Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts

by Robert M. Dowling

  After hearing of Glaspell’s appeal to preserve the Provincetown name for Cook’s legacy alone, O’Neill informed Kenton that he’d argued for that but was outvoted; he then wrote a separate letter to Glaspell, one of the few women among the Greenwich Village crowd whom he considered “a real person”:77 “When I heard of [Jig’s] death, Susan, I felt suddenly that I had lost one of the best friends I had ever had or ever would have. … I’m sure if Jig can look into the hearts and minds of Bobby, Kenneth, and me he sees an integrity toward the creation of beauty in this theatre with which he can be content.” In an unexpected but welcome letter from Greece, Glaspell reassured him that she understood his good intentions for the theater. Her onetime protégé responded with elation that he and Boulton “read and reread” her letter. “It made us feel close to you,” O’Neill wrote with sincere gratitude, “and we love you so much Susan.”78 Fitzie Fitzgerald, on the other hand, received another sort of letter from Glaspell, this one defending Kenton for fighting to preserve the name for Cook’s legacy, and she ended with bitter certitude: “Fitzie, and all of you, for this letter is for all of you, from very deep down, I am through.”79

  Over the following decades, O’Neill time and again acknowledged the “tremendous lot” he owed the Provincetown Players, if with some qualifications. “I can’t honestly say I would not have gone on writing plays if it hadn’t been for them,” he said. “I had already gone too far ever to quit.” Edna Kenton agreed, but only in hindsight and with a sternly worded but indisputable codicil: “There is no doubt at all that had he not had our Playwrights’ Theatre and our experimental stage to use always precisely as he wished to use them, he would have reached Broadway by quite another road and with quite other plays. … No other American playwright has ever had such prolonged preliminary freedom with stage and audience alike.”80

  On January 3, 1924, the Provincetown Playhouse reopened its old stable doors, with a fresh coat of paint, an enlarged stage, and newly built proscenium entrances. Their manifesto, written by O’Neill and published in their first playbill, declared that “the difficult is properly our special task—or we have no reason for existing. Truth, in theatre as in life, is eternally difficult, just as the easy is the everlasting lie.” The newly formed Provincetown group would maintain a strict code of artistic integrity, but Jig Cook’s days of idealistic amateurism, O’Neill now decreed, were over.

  Instead, the spirit of professionalism had taken hold: they now welcomed critics and hired a press agent, Stella Hanau. “The premières had some of the glitter of uptown openings,” Hanau said, “and those who remembered the early days eyed the limousines and the top hats with amazement faintly touched with disapproval.”81 Though most of them used the metonymy “the Provincetown,” they still didn’t have an official name. “We are just a theatre,” O’Neill said. “Beyond that, let what we do give us a name.” O’Neill, Macgowan, and Jones soon adopted one based on an article by Boulton in Theatre Arts magazine that announced their arrival and defined their mission with two unambiguous words: “Experimental Theatre.” Thus when the three men incorporated, they called the group the Experimental Theatre, Inc. (ETI). In due course, the press conferred a more portentous label: “The Triumvirate of Greenwich Village.”82

  O’Neill had suggested August Strindberg’s The Spook Sonata (1907) for their debut. The Swedish dramatist, O’Neill contended in his program note, “remains the most modern of moderns, the greatest interpreter in the theatre of the characteristic spiritual conflicts which constitute the drama—the blood—of our lives today.” Also at O’Neill’s behest, they chose to reinterpret Strindberg’s “chamber play” (a three-act work with minimal cast and props) using self-crafted masks. O’Neill had deployed masks before in The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape; but in Jones it was just the African mask for the witch doctor, and in The Hairy Ape the costume designer Blanche Hays had thrown together masks at the last minute for background characters. Jimmy Light, who designed the masks for Spook Sonata, boasted that before this landmark production, “no one had used the mask” in modern drama “as the focus of dramatic action.”83

  Light explained that prior to this, the mask in modern theater had “disappeared along with other fundamental tools of the theatre, such as the aside, the soliloquy, the prologue, and the epilogue.” In his profoundly illuminating but as yet unpublished reminiscence of his time with O’Neill, “The Parade of Masks,” he stresses that Spook Sonata’s qualified success was less important to the playwright than its “demonstration of the possibilities of the mask.” “It was ‘Expressionism,’ though not pushed to the point at which the physical setting,” in the mode of The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape, “takes on the anthropomorphical shape of the dramatic conflict.” O’Neill realized that the mask, rather than merely “an archaeological feature of classical theatre,” as it had been widely regarded, could be a powerful “tool for the exposition of emotional conflict in plays dealing with man as he is today.” “However, the actor has no manner or means by which he could change the rigid places and lines of the mask. It is we, the spectators, who living the past experience of the character and undergoing the immediate agony, place kinesthetically, our emotions on the face of the mask. They are our emotions.”84

  O’Neill’s dramatic arrangement of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner opened at the Provincetown Playhouse on April 6, 1924. For this play O’Neill was determined, as he’d been from the start, to heighten his audience’s sense of “identification,” a term that Light defined as the “memory and emotional resources of the spectator” informing a character’s inner self. Once audience members ceased to rely on the personality-tainted expressions of an actor (particularly those of the “hams” of the day), they might encounter a far more intimate and interactive theater than the superficial, passive entertainment they were accustomed to.85 Even revivals of classics like Hamlet, O’Neill argued as late as 1932, would do well to make use of masks: “Masks would liberate [Hamlet] from its present confining status as exclusively a ‘star vehicle.’ We would be able … to identify ourselves with the figure of Hamlet as a symbolic projection of a fate that is in each of us, instead of merely watching a star giving us his version of a great acting role.” “From the standpoint of future American culture,” O’Neill wrote, “I am hoping for added imaginative scope for the audience, a chance for a public I know is growing yearly more numerous and more hungry in its spiritual need to participate in imaginative interpretations of life rather than merely identify itself with faithful surface resemblances of living.”86

  Heywood Broun regarded Jimmy Light’s mask designs as “cadaverous and ghastly” and the experiment on the whole an “abject failure … a cracked test tube in the Provincetown laboratory.” Other reviewers were on less sure footing, and most agreed that Teddy Ballantine’s haunting recitation of Coleridge was magnificent. Even a mystified Broun reported that when the curtain fell, the little theater shook with applause. “Special students of the stage will find in new productions of the Provincetown Playhouse much to study and discuss,” wrote critic Robert Gilbert Welsh. “The ideas expressed are not likely to appeal to the general public—yet!”87

  O’Neill’s first original play in nearly two years, Welded, premiered uptown at the Thirty-Ninth Street Theatre a few weeks earlier on March 17. The play was directed by Stark Young but overseen by the Triumvirate and designed by Bobby Jones. Its run was a meager twenty-four nights, and the reviews were abysmal, often derisively so: “Climax after climax goes by,” scoffed E. W. Osborn of the New York Evening World, “at each of which one can imagine a well-trained curtain fairly aching to drop.” “Indeed, if the program had not indicated positively that the whole action of the play transpires within a six-hour period,” groaned Arthur Pollock in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “the audience would have been justified in regarding it as much longer.”88

  At one performance, the actress Doris Keane, who starred as Eleanor Cape, overheard an audience member grumble about
Jacob Ben-Ami, who played Michael, “If that fellow says [‘I love you’] again, I’ll throw a chair at him.” The audience was also laughing at inappropriate times, at first guiltily, then uproariously, and the Billboard’s critic guessed why: “It is an axiom that repetition, if continued long enough, will result in laughter. A well-known example is that of the old vaudeville gag, ‘I’m going away—but before I go I have something to say. I’m going away—but before I go I have something to say.’ Repeat this long enough and the audience will laugh, tho there is nothing intrinsically funny in the words or thought themselves. Mr. O’Neill has his couple alternating between the themes of ‘I love you’ and ‘I hate you’ far too long.” Edna Kenton, enjoying a moment of schadenfreude, gossiped to novelist and critic Carl Van Vechten that she’d overheard a friend of O’Neill’s sigh over the humiliating laughter made worse by the excruciatingly personal dialogue. “He has torn out his heart and put it on his sleeve for stupid peckers to peck at,” the person said. “I suppose it was something he must do.”89

  After the bad notices began pouring in, O’Neill complained privately to its director, Stark Young, about the distinction between the modern actors of the 1920s and the romantic actors of his father’s generation: “Here’s just the difference: the actors those days would not have understood my play but they could act it; now they understand it but can’t act it.” In public, however, O’Neill and Macgowan admitted a major blunder they’d recognized during rehearsals but too late to do anything about it: Jones’s set of the Capes’ Manhattan duplex was magnificently rendered but far too realistic for a “super-natural” play. “The creative mind does not always see clearly what it is doing,” Macgowan said in a Vogue “review” that really amounted to a public apology. “It would have been far better if he had provided nothing but dark curtains and stabbing shafts of light and a few chairs.” It should only have been done at Macdougal Street in the experimental way, he concluded. “It was our error—O’Neill’s and Jones’s and mine—that we chose to mount it on Broadway.” “I wanted to give the impression of the world shut out, just of two human beings struggling to break through an inner darkness,” O’Neill told the New York Times. “But the sets which I described in my stage directions were so ‘natural’ that they inevitably conjured up all the unimportant paraphernalia of daily living, daily existence, to stand between the life of my characters and the lives in the audience.”90

  Meanwhile, in the lead-up to the May 15 premiere of O’Neill’s next Macdougal Street production, All God’s Chillun Got Wings, the playwright inadvertently found himself at the center of a racially charged firestorm of his own making. First commissioned as a one-act by George Jean Nathan for his American Mercury magazine, All God’s Chillun swelled into a two-act, seven-scene play that expressionistically delves into the torments of a mixed-race marriage. Macgowan reported that over the weeks after its publication, the mailman nearly broke his back lugging shoeboxes overflowing with press clippings to the upstairs office. The clipping bureau also nearly broke the theater’s bank, since the price for the service was $50 per one thousand clippings. (The clippings, he complained, wound up costing them more than the scenery.) “What with the weekly syndicate letters and dispatches from Cape Town, Sydney, and Calcutta,” Macgowan said, “it is no risk at all to say that ‘All God’s Chillun’ received more publicity before production than any play in the history of the American theatre, possibly of the world.”91

  Note to the Ku Klux Klan

  Alarmed citizens from all walks of life, racist, religious, and progressive reformers alike, discharged an unending flood of rage upon the Provincetown Playhouse in the late winter and early spring of 1924. Every book club, college library, and gardening society printed diatribes about All God’s Chillun Got Wings. “It seemed for a time there,” O’Neill told a classmate about the indignation that the news of the production inflamed, “as if all the feeble-witted both in and out of the K.K.K. were hurling newspaper bricks in my direction, not to speak of the anonymous letters which ranged from those of infuriated Irish Catholics who threatened to pull my ears off as a disgrace to their race and religion, to those of equally infuriated Nordic Kluxers who knew that I had Negro blood, or else was a Jewish pervert masquerading under a Christian name in order to do subversive propaganda for the Pope! This sounds like burlesque but the letters were more so.”92

  The NAACP also received letters about the pending production in Greenwich Village, from those sympathetic to O’Neill to those prepared to drive African Americans off the continent if it were to appear: “The furor of intolerance that is being raised against O’Neill’s play is so absurd,” wrote one of the former. “White and colored people do occasionally get married, so why should not a serious dramatist use that phase of our national life as material for a big play.” Another, scribbled in black crayon, is addressed to “Nigger Johnson” (an allusion to the African American boxing champion Jack Johnson, who had married a white woman) and signed “white man.” The play, “white man” wrote, was exclusively designed to “help the black bastards to get what was in their rotten hearts for years.” He alleged that the leading lady Mary Blair was a mulatto, “not white,” and that for race relations in America, “this play is going to spoil everything. America is not for niggers—you shines belong in Africa. Bring on the Riot—that’s what we want.”93

  Jimmy Light, who was directing the play, told a reporter that he’d been “accused of being a Jew hiding under an English Christian name, and O’Neill was called a dirty Irish Mick.” Another of their correspondents considered O’Neill “so low he’d have to take a stepladder to get up to a cockroach.” Light neglected to mention the masses of Victorian ladies, one hundred thousand in number, who, through their representatives in the City Federation of Women’s Clubs of New York, unanimously passed a resolution condemning the playwright for inflicting upon New York “this unwholesome, revolting and disgusting exhibition of what Mr. O’Neill regards as art.”94

  The main cause of this uproar? The press had made a shocking discovery, circulated nationwide, that in the upcoming O’Neill production on Macdougal Street, a white actress, Mary Blair, would kiss the hand of her black leading man, Paul Robeson, live on stage.

  All God’s Chillun Got Wings treats the unlikely relationship between an educated African American man, Jim Harris, and a working-class Irish American woman, Ella Downey, from their preadolescent days as childhood sweethearts to their tumultuous marriage. Through the course of the play, Jim, a hardworking student, attempts to pass the American Bar Association exam; but he repeatedly fails it as a result of his low self-esteem, which he attributes to being intimidated by the white test takers in the examination room. His failure is also due in large part to the fact that Ella, at first incongruously, makes every effort to thwart his dream. This interracial union, divisive for both black and white audiences of the early twentieth century, ultimately destroys Jim’s professional ambitions and sends Ella spiraling into murderous racist pathology.

  The idea had been percolating for a couple of years: in O’Neill’s 1922 work diary, following the triumphant reception of The Emperor Jones, he’d jotted down, “Play of Johnny T.—negro who married white woman—base play on his experiences as I have seen it intimately—but no reproduction, see it only as man’s.” The only mixed-race marriage O’Neill saw “intimately” was that of his close friend Joe Smith from the Hell Hole and his wife, Miss Viola. The week Smith died at age fifty-six in 1929, the African American New York Amsterdam News ran an obituary headlined, “Village Man Who Helped Famous Playwright Dies.” The death notice’s opening line didn’t identify Smith as the gangster, auctioneer, or Greenwich Village personality that he was but rather as the man “whose knowledge of the relations of Negroes and whites and his vivid imagination enabled Eugene O’Neill, noted white playwright, to write ‘All God’s Chillun Got Wings.’” (Indeed, Smith must have been more engaged in the actual production than formerly known, since his granddaughter, Alice Nel
son, was cast as one of the girls for its opening street scene.)95

  O’Neill was touring around France in 1929 when he received a despondent letter from his old crony from the Hell Hole. In his plaintive letter, written just before his death, Smith told O’Neill that he’d given up trying to make it in the world. O’Neill responded with a check and words of encouragement that simultaneously look back on O’Neill’s anguished protagonist in All God’s Chillun and forward to Smith’s later appearance as the black gambler Joe Mott in The Iceman Cometh: “You know you’ve always got my best wishes and that I am your friend and will always do anything I can to help you. I haven’t forgotten the old days and your loyal friendship for me. … Buck up, Joe! You’re not going to confess the game has licked you, are you? That isn’t like you! Get a new grip on yourself and you can knock it dead!”96

  Along with Smith, the story of Etta Johnson, the boxing sensation Jack Johnson’s white wife, was another likely source for the play. News of her suicide, a highly publicized consequence of antimiscegenation feelings on both sides of the racial line, appeared in the pages of the New London Day on September 12, 1912, while O’Neill was in town working for the Telegraph, with the headline, “Mrs. Jack Johnson Could Not Endure Ostracism: Champion Pugilist’s Wife Killed Herself with Bullet After Saying Everyone Shunned Her Because She Had Married a Negro.” Etta Johnson’s suicide note read, “I am a white woman and am tired of being a social outcast. I deserve all of my misery for marrying a black man. Even the negroes don’t respect me; they hate me. I intend to end it all.”97 If members of the public hadn’t made this connection with O’Neill’s play on their own, William Randolph Hearst’s New York American drama critic made it for them: “It seems that negroes would be the first to resent this thing. When the negro pugilist, Jack Johnson, was parading his ownership of white womanhood, no one showered him with ‘bravos.’ That was in real life, too, but hardly a thing to form the basis of a play.”98