjoyed reading a few of his plays, so I decided to read (or reread) his complete works. Whenever I want to buy a classic author’s work in bulk, I turn to the Delphi Classics. They make the best, most complete ebook collections of classic literature. Because of the United States’ severe copyright laws, Delphi has produced two versions of O’Neill’s oeuvre. The rest of the world gets his Complete Works. The USA, however, only gets the Collected Works—that is, everything up to 1929, the cut-off point for works to fall into the (copyright-free) public domain. Rather than list what this volume includes, it’s easier to list what it’s missing: Dynamo, Mourning Becomes Electra, Ah, Wilderness!, Days Without End, More Stately Mansions, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, A Moon for the Misbegotten, Hughie, and A Touch of the Poet. Unfortunately, that list includes a few of O’Neill’s greatest works, but we’ll have to wait a few years before their copyright expires. Presumably, Delphi will update their ebook files with additional titles when they become available, as they have done with their other ebook collections.

Delphi’s Collected Works includes all of O’Neill’s one-act plays except for Hughie (1941). Of these twenty short dramas, very few are masterpieces, but overall they provide a revealing look into how O’Neill’s style and choice of themes developed over the years. O’Neill’s one original short story, “Tomorrow,” is also included here, as well as over sixty of his poems. Some additional rare odds and ends, not published until long after O’Neill’s death, are not surprisingly absent from this collection.

Among the full-length plays (say an hour and a half or longer on the stage), the highlights of this collection are The Hairy Ape, Anna Christie, Beyond the Horizon, and Strange Interlude. To be honest, the bad outweigh the good in this collection, but if you really want to get an idea of the arc of an author’s career, you have to read the bad as well as the good. Some real stinkers include Welded, Servitude, and The Great God Brown. Although O’Neill is known for realist plays about family dynamics, alcoholism, and the lives of New England sailors, it is interesting to find him venturing out of his comfort zone with experiments like history plays—The Fountain, Marco Millions, and Lazarus Laughed—and kabuki-type masked productions—The Great God Brown and again, Lazarus Laughed. The Hairy Ape and Strange Interlude are two cases where O’Neill’s modernist experimentation successfully paid off.

Since all of the content included herein is in the public domain, you could download all of these writings from the internet for free. It is worth it, however, to spend the three bucks to get them all together in one convenient package from Delphi. Although their ebooks aren’t perfect, Delphi is by far the most conscientious editor and producer of ebook bundles of classic literature. They actually put some diligent research into compiling these collections. Works are arranged chronologically. Some of the more important individual plays get introductory synopses discussing the original stage productions and critical response. Also, the ebook is illustrated with a scattering of photographs picturing O’Neill at different stages in his life, places he lived and worked, and title pages and posters for his plays. In print form, the Library of America has a well-edited and well-produced complete works of O’Neill in three volumes, but those might set you back a pretty penny. In ebook form, The Delphi Classics Collected Works of Eugene O’Neill is the best an American reader is going to get, and it’s well worth the nominal charge incurred.  

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.  

Lazarus Laughed by Eugene O’Neill

Strange multi-masked biblical tragedy

Lazarus Laughed is a full-length drama by American playwright Eugene O’Neill, winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. O’Neill wrote the play in 1925. It was published in book form in 1927 and first performed on stage at the Pasadena Community Playhouse in 1928.

Set in ancient times, Lazarus Laughed is based on the biblical story of Jesus Christ raising Lazarus from the dead. Or rather, it’s O’Neill’s speculation on what might have happened after that miracle took place. Christ does not appear in the play. He has already departed Lazarus’s house before the curtain opens, though he is discussed and debated in absentia. Here in O’Neill’s take on things, the resurrected Lazarus ascends to the height of a messiah to rival Christ himself. Lazarus defies Christian and Jewish teachings by leading a cult whose members deny the existence of death and live for laughter and pleasure. 

The drama begins in Lazarus’s hometown of Bethany, in present-day Palestine. Subsequent scenes take place in Athens and Rome, where Lazarus meets Emperor Tiberius and his successor Caligula. Stylistically, this drama is heavily influenced by Greek tragedy. O’Neill tries to evoke the experience of an ancient theatrical production. A chorus (actually more than one) chants narration and commentary throughout the play, and almost all of the actors are masked. Soon after completing Lazarus Laughed, O’Neill used such stylistic elements to again emulate Greek tragedy in The Great God Brown, a play set in modern times.

Lazarus Laughed has only been staged a few times over the past century, probably because O’Neill really didn’t make it easy to produce this drama. In some scenes, his stage directions call for as many as 150 actors on stage at once. Other than Lazarus and his wife, just about everyone else is wearing masks. One scene asks for 49 different male masks and 49 different female masks, and the actors change masks in each scene. O’Neill calls for masks varying in size, emotional expression, age, and ethnicity, and specifies multiple combinations of those characteristics, thus probably at least 500 detailed and well-crafted masks are required to pull this off the way he wanted it. I would imagine the few theatres and schools who actually staged this play likely cut corners in mask manufacturing because O’Neill’s specifications would be cost prohibitive and near impossible to follow to the letter.

Other than simply telling a story about Lazarus and Tiberius, what is the point of all this? I don’t know what literary critics might say about it, but for me personally, I get a message similar to that taught by the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics, that fear of death prevents us from truly living our lives. Lazarus’s repeated assertions in this play that there is no death can be taken two ways: 1) that eternal life in Heaven means there is no death, or 2) that death simply brings a nothingness that is neither to be felt nor feared, so enjoy yourself and live your life on Earth to the fullest. Based on the behavior of Lazarus’s followers in this play, and on how O’Neill lived his life, I’m guessing he meant the latter. There has to be a better way to get that across, however, than having Lazarus and his crowd of followers laughing and yelling, “There is no death!” many times over. If staged with all the grandeur that O’Neill intended, Lazarus Laughed might have been a sight to see, but on the page it mostly comes across as a bit silly.

The Great God Brown by Eugene O’Neill

Heavy-handed symbolism as O’Neill goes artsy

Eugene O’Neill’s play The Great God Brown was first staged in 1926. O’Neill may have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but not every one of his works is a masterpiece, or even good. Sandwiched between better-known repertory classics like Desire Under the Elms and Strange Interlude comes this oddity. I have almost worked my way through O’Neill’s complete works, and this is one of the weirdest dramas he ever wrote. It doesn’t read like O’Neill at all but more like something by Samuel Beckett. Beckett, however, would have done it much better. When The Great God Brown debuted, the New York Post called it “a superb failure.”

Mr. Anthony and Mr. Brown are partners in a construction firm. Their teenage sons are best friends who have just graduated from high school. While Brown is the junior partner in the firm, often looked down upon by his partner, his son William shows far more promise than Anthony’s son Dion. William “Billy” Brown is a good student with the potential to become a great architect and take over the leadership of the family business. Dion Anthony, on the other hand, has the temperament of a tortured artist-poet and is a heavy drinker and philanderer. Both young men are in love with the same high school sweetheart, Margaret, but she only has eyes for Dion. While William is jealous, he resigns himself to bachelorhood and focuses on his career. 

Dion is a terribly overdone caricature of the artiste. His speech is just a series of random phrases, many of them biblical, which he spouts in an ostentatiously crazy way. He constantly refers to himself and others he’s speaking to in the third person. To some extent, O’Neill seems to be making fun of the artist stereotype, but at other times he’s clearly buying into it. Although there is definitely occasional humor in The Great God Brown, it also seems clear that O’Neill intended the play to be philosophically profound in much the same way that Dion thinks the relentless stream of non sequiturs that he utters is profound.

One of the odd things about this play is that the characters wear masks. The opening scene takes place at a dance, so at first I thought perhaps it was a masked ball, and the characters were wearing Mardi Gras or domino masks, but that’s not the case. The characters don their masks anytime, 24/7, at their discretion. O’Neill recycles this dramatic convention from ancient Greek tragedies or Japanese Noh theatre. The masks symbolize the difference between one’s true self (mask off) and the personality he or she projects to others (mask on)—what The Who once referred to as an “eminence front.” Confusingly, however, in The Great God Brown these masks function as more than just metaphor. The masks sometimes cause cases of mistaken identity, which means that the characters must literally see the masks just as we do, yet no one in the play seems to find the wearing of masks the least bit odd. The masks also exist as disembodied objects. When someone finds a discarded mask removed from its owner, they react as if they’ve discovered a corpse. This unresolved ambiguity between the reality and metaphor of the masks is just bizarre and clumsy. An avant-garde playwright like Beckett might have pulled it off, but this seems woefully heavy-handed and out of place in what is otherwise a pretty typical O’Neill play about relationships and morals.

The Great God Brown may be a terrible play, but it sure isn’t boring. It’s hard to tell what audiences of 1926 would have thought of this. They might have eaten up this pretentious drivel. For readers of today, however, there is some pleasure in watching this train wreck unfold. One can imagine what it would have been like to spend an evening in the theatre experiencing this strange presentation. It is somewhat kitschily entertaining in the same manner as one of those hacky movies that’s so-bad-it’s-good.

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.

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.

Servitude by Eugene O’Neill

Who but O’Neill could make a rom-com so depressing?

Eugene O’Neill

Eugene O’Neill, winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature, is undoubtedly one of the greatest playwrights in the history of the American theatre. Having enjoyed reading O’Neill’s better-known plays, such as Anna Christie, The Hairy Ape, and The Iceman Cometh, I decided to work my way through his complete works. The task has not been entirely rewarding, however, particularly when venturing into O’Neill’s initial efforts, plays that even the author himself wished had been destroyed. Servitude, written in 1914, was O’Neill’s second full-length play, after Bread and Butter. Servitude was not published until 1950, against O’Neill’s wishes, in a volume entitled The Lost Plays of Eugene O’Neill. Now one can find it in various collections of O’Neill’s complete works, such as the Delphi Classics ebook or the Library of America hardcover editions.

David Roylston, a mustachioed playwright (hmmm, I wonder whom he’s patterned after?), is married with children, but his wife and kids are off traveling without him. He is holed up in his suburban New York home working on his latest play, with only his faithful servant to keep him company. Roylston is surprised by a ringing of the doorbell in the middle of the night. He is even more surprised to find that the caller is a beautiful young woman. Mrs. Frazer, as she calls herself, is one of Roylston’s biggest fans. Having perused all of his plays and taken to heart their precepts of scorning convention in order to be true to oneself, she has left her husband and makes a pilgrimage to meet her literary hero. As the two converse, she misses the last evening train and has no way of returning to the city, so Roylston offers to put her up in the guest bedroom.

Keep in mind that in this pre–World War I era, it was considered improper for a woman to be alone with a man who wasn’t her husband (and when defining alone, servants didn’t count). It’s not just an important contextual tidbit to keep in mind; the entire narrative of the play is, in fact, built upon this antiquated taboo. If her overnight stay were discovered, Mrs. Frazer’s reputation would be ruined, since everyone would assume she and Roylston had sex. Regardless, Roylston throws caution to the wind and convinces her to stay anyway. This causes all sorts of turmoil when his wife returns home the following morning to find Mrs. Frazer in her house.

The play starts out pretty well but just proceeds to get worse and worse. At first, you’re wondering what Mrs. Frazer wants from Roylston, which grabs your interest. Is she some former lover of his? Is she a just a fan, or is she a stalker? Then O’Neill explores the relationship between writers and their fans, which is also kind of interesting. From there, however, the play evolves into a debate about marriage, in which the two lead characters discuss at length how much the institution of marriage sucks. After all that, however, O’Neill tries to do a 180 and turn this into a romantic comedy—not a comedy in the sense that it’s funny; just a comedy as in the opposite of tragedy. For his time, I believe O’Neill had some relatively modern ideas about women’s independence. On the other hand, he doesn’t seem to like women very much, because in his marital dramas they are often depicted as the root of all evil.

Though Servitude shows some promise early on, by the halfway point it ventures into formulaic territory. The only aspect that’s not formulaic is O’Neill’s disgruntled views on love and marriage, which are just a drag. O’Neill would go on to write some masterpieces about marriage and family dynamics (like Mourning Becomes Electra and Long Day’s Journey into Night), but Servitude shows very little inkling of those great things to come.

Bread and Butter by Eugene O’Neill

A beginner’s take on familiar territory

Bread and Butter is the earliest surviving full-length play written by Eugene O’Neill, winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. O’Neill wrote this drama in 1914, when he was 26 years old. Prior to that, he had written a few one-act plays. Bread and Butter was neither published nor staged during O’Neill’s lifetime; its first public performance didn’t occur until 1998. O’Neill himself would have preferred that his earliest plays be forgotten, including Bread and Butter, but they now show up in collections of his complete works.

A young man named John Brown is the son of a wealthy hardware merchant in the provincial community of Bridgetown, Connecticut. Brown Sr. wants to give his son a position in the family business, but John refuses his father’s plans for his future. John wants to be an artist. After a heated family argument, Mr. Brown is talked into letting John study painting in New York, if only to work such fool notions out of his system. John enjoys the bohemian lifestyle of the artists’ studio and shows much promise as a painter. His creativity, however, is frustrated by the pressure put upon him by friends and family: the father who won’t lend financial support unless John picks a different career, the fiancée who doesn’t take John’s art seriously and just wants him to settle down to family life, the mother who only sees moral turpitude in John’s bohemian lifestyle, and the condescending elder brother who not so secretly covets John’s girlfriend. John is also partially responsible for his own artistic failures, since he lets himself be swayed from committing to his art, wallows in self-pity, and turns to alcohol.

Everybody’s gotta start somewhere, but this feature-length debut by O’Neill feels like a very pedestrian effort. The storyline about the artist who craves creative freedom is a premise that you’ve seen a thousand times. In fact, O’Neill covered very much the same ground himself in his one-act play of 1913 entitled “Recklessness.” The characters in Bread and Butter are more clichés than people. Perhaps the frank discussion of alcoholism might have been cutting-edge for 1914, but I doubt it. This drama took over 80 years to make it to the stage, after all, and then only on the strength of O’Neill’s name, so I think it’s safe to say the theatrical community of the era didn’t find this drama fascinating. In hindsight, however, one can see the baby steps of O’Neill’s stellar career, particularly his focus on alcohol and the dysfunctional family. Bread and Butter is not really terrible writing, it’s just rather boringly familiar. It is not the worst play that O’Neill ever wrote. (That would be Welded.) The ending of Bread and Butter, however, is particularly heavy-handed and hackneyed. Only readers with an avid interest in O’Neill’s career should read Bread and Butter, as a curiosity more than anything. No one else need bother with it.
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The One-Act Plays of Eugene O’Neill

Short sketches from a master playwright

Eugene O’Neill

One-act plays are the short stories of drama. These are brief stage plays lasting perhaps 15 to 30 minutes. American playwright Eugene O’Neill, winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature, is best-known for his full-length plays like The Hairy Ape, Desire Under the Elms, and The Iceman Cometh, but he also wrote 21 one-act plays. I don’t know if any book has ever been devoted exclusively to these short plays, but they can be found in complete-works collections of O’Neill’s writings, or in the three volumes on O’Neill published by the Library of America. In O’Neill’s day, one-act plays would have been staged for theatre festivals and variety nights, which served as opportunities for up-and-coming playwrights to establish a reputation and perhaps win some awards. Nowadays, one-act plays seem relegated to high school and college students performing them in theatrical competitions. While you are unlikely to ever see most of these short plays performed on an actual stage, they are worth a read. O’Neill is one playwright whose works come across well on the printed page. His well-crafted dialogue and detailed and descriptive stage directions often read like prose fiction, calling to mind the works of novelist contemporaries like John Steinbeck or William Faulkner. 

With the exception of the final play on this list, Hughie, all of these works were written early in O’Neill’s career, before he achieved fame and critical acclaim with plays like Beyond the Horizon (a Pulitzer Prize winner) and The Emperor Jones. The first four plays listed below comprise a series with recurring characters, the crew of the ship Glencairn. Many of O’Neill’s early plays deal with nautical travel or the lives of sailors, either at sea or on shore. Seafaring tales were more popular in the early twentieth century than they are today, and the genre allowed O’Neill to deliver popular dramas to the audience while honing his craft towards more mature sailor plays like Anna Christie. In the later plays on this list, one can see the development of O’Neill’s interest in dysfunctional families and their psychological problems, which would lead to later, greater plays like Mourning Becomes Electra and Long Day’s Journey into Night. Through no fault of O’Neill’s, many of his one-act plays present scenes that will seem very familiar from films of the last hundred years, so familiar that they often come across as predictable and clichéd now. It’s hard to tell, however, how they would have been received by theatre audiences a century ago.

Bound East for Cardiff (1914) - 3.5 stars
The first of a series of four one-act plays set on the ship Glencairn. This one presents a death scene in the ship’s forecastle. One crewman lies dying, injured from a fall, while his shipmates converse around him.

In the Zone (1917) - 3 stars
Set during World War I, the ship Glencairn is carrying munitions and has entered “the war zone.” The crewmen are suspicious that one of their own, Smitty, may be a German spy. Not badly written, but utterly predictable to anyone who’s seen enough old war films.

The Long Voyage Home (1918) - 4 stars
Men from the Glencairn stop in a waterfront tavern in London, where the barkeep and his friends hope to shanghai an unsuspecting drunk into servitude on another vessel. This is a familiar scene from literature and film—such as the nautical writings of Jack London or Robert Louis Stevenson, for example—but well done here.

Moon of the Caribbees (1918) - 2 stars
The Glencairn is docked in the West Indies. The crewmen wait for some Black women to show up bringing liquor and sex. Drinking and dancing ensues. The women represent the exotic temptations of the nautical life and wanderlust amid the tropics, but the depiction is racist and the plot is pointless for the most part.

A Wife for a Life (1913) - 2 stars
Two partners work a gold mine in Arizona. The younger of the two gets a telegram from an old sweetheart summoning him home. This leads to a conclusion that is not at all surprising. The dialogue is bogged down with a lot of clumsy explanation.

The Web (1913) - 3 stars
A New York prostitute with a child lives at the mercy of her abusive boyfriend/pimp. At first this reads almost like a piece of muckraking realism, but it gets very heavy-handedly melodramatic towards the end. Again, this is like a scene you’ve seen in countless movies.

Thirst (1913) - 3.5 stars
Three survivors on a life raft are dying of hunger and thirst and fighting off insanity. There’s some racism here, not uncommon for the era, but it is a decently written melodrama. This reads as if it were written for film because the set directions seem as if they would be impossible to execute on a stage.

Recklessness (1913) - 2 stars
An ugly marriage scene, perhaps foreshadowing O’Neill’s later dysfunctional family dramas but not very successfully. A rich older man with a lovely young wife finds out she is cheating on him with their chauffeur. The depiction of the woman is deliberately cruel, indicative of a woman-is-the-root-of-all-evil mindset that plagues some of O’Neill’s other plays.

Warnings (1913) - 3 stars
A telegraph operator for a steamship discovers that he is losing his hearing. He decides to sail on one last voyage, even though he knows his deafness might endanger the ship and its crew. This features a good family scene up front, worthy of O’Neill’s better efforts, but a pretty straightforward, expected ending.

Fog (1914) - 2.5 stars
Another lifeboat drama. Two men talk while a poor woman hugs her dead child. One of the men is a businessman and one a poet, and they carry with them all of the clichés that go along with those professions. This play is ambitious for its supernatural ending.

Abortion (1914) - 4.5 stars
A college baseball star cheats on his fiancée and gets another girl pregnant. His father helps him pay for an abortion. When the girl dies, her brother comes looking for revenge. Surprisingly dark and risqué subject matter for the time. 

The Movie Man (1914) - 2 stars
A comedy set in the Mexican Revolution. A movie director has a contract with a rebel general to film all of his battles. The general is a thinly veiled parody of Pancho Villa. The humor isn’t very funny, and the depiction of the Mexicans is a bit racist.

The Sniper (1915) - 4.5 stars
Set in Belgium during World War I, in a cottage destroyed by shells. A peasant mourns over his dead son, a soldier killed by the Prussians. The peasant vows vengeance against the Germans, but a priest tries to dissuade him from rash violence. Brief but powerful.

Before Breakfast (1916) - 2 stars
A trashy alcoholic shrew of a woman bitches at her husband, a poet (who is offstage, never seen). Reading as if it were written to punish some ex-girlfriend, this is another woman-as-the-root-of-all-evil story, yet it still might be provide a meaty monologue for some character actress.

Ile (1917) - 3.5 stars
In the arctic, a whaling boat is blocked by ice. The captain refuses to turn back until his ship is filled with whale oil (“the ile”). The crew, starving and overworked, threaten mutiny. The captain’s wife, also along for the ride, pleads with her husband to turn the ship back towards home as the voyage weighs on her sanity.

The Rope (1918) - 4 stars
A dysfunctional family drama, heavy on the white trash. A bitter old man is losing his sanity. He keeps a noose hung in his barn so that his estranged son can someday return and hang himself with it. Meanwhile, his daughter and her husband scheme to get the old man’s farm and money. A good surprise ending.

Shell Shock (1918) - 2.5 stars
A World War I hero suffers from PTSD after some horrific trench warfare, as evidenced by his compulsive obsession for hoarding cigarettes. This feels a bit like an after-school special with a rather simplistic take on its issue. It hints at a bleak and cynical ending that would have risen it above the mediocre but ultimately backs out in favor of a crowd-pleasing expression of patriotism.

The Dreamy Kid (1918) - 3 stars
A blaxploitation film in one-act play form. An elderly Black woman lies ill on her death bed. She waits for her grandson Dreamy to show up before she succumbs to death. Dreamy, however, is a hoodlum on the run from the law. The dialogue is penned in heavy Black accents, but otherwise this isn’t noticeably racist.

Where the Cross is Made (1918) - 3.5 stars
A former sea captain, obsessed with a buried treasure, is losing his sanity. He has built a replica of a ship’s cabin on the roof of his house and confined himself to it. His son wants to get him committed to a mental institution. 

Exorcism (1919) - 2 stars
Two roommates live a drunken existence in a squalid New York apartment. One is depressed over his impending divorce and considers suicide. It’s hard to see the point in this one.

Hughie (written in 1941, first performed in 1959) - 3 stars
A boisterous professional gambler lives in a run-down hotel in New York. In the wee hours of the morning, he accosts the new night clerk on duty and bombards him with conversation. Mostly, he regales the new kid with tales of his night clerk predecessor, the recently deceased Hughie. Written later in O’Neill’s career, this is a fine character study, but rather devoid of plot.

Marco Millions by Eugene O’Neill

Historical drama satirizing materialism

American playwright Eugene O’Neill, winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature, is best remembered as the author of tragic family dramas set in New England, such as Desire Under the Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra, or Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Alcoholism and the sea are frequent themes that reappear in his writings. One delving into the obscurities of his literary output, however, will find some surprising oddities in his body of work. Among these anomalies are two historical dramas about explorers of centuries past. The Fountain, a play about Spanish Conquistador Ponce de León’s quest for the fountain of youth in America, was completed in 1922. In a similar vein, Marco Millions is a historical play about the Venetian merchant Marco Polo’s journey to China to meet Kublai Kaan (the way O’Neill spells it). Marco Millions was published in 1927, and was first produced for the stage in the following year.

As the play opens, Marco Polo has reached an age where he is ready to play a decisive role in the family business, though he still has a lot to learn about the world. He accompanies his father Nicolo and his uncle Maffeo on an epic business trip to the East to trade with the great Kublai Kaan. In departing, Marco leaves behind his betrothed, Donata, vowing to remain faithful to her and marry her upon his return. Over the course of the trip, his youthful innocence gradually wears away as he acquires financial, political, and carnal knowledge. He is still naive in some ways, however, as demonstrated by the fact that he fails to notice that Kukachin, the lovely daughter of the Kaan, has fallen in love with him.

Marco may be the hero of this play, but O’Neill also makes him out to be rather a boob. Like a grandiose parody of an American middle-class shopkeeper, salesman, or bean counter, Marco’s eyes don’t see much beyond his business. His every action is directed toward profit. Rather than even noticing the exotic love and romance that is right under his nose, he is determined to make his fortune, win the respect of the folks back home, and marry his high school sweetheart. At times O’Neill makes the character so clueless that it becomes difficult to see what Kukachin finds attractive in him. In the end, the social commentary is pretty tepid, the cynicism hinders any emotional involvement, and the satire can hardly be called laugh-out-loud funny. The play ends with a brief epilog that delivers an odd meta-twist that breaks the fourth wall in a way (though nonverbally). While it may have been unusual and innovative for its time, this gimmicky device doesn’t really pay off by adding anything to the play.

Judging by the stage directions, Marco Millions would be a difficult and expensive production to stage. Although only about an hour in length, the includes scenes that take place in Italy, Persia, India, Mongolia, and China. The set specifications include palaces and ships, and some scenes require dozens of lavishly costumed extras. Bringing O’Neill’s elaborate vision of the play to life would require a tremendous amount of work for such a brief and relatively lighthearted affair. Some literary critics have described Marco Millions as “Shavian,” meaning similar in style to the plays of George Bernard Shaw, whose work was praised for its wittiness and its wealth of quotable bon mots. What may have worked for Shaw, however, doesn’t necessarily work for O’Neill. Marco Millions feels a bit like an overly built-up joke with a disappointing punch line or a somewhat pointless fable that’s misplaced its moral.
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Desire Under the Elms by Eugene O’Neill

Greek tragedy in rural New England
Desire Under the Elms, one of Nobel Prize-winning playwright Eugene O’Neill’s better known dramas, premiered in 1924. The story is based on the ancient Greek myth of Phaedra, Hippolytus, and Theseus, but O’Neill’s play does not adhere strictly to the plot of the source material. The drama takes place on a farm in New England. In the opening act, Peter and Simeon Cabot and their considerably younger half-brother Eben Cabot are discussing their father Ephraim, who owns the family farm. The older sons are wondering when the old man is going to die so they can take over his land. Fed up with waiting for their due share of the farm, they are contemplating running off to California to hunt for gold. Eben, on the other hand, harbors a strong hatred for his father for having worked his mother to death. Eben dreams of someday taking his revenge on the old man and reclaiming the land that he believes rightfully belonged to his mother. Everyone’s plans are upset, however, when it is revealed that Ephraim has remarried, and will soon be returning home with his much younger bride.

Desire Under the Elms is one of O’Neill’s more popular and successful plays, having been staged in many productions over the past century and adapted into a Hollywood film in 1958. The script certainly contains some meaty parts for the three leads. Eben, Ephraim, and the stepmother/third wife Abbie Putnam all get their fair chance at scenes of emotional power. When reading the play in book form, however, it does not come across as effecting as many of O’Neill’s other works. For starters, the entire play is written in a sort of hillbilly accent that doesn’t really call to mind New England. The word “yes” is transcribed as “ay-eh,” “home” is “hum,” and “pretty” is “purty.” Not only does this apostrophe-studded hick transcription make for difficult reading, but it renders the characters less sympathetic, as if O’Neill himself were making fun of them. The accent doesn’t come across as true-to-life as do those of the patrons of the waterfront bar in Anna Christie or the coal shovelers of The Hairy Ape. On stage, skilled actors would be unlikely to stick exactly to the text and could craft a believable accent to sell the characters, but on the printed page you’re stuck with the language as written.

The plot of the play is very predictable. There really isn’t any story development that you don’t see coming a mile away. These are archetypal characters acting out a scenario that is thousands of years old. Originality or surprise, therefore, probably aren’t the main objectives here, but rather to allow the audience to experience universal scenes of love, anger, and grief that are familiar but nonetheless powerful. Even so, Abbie’s climactic act does not come across as realistic, at least not when set in the twentieth century. Here it feels like a contrivance calculated to squeeze as much anguish out of the characters as possible. After the intensity of that moment, the conclusion seems timid by comparison, more epilogue than finale. The final line of the play reads almost like a joke and is indicative of a disconnect that persists throughout the story between the tone of the language and the tone of the events in the story.

In general, I enjoy reading O’Neill’s work, and I respect him as one of America’s preeminent playwrights. Desire Under the Elms is a good play, but in a career studded with masterpieces it doesn’t shine as brightly as many of O’Neill’s other renowned works.
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All God’s Chillun Got Wings by Eugene O’Neill

Mixed marriage with mixed messages

Eugene O’Neill

Likely one of the reasons that Eugene O’Neill won the Nobel Prize in Literature is because he pushed the boundaries of realism on the American stage, thoughtfully confronting audiences with uncomfortable subject matter previously unseen in theaters. In plays like Beyond the Horizon, Anna Christie, and The Hairy Ape, O’Neill gave audiences unflinchingly frank portrayals of dysfunctional families and grittily authentic depictions of the working class. In his 1924 play All God’s Chillun Got Wings, O’Neill pushed the envelope even further by tackling the topic of race. The curtain opens on a city street corner where white and black tenement neighborhoods converge. Black and white children play in the street, all but oblivious too their differences. As those children grow older, however, their attitudes change and they become more divided by prevailing racial prejudices. Nevertheless, one young black man, Jim Harris, retains his love for his childhood sweetheart Ella Downey, a white woman.

When first staged in 1924, the play was quite controversial. Predominantly white audiences were outraged by O’Neill’s portrayal of love between an African American man and a white woman. Today we can see that O’Neill deserves to be commended for his groundbreaking depiction of an interracial marriage. On the other hand, his representation of that mixed marriage is certainly not a positive one, and if anything he seems to be saying that such relationships are bound to end in tragedy, despair, and perhaps even insanity. That’s hardly the enlightened attitude towards race that today’s theater-going audiences would expect, yet it is characteristic of the well-intentioned but rather half-hearted attempt at racial justice that pervades this drama.

By the end of the play, O’Neill makes Ella such a racist that it’s unbelievable that she could ever have married a black man in the first place. She is paralyzed by guilt for betraying her white race, and she sabotages her husband’s chances at success in order to keep him from reaching above his accepted station in society. Ella’s “keeping the black man down” attitude doesn’t make any sense in the context of their marriage. On the other hand, if the two characters are meant to stand for their races as a whole, then it does make some sense as a commentary on white society’s treatment of the black population in the early 20th century. In truth, however, O’Neill really doesn’t treat Jim much better than Ella does. He depicts Jim as the exceptionally intelligent son of an upwardly mobile black family, but then he renders him incapable of succeeding in his studies towards becoming a lawyer. In one scene O’Neill has Jim overtly begging to be Ella’s “slave,” a surely intentional word choice on the part of the playwright that would be considered offensively inappropriate today. On the bright side, the most positively portrayed character in the play is Jim’s sister Hattie, who is depicted as a smart, capable, independent black woman and an outspoken straight shooter in conversations about race.

One undeniably good thing that came from this play is that it launched the theatrical career of the great black actor Paul Robeson, who would also go on to star in the 1925 revival of O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones. While today All God’s Chillun Got Wings seems a bit antiquatedly tone deaf in its discussion of race, in the 1920s it was a big leap forward for the realistic depiction of blacks in mainstream white culture. When it’s faults are taken into consideration today, that leap may seem more like two steps up and one step back, but nevertheless it amounted to one important baby step forward.
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Gold by Eugene O’Neill

From pulp fiction to family tragedy
Gold is a four-act play by Eugene O’Neill. It was published in 1920, the same year as his better known works Anna Christie and The Emperor Jones. The first act takes place on a deserted island in the Malay archipelago of the South Pacific. Captain Isaiah Bartlett of the whaling ship Triton and five of his crew members are marooned on the isle after having survived a ship wreck. Having drifted on the open seas for days, they are now starting to feel the pangs of starvation and are on the verge of being driven mad by the lack of drinking water. Though the island is devoid of the bare necessities of life, the castaways have discovered a treasure chest full of gold and jewels, which provides them with yet another reason to go mad. Fortunately, they are rescued by a passing ship at the end of the first act, but what has transpired on the island will continue to haunt them long after they have returned to civilization.

Though depictions of sailors and seafaring life are common in O’Neill’s body of work, there is a pulp-fiction quality to this scene that is refreshingly unexpected. In the second act, however, the play returns to territory more familiar to readers of the Nobel laureate’s dramas. Act Two takes place at Bartlett’s house on the California coast, where we see the sea captain interacting not only with his crew but also with his family. Dysfunctional families are stock-in-trade for O’Neill, and here we witness the Bartlett family being torn apart by the father’s obsession with gold as his greed and guilt drive him further from the ones he loves.

The play’s change in direction from the sensationalistic sea story to the more prosaic and depressing concerns of family dynamics is not unexpected, given O’Neill’s track record, but it is not really a welcome change either. After the first act, which is kind of fun, the audience wants more of the gold-hunting narrative, even if it is uncharacteristic of O’Neill, but he goes out of his way to avoid gratifying those desires and instead delivers another variation on the tragedy of the American family. Though in general I’m a fan of O’Neill’s plays, Gold is not one of his better pieces of writing. The dialogue generally consists of overly protracted arguments that end with predictable results. When the story does occasionally take a surprising turn, it’s usually more of a letdown than an improvement. The behavior and choices of the characters are not always realistic, even when their judgment is not clouded by gold fever. The use of gold as a poisoner of minds and a destroyer of relationships is a convenient and clichéd way of arriving at the sort of emotional turmoil that O’Neill would explore more intelligently in later, greater plays like Long Day’s Journey into Night.

Gold isn’t a terrible play—it is Eugene O’Neill after all—but it’s hard to imagine an audience exiting the theatre or a reader closing the book feeling noticeably excited or moved by it. When compared to other plays in O’Neill’s impressive body of work, Gold may have been a necessary step in his artistic development, but on its own it is an overwrought melodrama that feels a little too simplistic and half-baked to be compelling.
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Welded by Eugene O’Neill

Great playwright, terrible play

Eugene O’Neill

Eugene O’Neill, winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature and highly regarded as one of America’s greatest playwrights, has a good 10 or 12 masterpieces in his body of work. Amidst all the greatness, however, lie quite a few shorter and lesser-known works of variable quality. Fans of O’Neill’s work might derive some pleasure in investigating some of these obscure dramas. You never know what you’re going to get, and the element of surprise adds to the enjoyment. His 1924 play entitled Welded, however, is one case where that strategy definitely does not pay off. This dismal three-acter might just be the lauded playwright’s worst effort.

Welded is the portrait of a marriage between a playwright, Michael Cape, and his actress wife, Eleonore. Given the subject matter, there’s likely an autobiographical component to this story, but one shudders to think what O’Neill’s wife must have done to him to produce this disaster. In the first act, the couple have a vicious argument. Michael has a very romantic conception of what the ideal marriage should be like, and he has little tolerance for any instance when his own wedlock should fall short of this perfect love. Needless to say, Eleonore finds it hard to live up to such unreasonable standards of blissful devotion. Michael is so insecure about their relationship’s imperfections that he is insanely jealous, and the fact that his wife had relations with other men before he met her is something he just can’t deal with. Furthermore, Eleonore’s acting career is built upon the plays that Michael wrote for her, so he has that to lord over her. By the end of the first act, the two are flinging insulting invective back and forth, and the end of their union seems imminent. In act two, man and wife each immediately go out and carry on exactly the way one would expect clichéd representatives of their genders to behave.

Though likely intended to be a deep study of marital dynamics, Welded reads more like the transcript of a role-playing session in couples therapy gone wrong. An inordinate amount of text is taken up with stage directions, all body language and pregnant pauses, to the point where after a while the two leads aren’t even allowed to complete a sentence. They frequently just shout each others names—“Michael!”, “Nelly!”—or their annoying nicknames for each other—“My lover!”, “My Own!” Though O’Neill is known for his realistic depictions of dysfunctional families, this marriage is overwrought with the high-falutin’ histrionics of a pair of pretentious Romantic poets. The most realistic character in the play is a prostitute who unintentionally and thanklessly acts as the voice of reason.

Welded probably would have added up to about an hour on stage. It would take two extremely attractive actors to make that hour tolerable, and to read it off the page is a very tiresome ordeal best avoided. Think of it this way: I read it so you don’t have to.
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