Poor, benighted souls are we, caught between earth and heaven, between the black bog of the past and the translucent blue of a happy future forever receding just beyond our grasp.
That is how Eugene O’Neill saw the world, anyway, and he didn’t like to suffer alone. So he wrote plays — big, lumbering, oafish, simple-minded, dark-hearted plays that were, for the most part, melodramatic, bombastic, predictable and occasionally downright ludicrous.
They were also, a good many of them, absolutely unforgettable.
Such is the perverse paradox of O’Neill: He wrote some of the gaudiest, most ham-fisted prose imaginable, yet nearly 50 years after his death, his work won’t go away. It will not be dismissed.
Even when his plays appear to be hopelessly out of fashion, when they seem like so much theatrical taxidermy left to molder in the attic while we amuse ourselves with more sophisticated diversions in this glib and ironic age, O’Neill’s works are waiting. At certain moments (not equal) such as last year’s successful New York production of “The Iceman Cometh” and this week’s opening of “A Moon for the Misbegotten” at the Goodman Theatre — one or another of those outsized, galumphing plays crashes back into the parlor, and all of the slick, would-be wisdom about theater is trampled underfoot.
“We will keep returning to O’Neill because it’s the deepest well we have in the American theater,” said Daniel Sullivan, director of “Misbegotten” at the Goodman.
“These are endlessly surprising works, extraordinarily beautiful and extraordinarily painful.”
O’Neill, who died in 1953, was a compulsive autobiographer, returning again and again to issues of personal torment. Biographer Louis Sheaffer called him “an emotional hemophiliac whose family-inflicted wounds never healed.” O’Neill tried to explore other topics in his work, but all mind-roads eventually led back to where he sat, hunched over a wooden desk for hours each day, writing in minuscule longhand script about the subject that obsessed him: himself.
“There still is no American writer whose whole self is as fully represented in the works,” Sullivan said.
“Misbegotten,” one of O’Neill’s most lyrical plays, is the story of James Tyrone Jr. (played in the Goodman production by Gabriel Byrne), a lonely, alcoholic failure and a dead ringer for O’Neill’s dissolute older brother, Jamie. The play chronicles a few peaceful hours that Tyrone is granted in the company of Josie Hogan (Cherry Jones), a woman who subdues her own demons not by drowning them in alcohol, but by drowning them out in loud, playful arguments with her father, Phil (Roy Dotrice).
Josie and Tyrone love each other; they have loved each other for years. But in the revealing light of what Josie calls “the silly mug of the moon,” it becomes clear that love alone cannot rescue Tyrone from the black pit of memory that draws him back in, time after time, just when he thinks he’s finally clawed his way up and out. “There is no present or future,” he tells Josie bitterly. “Only the past happening over and over again — now. You can’t get away from it.”
Completed in 1943, the drama is about “the difficulty of loving,” Sullivan said. “That was the constant theme of O’Neill’s life. You can’t love until you know who you are, and how do you ever know who you are?”
Identity is a fragile, tentative thing, after all, a will-o’-the-wisp that can be shaped and manipulated. O’Neill learned that lesson early: His father, James O’Neill, was a famous actor in the late 1800s, a matinee idol who had what his writer son later would call “the good bad luck” to be cast in a popular stage version of “The Count of Monte Cristo.” James O’Neill’s promising career stalled out in endless touring companies of the swashbuckling melodrama, as he went from city to city for decades, repeating the same lines night after night. His sons, James Jr. and Eugene, were born in hotel rooms in 1878 and ’88, respectively.
The boys’ mother, Ella O’Neill, was a frail woman from a wealthy, sheltered background who had attended convent schools and thus was never able to adjust to the ruggedly peripatetic life of an actor’s family. Her son would create a tender but excruciating portrait of her — bemused, regretful, drug-addicted — in one of his last plays, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”
After a brief stint at Princeton University, Eugene O’Neill began his real education: sailing to exotic harbors as an ordinary seaman, hanging out in waterfront bars and soaking up the dialogue that later would infuse his plays with the bracing tang of truth. His first efforts, produced by the Provincetown Players in Provincetown, Mass., were one-act plays such as “Bound East for Cardiff” and “Where the Cross Is Made,” compact, restless dramas featuring grizzled sailors who lived for little more than their next drink.
O’Neill’s first full-length play, “Beyond the Horizon” (1920), which won the Pulitzer Prize, also centered on the power — sometimes fatal, sometimes healing — of the sea.
The plays came regularly throughout the 1920s and 1930s, great, hulking dramas top-heavy with words that at first perplexed but gradually enchanted Broadway audiences. O’Neill was the first American playwright to win widespread critical and popular acclaim, to be mentioned in the same breath with great European masters such as August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen.
O’Neill certainly looked the part of a major writer: tall, dark, gaunt, with a baleful black-browed stare that probably could have intimidated ocean swells into submmission.
He became rich and famous, and, like many rich and famous male writers in the 20th Century, discarded two wives and all but abandoned three children along the way. His work was his only real interest, more than one observer noted; he was determined to tell the truth about life as he saw it, an obsession that required and perhaps even excused a certain single-minded ruthlessness. In 1936, O’Neill won the Nobel Prize.
Read today, many of the plays seem like bizarre, unruly behemoths, filled with flamboyant emotions and over-the-top characters who would seem more at home in a movie-of-the-week on the Lifetime cable network. Plays such as “Desire Under the Elms” (1924), “Strange Interlude” (1928) and the trilogy “Mourning Becomes Electra” (1931) are lyrically lush in a way that, if written in 2000, would invite instant parody.
Nevertheless, the plays clank and hiss with a kind of brute, mechanistic force that is far more than the sum of their obvious faults. For all of his sentimentality, for all of the embarrassingly juvenile psychoanalysis from which his characters sprang, O’Neill was a writer of raw, even frightening, power. “If it is stammering,” wrote critic Brooks Atkinson in 1956 of the playwright’s canon, “it is still the most eloquent and significant stammer of the American theatre.”
His later plays, written in the late 1940s and ’50s, marked the emergence of O’Neill the poet, the man who could wring a desperate beauty from the most tragic of predicaments. He stripped his writing down to its bleak essence, shedding the symbol-rich philosophizing or jack-in-the-box plot tricks. These works were letters home, long after home had disappeared.
“Misbegotten,” first produced in 1947, was among this last group, dramas that Sullivan called “huge gifts at the end of his life.”
Yet “Misbegotten” had a rocky start. Premiering in Columbus, Ohio, it moved to a few other middle-sized cities and, dogged by lukewarm reviews, closed before it reached Broadway. Ironically, then, there were no Broadway productions in his lifetime of the two plays — “Misbegotten” and “Long Day’s Journey” — upon which most of O’Neill’s reputation now rests. (His will prohibited the release of “Long Day’s Journey” until after his death.)
Part of what sunk the initial production of “Misbegotten” was its language — harmless-sounding today, but salty by 1940s standards. City authorities in Detroit objected to words such as “bastard” and “whore.” They demanded that the word “mother” and “prostitute” not be used in the same sentence.
For all of its darkness and pessimism, “Misbegotten” also has its moments of ribald humor, as Sullivan noted. “The whole first act is very witty.”
O’Neill, in fact, often complained that people failed to see the humor in his work, so intimidated were they by tales of his brooding seriousness. During the 1946 Broadway production of “The Iceman Cometh,” O’Neill told a friend that “audiences don’t laugh at my plays, they’re afraid to, they don’t know whether they’re supposed to or not. Someday I’m going on a grand binge and explode the great man myth, the impression that I’m all gloom and tragedy.”
The “great man myth” — a natural one, given the international renown that his plays garnered — also made O’Neill a plump target. During his working life, several well-known critics attacked him regularly. Eric Bentley published a famously scathing essay in 1952 called “Trying to Like O’Neill,” in which he said that the playwright’s characters are “blown up with psychological gas.” Bernard De Voto scoffed that O’Neill had “written some of the most pretentiously bad plays of our time.”
Defenders of O’Neill have a simple response to those observations: Yes. Absolutely. Few major American writers produced as much truly bad work as did O’Neill — but few, also, produced work that can stand with his best. He was fiercely courageous in confronting the damage that families can do.
“You keep making discoveries about the play on a daily basis,” Sullivan said of the process of working on “Misbegotten.” Just when you think you’ve come to the end of O’Neill, you find a word or a moment in a play that, like a secret chamber, springs open to the touch. Revealed is a whole new corridor of meanings and associations, of harrowing epiphanies.
So we wrestle with his works, with these stubbornly overgrown dramas that blunder and stumble their way into a contemporary theater world more accustomed to sitcom-inspired wit or politically charged allegories. O’Neill didn’t care about any of that. He was too busy putting his life on the line — on, in fact, every line that he wrote.
“He would not,” Sullivan said, “turn away from himself.”
That is why, despite the lure of simpler, gentler things, we cannot turn away from him.
