The Modern Theatre

Two new plays by Eugene O’Neill have been produced this past winter by the Theatre Guild, the first with enormous popular success, and both showing our foremost dramatist in new guise. ’Ah, Wilderness!‘ (Random House, $2.50), called a ‘comedy of recollection,’is indeed a comedy, and, more surprising still, a comedy in the straight naturalistic style, so that it is far more amusing when acted than when read. It is the simple, straightaway story of a middle-class family in a small Connecticut city, in 1906 (the date of O’Neill’s adolescence). There is, in this family, a seventeen-yearold boy in the throes of adoring first love and the toils of Swinburne and Omar Khayyam; and there is a father, the local editor, who strives sympathetically to understand his offspring and to tell him ’the facts of life,’with embarrassing moments for both of them. The other members of the family are not neglected, but fill their natural niches in this domestic picture. There is here none of O’Neill’s probing into the dark places of the spirit, or search for new technical methods of projection. The telling is as simple as the story. Rut there is warm sympathy, even sentiment, and almost incessant humor, not of ‘wise-cracks,’ but of character. Some have complained that the play is not ’characteristic O’Neill,’and that ‘other dramatists could have written it.’ But we feel that in his pleasant and amused recollections, based perhaps on his own boyhood, O’Neill is entitled to a few hours of untroubled sentiment; and as for the charge that others could have written the play, the fact remains that none of them has.

Of course, the reader is handicapped especially from lack of George M. Cohan to interpret the father — a stage performance in many ways reminiscent of the delightful art of Joseph Jefferson.

But if the reader is handicapped in getting the flavor and fun from ‘Ah, Wilderness!’ he is perhaps better off than the theatre auditor in forming a definite judgment of Days Without End (Random House, $2.50). In this drama O’Neill continues his technical experiments, and also apparently continues what he began in Dynamo — the dramatization of the struggle in modern man to find rest from his skepticism and some sort of religious faith to give his life meaning. The chief technical experiment in the play consists in the employment of two actors to portray the ‘hero.’ The second actor, always seated or standing close behind the first, wears a grim, expressionless mask, speaks in. a harsh, dead, dry voice, and represents the doubting, skeptical, at times cruel side of the character. It is a combination of the devices used in The Great God Brown, and earlier by Alice Gerstenberg in Overtones. This side of his nature has driven John into an act of unfaithfulness to his wife, and this in turn threatens her chances of recovery from pneumonia. The play ends with a strange duel between the two figures, at the foot of a huge crucifix. John wins by a return to the faith of his childhood, and the masked figure sinks prostrate below the cross.

Obviously, in the theatre, the graphic vividness of the play, and (after a slow and labored start) the ‘characteristic’ O’Neill tortured emotionalism, tend to fog our judgment. We are not sure whether O’Neill intends us to regard John’s reversion to Catholicism as an answer to the age’s needs, or whether it is simply the case study of an individual.

Not all our doubts are resolved by the printed text. It is nowhere made plain whether O’Neill is studying one case, or through the one ease trying to speak to his generation, though any O’Neill play always tends, by its very emotional weight and seriousness, to assume a broader significance. That is perhaps the play’s greatest weakness. If it is a case study, we cannot complain that there is no genuine conversion. John is afraid his wife is going to die, he can’t face life without a protecting love, and he cries his belief more like a petted and terrified and selfish adolescent than a man converted to faith and trust, in powers greater than himself, to genuine religious humility. His doubts and faith alike suggest a weak character, of no significant intelligence. It is the failure to make it plain that this is a case study, the suggestion (vague but inescapable) that we are to take John seriously as a representative modern intellect wrestling with doubt, the problem of evil, the sterility of skepticism. which make the drama far from satisfactory. O’Neill himself was born a Catholic. Many will assume he is returning to the faith of his fathers, and will regard the play as religions propaganda, so to speak. As such, alas, it is prettyfeeble. It will bring few genuine modern intellects home to Rome. This drama, and Dynamo, O’Neill’s two plays on religious themes, are his weakest in the theatre, and on the printed page. The judgment is unavoidable that he is not yet intellectually equal to the great task he has set himself.

But here again we must point out that no other dramatist in our theatre even dreams of attempting such a task. O’Neill failures are a greater credit to our stage than most men’s successes.

In the gay nineties the word ‘clever’ was much mouthed, and had a definite connotation. It connoted brilliant and somewhat metallic surface, no depth of purpose, epigrammatic wit (always), and generally a sparkling versatility. Oscar Wilde was the cleverest of the clever men. At first we called Shaw clever, till we knew better. To-day Noel Coward has inherited the mantle of cleverness. He has the versatility, to the nth power, the wit, the surface brilliance, the technical dexterity which suggests rapid and intuitive composition (probably deceptive; at least, the dexterity has come with long years of theatre practice), and too often the seeming lack of sincerity beneath. To read the preface Coward has written for the new omnibus edition of what he considers his seven best plays, Play Parade (Doubleday, Doran, $3,50), might be to confirm that verdict. — if we did n’t reread the plays.

But Coward is not so lightly to be dismissed. His preface would have us believe he wrote Cavalcade solely to satisfy a desire to do a ‘big’ production, and he just happened by accident to hit on the English theme (though he admits modestly the scene of Queen Victoria’s funeral is pretty darned good). The Vortex he wrote to give himself a good part to act — in which he certainly succeeded. And so on. All true enough. In Design for Living he most assuredly was primarily concerned with writing three magnificent comedy roles for himself and the Lunts. But when you come to read the plays - especially The Vortex, Cavalcade, and the only unacted one of the seven, the war play, Post Mortem — you cannot escape the bitterness beneath the banter, the hurt and angry emotions beneath the pose of elegant nonchalance. Coward is essentially the dramatist of post-war England, of a decade that danced madly to forget its graves, or, if too young or too callous to remember the graves, seized on a wild freedom for want of anything better. A deep, hurt sensitiveness in his soul found this world empty, ugly, horrible, and he could n’t keep it out of his plays — not even, if you look sharp enough, out of Design for Living. It flares up at the end of Cavalcade, it almost snarls through the strange scenes of Post Mortem, it is nostalgic in Bitter Sweet, and brutal in The Vortex. It is absent only from Hay Fever and Private Lives, those two bits of clever fluff which have to be acted by the most expert comedians to come to life, but when so acted are delightful.

Coward is still a youngish man, and it will he interesting to see what, direction his future work takes. There is something in him deeper than cleverness, whether he will admit it or not.

WALTER PRICHARD EATON