Experimental O'Neill. Eugene O'Neill

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ of this scene, or of any other scene in the play, should by no means be naturalistic.”8 (See p. 123.) Suggesting that the non-naturalistic mise-en-scène requested by O’Neill was integral to all aspects of the play’s original production, critical reviews of the play pointed to a lone actress who veered from the dramatist’s above stage direction. As Ronald H. Wainscott notes, the only performer “singled out for ineptitude”9 was Mary Blair, who played Mildred, the young woman who visits the stokehole. According to O’Neill’s stage directions the character should look “as if the vitality of her stock had been sapped before she was conceived.”10 (See p. 124.) Yet “Blair’s emotional methods [according to Wainscott]…almost precluded her ability to approach such an artificial [theatrical] character.”11 Subsequently, when the production moved uptown from the Provincetown Players’ Playwrights’ Theatre to Broadway, the director replaced Blair with an actress capable of performing in a style that was more in synch with the play’s theatricality.

      The critical praise for actor Louis Wolheim, who played The Hairy Ape’s protagonist, Yank, also suggests the importance of non-naturalistic acting to the production. Wolheim, a Princeton graduate and former boxer who, according to critic Brooks Atkinson, helped turn the drama “into a savage hubub with devastating philosophical and political overtones,”12 “alternately engaged and alienated his audience, always returning to the empathic suffering in Yank’s journey.”13 Apparently, Wolheim’s acting style, which was also noted for its intelligence, alternated between the sort of engagement and alienation, empathetic identification and distancing that would later become hallmarks of Brecht’s persistently non-naturalistic epic theater.

      The critical and commercial success of The Hairy Ape, as well as the professional limitations of the Provincetown Players, which had originally been founded as an amateur company, led to the break up of the Players shortly after the production (although a watered-down version of the company would eventually manage to reconstitute itself, from 1925-1929, without O’Neill). Nonetheless, the success of the expressionistic, highly stylized The Hairy Ape, appearing two years after The Emperor Jones first established O’Neill’s international reputation, was a fitting culmination to the dramatist’s incredibly productive, mutually beneficial six-year tenure with the Provincetown Players.

      Although somewhat controversial for its “squalid” dialogue—the NYPD unsuccessfully tried to close the production down for using obscene language—reviewers of the play generally found aesthetic value in its slang-filled dialogue and, especially, in the play’s theatricality, which included masked characters. Critic Walter Prichard Eaton, for example—who saw The Hairy Ape during its original run at the Provincetown Players’ “dingy little playhouse on Macdougal Street”14—suggests that the drama’s theatricality was central not only to the work’s success, but also to the future of American theater:

      Certainly, never on our stage has such use been made of the rank realism of vulgar speech… We may say also quite as certainly, I think, no such fusion of dialogue and scenery, of the intellectual, the emotional, and the pictorial, into a single thing which is only to be described by the word theatrical, has ever before been accomplished by an American playwright… In Eugene O’Neill the new art of the theater in America has found its playwright at last. To see “The Hairy Ape” is to see the bright promise of what is to come, not the pale promise of what has been.15

      Indeed, the Provincetown Players’ production of The Hairy Ape, the last of O’Neill’s dramas that the company would produce, “stood apart as a leading theatrical event not just of the season, but the decade.”16

      Old-School Criticism and the Great American Playwright

      Although many of his plays were highly theatrical, much criticism of O’Neill remains rooted in a dated approach to literature and theater that prioritizes not only realism, but also biographical interpretation. This is due, in large part, to the enormous impact of O’Neill’s autobiographical Long Day’s Journey Into Night, considered one of the greatest plays of modern drama, as well as to the oft-consulted, still-influential “definititve” biographies by Louis Sheaffer, Travis Bogard, and Arthur & Barbara Gelb, which in addition to covering O’Neill’s life, interpret most of his plays biographically. Plus, O’Neill’s Irish-Catholic family history—which includes being raised by a conflicted, drug-addicted mother, as well as a famous actor-father from Ireland (who grew up dirt poor) against whom O’Neill rebelled, socially and aesthetically, on his way to becoming “the first great American playwright”—is quite dramatic in itself, and thus further encourages biographical readings of the plays.

      The over-reliance on biographical literary analysis is not, however, the only reason for an under-appreciation of some of O’Neill’s early plays. Although highly theatrical dramas such as The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape resist simple biographical interepretation, those plays, along with the rest of O’Neill’s early dramas, are frequently depicted as earnest “apprentice work.” Subsequently, O’Neill’s early, experimental playwriting (and much experimental drama in general) is viewed as being less mature, and thus inherently less effective, than the later realistic drama. In his critique of a standard bearer of O’Neill criticism, Travis Bogard, Thomas F. Connolly points to the limitations of this sort of scholarship, which can drastically distort and diminish O’Neill’s wide-ranging accomplishments as an innovative playwright:

      Such commentary sees O’Neill’s body of work as a dramaturgical Road to Damascus. O’Neill’s true dramatic mission is to be a realistic writer steeped in bourgeois psychology, rendered unique via O’Neill’s aesthetic of autobiography. All past plays are prologue to Long Day’s Journey Into Night.17

      In spite of this type of all-too-common criticism which suggests otherwise, the main focus of O’Neill’s career was not on writing plays that adhered to the conventions of mainstream realism. While the late masterworks are, indeed, high points of American drama, except “for [those] final, putatively autobiographical plays—O’Neill has scant interest in conversation plays.”18

      The Wooster Group and the

      Importance of Form

      The Wooster Group, too, has little interest in conversational realistic plays, or in staging them in conventional ways. According to Elizabeth LeCompte, her process of directing a written play always entails reinvention rather than a simple restaging of the text. What she says of her approach to a work by another groundbreaking playwright of modern drama, Anton Chekhov, is equally relevant to her direction of The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape: “I’m not just going to do Chekhov [or O’Neill]. I’m trying to—I’m trying to make it present for me. Which means literally reinventing. I mean—‘reinventing’ it—it’s an over-used word. I mean reinventing it from the ground up.”19

      Even if LeCompte were to reverse her renovative aesthetic inclinations and try to stage O’Neill (or any dramatist) in a traditional manner, she could not simply return to the theatrical past of the Provincetown Players and remain there for the duration of an O’Neill one-act play. Besides, such theatrical time-travel—especially from the twenty-first century—would prove antithetical to the relentless experimentation of both the Provincetown Players and O’Neill during the nineteen-tens and -twenties, not to mention the Wooster Group. Plus, as Brecht reminds us, “Literary forms [of the past] have to be checked against [current] reality.”20 Yet the reality of the present is, like O’Neill’s texts, also tethered to the past, while performance takes place in the here and now. Thus, the presentation of a written play will always contain inherent tensions—between history and “the now,” the anterior existence of the written script (and the rehearsal period, etc.) and live performance—although conversational realism will often attempt to conceal such tensions.

      As O’Neill continued to develop and experiment with an aesthetically diverse body of dramatic work during the nineteen-twenties, Bertolt Brecht, of whom O’Neill was surely unaware at the time, began exploring drama’s inherent tensions within СКАЧАТЬ