Mourning Becomes Electra
THE MAN of the MONTH
[Horace Liveright, $2.50]
MANY of Eugene O’Neill’s plays seem like apprentice work by comparison with his cool and deliberate trilogy, Mourning Becomes Electro, which the Theatre Guild is now presenting in New York and which is also available in book form. During the past few years Mr. O’Neill has sounded truculent. Although The Great God Brown, Strange Interlude, and Dynamo all had something of the fierceness of his emotional vitality, his mind seemed to be on edge. But this dark and malevolent tragedy, based on the Orestes-Electra legend, has been written by a master hand. In spite of its length, which consumes six hours in the theatre, it is clearly wrought, perfectly sustained — a prophetic procession of strange images of death.
Taking the scheme of the Orestes-Electra legend as he found it in Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, Mr. O’Neill has translated it in terms of modern psychology. The baleful house of Atreus becomes the New England house of Mannon, against which the fates have set their spectral seal. Agamemnon becomes Brigadier General Ezra Mannon, just returning from the Civil War. Clytemnestra becomes his wife, Christine; Electra becomes his daughter, Lavinia; Orestes is Orin, his son; and Ægisthus is his wife’s lover, Captain Brant in the clipper-ship trade. Although Mr. O’Neill has not slavishly followed the details of his models, he has kept the structure of his chronicle very much the same, interpreting the motives of vengeance in modern idioms. What he has contributed to it chiefly are the conclusions, most of them expressed in the final play. His Electra, for example, takes full responsibility for her personal guilt in this chain of demoniac murders and suicides. In the last scene of the play, which is the grimmest and most magnificent, she stands quietly on the steps of the Mannon mansion, orders the hired man to close the shutters at all the windows, walks resolutely into the house, and seals herself up within the Mannon tomb. The last of the Mannons has the fortitude to accept the living death of her fate.
The popularity of his plays in book form proves that Mr. O’Neill is read. Like Strange Interlude, Mourning Becomes Electra has become a best-seller. But anyone familiar with Mr. O’Neill’s texts and productions understands that he is primarily a man of the theatre. He is, among other things, a superb writer of melodrama; and what often looks wordy and obscure in the text becomes electrically vivid when it is properly staged. The first two plays of the Mourning Becomes Electra trilogy are particularly theatrical. For the stage version has the supreme advantage of spectacle and brilliant acting — the shadowy, vibrant settings by Robert Edmond Jones, the black flowing costumes that make the women stately figures in a tremendous tragic design.
Melodrama is seldom as mordant as the big scenes of this play. Seldom one feels in the theatre anything so pulsating as the treacherous poisoning of Ezra Mannon in the dead of night, the proving of Christine’s guilt by placing the box of poison tablets on the breast of her dead husband, and the hysterical murder of Captain Brant in the little cabin of his ship. Being a dramatist, Mr. O’Neill has imagined these big scenes in terms of the theatre; and the Theatre Guild, with Philip Moeller directing, has given him actors worthy of his mettle. Alla Nazimova, as the wife, acts ‘from the inside, like a great artist. The grace, the venom, the flow, and the malignance of her acting show what sinister beauty lies beneath the determined homeliness of Mr. O’Neills prose style. Playing the part of Lavinia, Alice Brady brings a solemn majesty to the drama, and a voice that rings with doom. Earle Larimore, as Orin, brings the hysteria of a weakling.
Whether this is a great play or not, in addition to being Mr. O’Neill’s masterpiece, raises the provocative question of whether or not great plays can be written under the flattened spiritual conditions of modern life. Bereft of kings and queens, who governed the scale of Greek tragedy, we have to look for our heroes in more obscure places; and heroes of some sort are essential to great works. To me, the characters of Mourning Becomes Electra fall short of the heroic. They are people of superior will; they have courage and strength; Lavinia’s recognition of fate in the last scene is a splendid exhibition of human valor. But the Mannons lack grandeur and nobility, which are true properties of tragic heroism. What the Mannons are on their own terms, however, is the stuff of masterly drama. For Mr. O’Neill, I think, has written the finest play in the whole range of the American theatre.
J. BROOKS ATKINSON