Giving O'Neill Till It Hurts

Being Some Highly Unofficial Program Notes for the Most Punishing of His Plays

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

THE New York Theatre Guild—the once puling institution which in a few short years has grown from a small group of strenuous amateurs into a clinging oak that is a nice blend of the Moscow Art Theatre and the Messrs. Shubert—has suddenly gone O'Neill.

Its directors gave some evidence last season of feeling restive under the foolish, though not altogether baseless, charge that they were inhospitable to native plays and scornful of the American playwright. Stung to the quick by this allegation they replied, in effect, that they were simply devoted to the American playwright and added that his name, by the way, was Sidney Howard. Forthwith, then, they demonstrated this devotion by producing two of Mr. Howard's comedies at once—The Silver Cord and Ned McCobb's Daughter—and took an option on his next three. They even threatened a few months ago to take this option out for a little exercise, but nothing came of the idea, and whereas they still hold it they have (for the time being, at least) let go their far less resolute and less binding clutch on Mr. Howard's affections.

BUT until 1928 the Guild, which is undoubtedly the most important theatre in America, had never joined forces with the author who, I suppose, is the most important American playwright. In nine seasons of production they had not presented a single one of the works of Eugene Gladstone O'Neill. It was not because there were not plenty of them lying around. To be sure, this harsh, glum and Dreiserian playwright is not the most productive of the lot, but even if Owen Davis is about no plays up on him, the comparatively otiose and slothful O'Neill has turned out somewhere between 4° and 5o works for the theatre, if you count not only the long ones like Anna Christie and Desire Under the Elms but such short, savage sketches as In the Zone and Bound East for Cardiff, which have given him so strong a vogue in those college dramatic societies where performances of O'Neill plays agreeably keep the undergraduates from .getting into a rut of athletics and dances and vacations.

With so imposing a list of works, it was difficult for the Guild's directors to explain away their long and ardent neglect of O'Neill, and, seemingly taunted beyond endurance about it, they have turned suddenly and, as with a snarl, announced that they would produce two O'Neill plays before this very season was out.

"Oh, so they want O'Neill, do they?" you can almost hear the Guild saying. "Well, let's give them a plenty."

The plan, therefore, seems to be to give O'Neill plays till it hurts. And with that slightly parental, or at least pedagogical, accent which has ever marked the public utterances of an art theatre, I think the Guild's directors will be inclined to add that it hurts them more than it does us.

The two plays went into rehearsal in December, so that while you and I were tying up parcels or re-reading the Christmas Carol or arranging with Mr. Crum, the drayman, to cart away the embossed Yuletide greetings from our loved ones, the actors of the Theatre Guild were finding the holiday season just one O'Neill play after another.

The first of these was Marco Millions, a many-scened portrait of that chatty and Babbitty traveling man of old Venice—Marco Polo. Its leading role was entrusted to Alfred Lunt and if you want to know more about it, you can get it at any book shop if you are firm enough with the clerk, for it made its appearance in book form nearly a year ago.

The second play was the one called Strange Interlude and, unless the actors shoot the director, one another, or themselves, the curtain should be rising on its performance some time during the same week in which this issue of Vanity Fair is being snatched from the news stands by its ravenous public.

Strange Interlude is the study of a woman in her relations with six men. The first of the six is the romantic hero of her girlhood who crashes to his death in an aeroplane before ever their love can be consummated. He dies in what the professors of playwrighting call the antecedent action. The second man is her father whom she hates for having blocked that consummation. Father dies during the first intermission. The third is the moonstruck young hero-worshipper whom she marries, and when, in the nick of time, she discovers insanity in his family, an old friend (Number 4) graciously assists her in the biological problem of having a child (Number 5) whom she can pass off on her unsuspecting husband as his own, thereby keeping him happy though sterile. When this tangle of passions and frustrations has unraveled itself at last by the death of the husband, the cooling off of the lover, and the growing up of the son, a sixth man is ready to mingle his declining years with hers, marrying her in the stormy twilight of her passions, and, slipping into the dead father's niche, a soft, epicene literary friend whose own incapacity for physical love (which even he himself vaguely confuses with purity) has enabled him to sort of hang around during the twenty years that she was having her fling.

FOR the action of Strange Interlude covers twenty years, and while its performance takes somewhat less time than that, the Guild, on discovering that it had been written in nine long acts, served notice on its docile subscribers that a play had come along whereby even those gluttons for punishment might show the mettle of their pasture. It was decided at once to begin each performance in the late afternoon, permit the audience to go home to dinner and then play the remaining scenes for such portions of that audience as were still going strong in the evening. Such a program of production would stagger any producer less spartan than the Guild. To its directors, however, with their memories of Shaw's Back to Methuselah, which took three evenings to play, Strange Interlude must seem like a mere vaudeville sketch.

What thus prolongs the exposition of its not particularly rich or complicated theme is, indeed, the peculiar feature of Strange Interlude, for in this play Mr. O'Neill sets down for his characters not only their speeches but their innermost thoughts, communicated to the audience in long, verbose, implausible soliloquies and asides which make up the greater part of the text. This device represents, as did the antics with the masks in that floundering and tedious drama called The Great God Brown, not only endless and restless boredom with the rigid limitations of the modern play's form, but his own almost hypnotized observation of the incontrovertible fact that things and people (as Buttercup so well expressed it) are not what they seem.

These asides in Strange Interlude are not merely the old whispered clues to a tangled plot, tossed lightly across the footlights, but elaborate harangues intended to illumine the hidden motives of his puppets. Thus, even as the wife is patting her fond husband on the back and soothing him with kind words, she is resonantly informing the audience how gross an oaf he is, how vulgar and distasteful his body seems to her, how feeble his love making, and how fatuous his cuckold smile.

I THINK that most actors would tell O'Neill with some asperity that such illumination was their business and none of his, and, by thus dispensing with their aid, he would be calmly throwing away his only reason for turning to the dramatic form in the first place. But even one who felt unequal to the didactic impertinence of telling O'Neill (or any other playwright) that this or that was not the way to write a play, might still be hardy enough to suggest after reading Strange Interlude that O'Neill was not a good enough cook to use this particular recipe.

Many of the thoughts which he has written for his characters seem to me about as clumsy and paltry dramatic writing as one would come upon in a month of first-nights. It is, of course, a good deal of a job. It is no mean thing to report with the lapidarian art of an Ernest Hemingway the very accent and feel of men's speech. It takes an even greater gift to guess what goes on behind the arras of their foreheads. I suspect that O'Neill might say with some safety that his guess would be as good as mine. But I can only reply that I put down the ninth unconvincing act of Strange Interlude with the feeling that he had attempted a task which called for more intuition and knowledge of the human animal than he possessed. And as I pronounce that heresy, I know just what must have been the feelings of the little boy in the fairy tale who cried out, "He hasn't got anything on!"

Thoughts race through the mind as wordless as the murmur of the sea, as impalpable as perfume, as swift as light. The effort to reduce them to words, to weigh them down with syllables and sentences, would probably make even phrases far more winged than O'Neill's seem pompous and manicured and clumsy. Words give them a leaden-footed languor and the tour which O'Neill conducts through the minds of his characters in Strange Interlude gives you something of the sensation you would experience if you were to go through a scenic railway on a glacier. The audible thinking which the Puppets must do in Strange Interlude has all the agonizing retardation of a slow motion picture.

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In the manuscript, of course, the difference between the inner thought and the outward speech, which the actors could convey by a mere change of voice or the director by a shift of lights, is indicated by alternations of Roman and Italic type.

The average playgoer may not find the result confusing, but it would be small wonder if the mechanics of these scenes did not set him to speculating as to what, in addition, the actors themselves were thinking. I can quite imagine his trotting home to dinner during one of the intermissions, his mind clouded with the vague impression that the scene between the husband and wife, as just performed for him by Lynn Fontanne and Earle Larimore, had run something like this:

SHE: Well, my dear, you must get to your typewriter now and do some of your splendid writing.

Of course his ivriting is hopeless, but I cant have him sitting around twiddling his thumbs.

I COULD PUT A LOT MORE FEELING INTO THIS SCENE IF THE GUILD HAD HAD SENSE ENOUGH TO CAST ALFRED FOR THE PART OF THE HUSBAND.

HE: I'm afraid no one else in the world will think it splendid.

But I don't care a hang about being a writer. I want to be a father. I wonder if she's going to have a baby. I DO WISH LYNN WOULDN'T STROKE MY HAIR IN THIS SCENE. I DON'T DARE TAKE OUT MY POCKET COMB IN FRONT OF ALL THESE SUBSCRIBERS.

SHE: Nonsense, darling. I just know you're going to be a success.

But he won't. He's a failure. He'll always be a flat, flabby failure. My God! I'm yoked to a clod.

THERE'S A BLOODY LOT OF COUGHING OUT FRONT TONIGHT.

HE: Anyway, it was good of dear old Ned to get the job for me.

Poor, silly, old Ned. I'll bet he's always been half in love with my wife. I'M GOOD AND TIRED OF PLAYING THIS KIND OF SAP. IT'S A WONDER THESE DIRECTORS WOULDN'T KNOW A GOOD ROMANTIC ACTOR WHEN THEY SAW ONE.

SHE: Well, some day you'll have a chance to do a good turn for him. The poor fool is too dull to suspect that Ned and I have been deceiving him for weeks.

THEY DO EVEN MORE COUGHING AT O'NEILL THAN THEY DO AT SHAW.

HE: If I ever become successful, it'll be because of your confidence in me. Oh dear, I xvonder if it's my fault she doesn't have a baby.

I'LL BET THAT THAT GIRL DOWN THERE IN THE AISLE SEAT WOULD RATHER SEE ME AS D'ARTAGNAN.

SHE: YOU make me so happy when you say that.

The only way he can ever make me happy is by dropping dead.

I WISH I HADN'T TAKEN THAT THIRD HELPING OF SOUFFLE AT LUNCH.