Hylan submitted his legal grounds a few days later, when the damage had already been done: the children were too young to act on a professional stage. This didn’t hold up, since the eight child actors were aged eleven to seventeen, within acceptable bounds; in addition, a Broadway show was granted a permit to hire an eight-year-old the following week, a clear indication that the city simply wished to put an end to the O’Neill production. Harry Weinberger, the Experimental Theatre’s attorney, hiked down to city hall the day after the premiere. Hylan refused him an audience, but his executive secretary listened to the arguments in silence. When Weinberger had finished his case, the secretary responded by asking if he’d ever seen such a long spring. Weinberger then invited the mayor or his secretary to attend the play gratis and see it for themselves but was declined.125
When Jimmy Light stepped out from a proscenium entrance on opening night to explain the mandate from city hall, he was welcomed with cheers and whistles. Light asked if he should read the children’s dialogue out loud, to which the audience chanted, “Read! Read!”126
Paul Robeson and Mary Blair in the Provincetown Playhouse production of All God’s Chillun Got Wings, spring 1924.
(COURTESY OF JEFF KENNEDY)
The audience that evening was racially mixed, and to ward off a riot, or even an isolated scuffle, no one was permitted to watch the play standing. Seated to the left of Kelcey Allen, the drama critic for Women’s Wear Daily, Allen reported, was “one of the best poets of the negro race in America, a man who probably understands the strivings of his people as few others do.” (Allen kept him anonymous, though in all likelihood this was Claude McKay, a vanguard poet of the Harlem Renaissance who’d just arrived back from Paris that January. As a former editor of Max Eastman’s radical magazine the Liberator, he often appeared at Village happenings like this one.) “Such a man,” Allen wrote, “possessing the delicate emotional sensitiveness of a poet, would be likely to sense the most intangible slight or slur against his race. But it was evident that he found nothing in the play that is degrading and everything that is ennobling.”127
Another reviewer, hostile to “the little reds, pinks, radicals and general nuts of Greenwich Village nutdom,” thought the play “miscegenation propaganda” and wrote that “an agitated patroness, who sat next to me did not keep her thoughts secret by any means. She confided to me that she was from the South and regarded the whole affair as worthy of the attention of the Ku Klux Klan. She was heartily seconded by half a dozen who sat around us.”128 The only interruption of the night was a drunk who stumbled into the theater in mid-performance and took a seat; he muttered that he didn’t understand the play, then said, “Where the hell am I?” and stumbled out. Aside from this unrehearsed bit of comedy, O’Neill said later, “nothing at all happened, not even a single senile egg.” The only evidence of potential foul play was a yellow pamphlet left behind on a seat entitled “The Ku Klux Klan.”129 By the end of the performance most critics had felt “cheated,” O’Neill said, “that there hadn’t been at least one murder that first night.” Even the scene when Blair kissed Robeson’s hand, noted one disappointed critic, “caused no more than a tremor of resentment and was, so far as any demonstration is concerned, completely unnoticed by the audience.” Robert Benchley of Life pronounced drily that the production, “long dreaded by the champions of Nordic supremacy and the guardians of the honor of white womanhood, has taken place, and, at a late hour last night, white women were still as safe on the streets of New York as they ever were and the banner of purity still floated from the ramparts of our own Caucasian stronghold.”130
Paul Robeson played the roles of Brutus Jones and Jim Harris back-to-back from May 5 to October 10, then played Jones again that December.131 The racial attacks persisted on all sides over the role of Jim Harris, Robeson wrote in his Opportunity piece, but never from people who had either read or attended the play. “Audiences that came to scoff,” he said, “went away in tears.”132 “Robeson adds to his extraordinary physique a shrewd, rich understanding of the role,” the New York Sun raved, “and a voice that is unmatched in the American theater. This dusky giant unleashed in a great play, provides the kind of evening in the theater that you remember all your life.”133
All God’s Chillun lasted one hundred performances, with a break to transfer to the Greenwich Village Theatre in Sheridan Square that August. However, the last-minute solution to the problem of casting children, according to O’Neill, “enraged the police authorities” so badly that it “stirred up trouble” for his next highly contentious play, Desire Under the Elms.
“God’s Hard, Not Easy”
That August 1924, O’Neill, to his irritation, was browbeaten into attending a performance of his S.S. Glencairn plays. It was held at Provincetown’s local Barn Theatre, and he’d been “expecting to be bored stiff,” he told Kenneth Macgowan afterward, but found himself utterly charmed by the production. He was most impressed by the way its director, his Provincetown friend and Greenwich Village bookstore owner Frank Shay, had combined the independent one-acts (minus In the Zone) into a seamless “single-complete play about sailors.” But the old tales of his time with his shipmates at sea also made him “homesick for homelessness and irresponsibility,” he admitted, “and I believe—philosophically, at any rate—that I was a sucker ever to go in for playwrighting, mating and begetting sons, houses and lots, and all the similar snares of the ‘property game’ for securing spots in the sun which become spots on the sun.”134
O’Neill’s urge toward possessiveness, a trait he’d always decried in his father, had gotten the better of him, and he was now broke. Welded hadn’t even made enough to pay his income taxes for the year, his family’s estate continued “quiescently in probate,” and the $1,000 to Kathleen Jenkins for Eugene was causing his financial back to “creak under the strain.” He needed a quick infusion of cash, and after seeing the Glencairn plays produced together in Provincetown, he believed that they would make a hit in New York and proposed that the Triumvirate put them on themselves. All God’s Chillun had also reopened at the Greenwich Village Theatre that August, and to boost ticket sales he suggested that Macgowan hire a “foxy press-agent” to stir up ticket sales with controversy by goading Mayor Hylan into attempting to shut the production down again.135
O’Neill had begun a new play, Marco Millions, and was hunting for a new uptown producer. Marco Millions required an enormous cast and complex scenery changes that, he knew, couldn’t be performed adequately downtown. In an attempt to entice the backing of theater giant David Belasco, he explained in a letter to the wary producer that although it takes place in the thirteenth century, the play was in reality a “comedy satire by an American of our life & ideals.” The usually dependable Arthur Hopkins had also left him hanging on his decision regarding The Fountain, which led O’Neill to regard Hopkins as “not the right sort of Santa Claus for me to believe in.”136 At the end of the day, his financial hopes rested on his full-length tragedy Desire Under the Elms, which the Triumvirate scheduled to follow S.S. Glencairn.137
By the time the S.S. Glencairn plays opened at the Provincetown Playhouse on November 3, 1924, O’Neill’s work could no longer be dismissed as an aberration of the times. His celebrity had grown all out of proportion to what anyone could have expected from an American playwright. His plays were also making headway in Europe, with productions scheduled in Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Russia. Quite a few drama critics attended the Glencairn one-acts when they’d premiered singly on Macdougal Street; but given the Provincetown Players’ hostility to reviewers, only a handful had actually reviewed them (In the Zone, staged by the Washington Square Players, excepted). When the Glencairn plays appeared as one bill that fall, 1924, the notices reflected a wistful nostalgia for O’Neill’s sea plays of the 1910s after the high-pitched clamor of the last four years. Their respite from controversy lasted for about a week.
Desire Under the Elms opened on November 11 at the Greenwich Vill
age Theatre on nearby Sheridan Square. The Experimental Theatre, Inc., had taken over the space for its second season to expand its audience base while still running plays at the Provincetown Playhouse. The critics diverged wildly over O’Neill’s new full-length: the more conservative-minded among them viewed the play as a needlessly sordid and pessimistic tableau; others praised it ardently, while still recognizing its flaws. “I don’t wish to pretend that ‘Desire Under the Elms’ is a good play simply because O’Neill happens to be the author of it,” wrote George Jean Nathan. “But it is far and away so much better than most of the plays being written by anyone else who hangs around here that one gratefully passes over even its obvious deficiencies. It doesn’t matter much if a beautiful and amiable and engaging woman tucks in her napkin at her chin or not.”138
O’Neill acknowledged the clear “line of development” from The Emperor Jones to The Hairy Ape to All God’s Chillun to this latest creation.139 But his expressionistic-naturalistic portrayal of New England culture, which takes place in 1850 at a Connecticut farmhouse, was also a by-product of nineteenth-century realism’s local-color tradition. Before the action of the play, Ephraim Cabot, a farmer in his seventies, believes that God ordered him to find a new wife, and he does—a much younger woman named Abbie Putnam. (As an inside joke to his Provincetown friends, O’Neill named Abbie after a librarian there who’d once refused O’Neill a library card and thrown him out for drunkenness.) Ephraim’s son Eben believes that their farm is rightfully his, as his deceased mother had a claim on its ownership. At first Eben hates Abbie for presuming the farm is now hers; but in spite of her greed, Abbie and Eben fall in love, and she gives birth to a son. Ephraim believes the new heir is his own and convinces Eben that Abbie’s been playing him for a fool. After Eben confronts her, she murders their infant in his crib as proof to Eben (and to a large extent the audience, given her earlier manipulations) that she loves him alone. At first, Eben is horrified by the news and notifies the authorities. But he returns crestfallen over his betrayal and, throwing off his previous possessiveness over the farm as she’d thrown off her own, takes shared responsibility for the crime. In the final scene, the lovers pledge their love to one another and admire the sunrise as the sheriff’s men lead them to their punishment—most likely the gallows. Ephraim resigns himself to living out his final years alone on the farm.
By this time, Robert Edmond Jones, who directed and designed the play’s sets, was the recognized “father” of American scenic design. After a decade of perfecting his methods with, among others, Arthur Hopkins, the Provincetown Players, the Theatre Guild, and now the Experimental Theatre, Inc., Jones had effectively imported from Europe what became known as the “new stagecraft”—the use of colorful backdrops and lighting to complement each play’s plot and characters rather than the traditional scenery that was merely functional or ornamental. For Desire Under the Elms, only the rooms of the Cabot house in which action is taking place were meant to be visible at any given time, making the four chambers of the two-story structure intimate the systole and diastole of the human heart. Two massive elms loom over each side, their branches hanging down over a battered roof and emitting a green glow in contrast to the house’s gray exterior. O’Neill describes these elms in gendered terms: “There is a sinister maternity in their aspect, a crushing, jealous absorption. They have developed from their intimate contact with the life of man in the house an appalling humaneness. … They are like exhausted women resting their sagging breasts and hands and hair on its roof, and when it rains their tears trickle down monotonously and rot on the shingles” (CP2, 318).140
At an early rehearsal in that fall of 1924, the three members of the Triumvirate convened the entire cast and crew of the Experimental Theatre, Inc., at the Greenwich Village Theatre. They were preparing to open the season with Stark Young’s The Saint, and Bobby Jones, who was directing that too, solemnly addressed the troupe: “Recently I heard the story of a blind child on whom a successful operation had been performed. When the bandages were finally removed from its eyes, the child looked around in ecstasy and murmured, ‘What is this thing called light?’ To me, the theatre is like a light that blind people are made to see for the first time. The theatre is a dream that the audience comes to behold. The theatre is revelation. That is what I want to tell you.”141 Jones then silently walked up the aisle and out of the theater. Macgowan turned to O’Neill and asked if he had anything to add. He said no, and the performers were dismissed.
Jones had been raised in New Hampshire, and he understood that O’Neill wanted the New England setting and Puritan attributes to equal in importance O’Neill’s plot and characterization. Tough-minded “New England granite” culture was to be symbolized by a permanent fieldstone wall in front of a shabby gray farmhouse. New England Puritans believed that God was a jealous, pitiless, and wrathful being, a vision Jonathan Edwards immortalized in his blood-and-thunder sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Edwards’s theology guides the play’s devout protagonist Ephraim Cabot’s worldview: “God’s hard, not easy! … I kin feel I be in the palm o’ His hand, His fingers guidin’ me. … God’s hard an’ lonesome!” (CP2, 377). Outside of intellectual circles in the 1920s, Puritans were widely admired in the United States, as one reviewer wrote, “for their courage, their rugged persistency, their industry, their narrow adherence to narrow standards. … [But] we have begun to wonder,” she said after attending the play, “if England had not something on her side when she ejected the Puritans.”142
For all of O’Neill’s own atheism and bohemian living, he still regarded the hellfire-and-brimstone Puritan farmer Ephraim as “so autobiographical.” When O’Neill hired a man to type up the script, he invited him on a series of three-mile walks through the woods, always pointing out crumbling fieldstone walls, quoting from his play, “Stones atop o’ stones—year atop o’ year.” “What I think everyone missed in Desire,” he said that March, “is the quality in it I set most store by—the attempt to give an epic tinge to New England’s inhibited life-lust, to make its inexpressiveness poetically expressive, to release it.”143 Such a release, of course, sends his characters to their doom. But he deplored the “sneering contentment” of soft thinking, if not always in practice, and he thus equated a “happy ending” for the audience with unearned success. Tragedy was hard and therefore earned. For O’Neill, the notion of a tragic ending as “unhappy” was a “mere present-day judgment,” and he pointed out that the Greeks and Elizabethans had recognized the elevating attributes of tragedies like Desire Under the Elms. “Truth,” he said, “in the theatre as in life, is eternally difficult just as the easy is the everlasting lie.”144
The shadow of Sigmund Freud once again descended upon the talk over O’Neill’s dramatic vision. Ephraim’s son Eben fixates on his mother’s memory, hates his father, and conducts a heated sexual affair with his stepmother, which is technically incest though they are not blood related. Most critics were thus aroused to single out Freud’s influence, especially the “Oedipal complex,” or the subconscious desire among men to kill their father in order to marry their mother, rather than Greek mythology itself, as the guiding source for Desire Under the Elms. (Since Eben adores both his mother and stepmother, critic Gilbert W. Gabriel wryly asked a doctor in the lobby whether this might be diagnosed as an “Oedipus duplex.”) O’Neill was yet again moved to write a public denial: “To me, Freud only means uncertain conjectures and explanations about the truths of the emotional past of mankind that every dramatist has clearly sensed since real drama began. … I respect Freud’s work tremendously—but I’m not an addict! Whatever Freudianism is in Desire must have walked right in ‘through my unconscious.’”145
After two successful months in Greenwich Village, Desire Under the Elms transferred to the Earl Carroll Theater for its Broadway run. Prior to this, producers assumed that no tragedy, that is, a play without a happy ending, no matter how tantalizing, could last more than twenty weeks uptown. It ran f
or nine months, 420 performances total, making it the longest-running tragedy yet in American theater history. And once it had moved uptown, the Triumvirate required no “foxy press-agent” to manufacture controversy. That would come free of charge.
Over the summer of 1924, O’Neill had resolutely steered clear of alcohol, with but one exception—a cruel trick orchestrated by “dat ole davil, sea.” One morning at Peaked Hill Bar, Boulton notified Harold de Polo that a ten-gallon drum of “200 % pure alcohol” had been “left up on our doorstep by the sea!” O’Neill’s bender lasted only a couple of days, she said. (This was reassuring but false: She later told a doctor he was off the wagon for nearly two weeks.)146 On November 12, the day after Desire Under the Elms opened, O’Neill returned to the bottle and continued drinking, around the clock, through December.147 Quitting in Ridgefield proved impossible. Not only was it close to New York, a city he could now tolerate only when drunk, but Brook Farm itself, he wrote Theatre Guild producer Lawrence Langner in hindsight, “always drove me to hard cider, acidosis, and the Old Testament in the weepy, muddy, slush-and-snow days.”148 O’Neill desperately wanted out of New England, preferably to a warmer climate.
At Peaked Hill Bar that previous summer, O’Neill and Boulton hosted Mary Blair, following her ordeal with All God’s Chillun Got Wings, and Juliet Brenon, Cleon Throckmorton’s fiancée. Brenon had just returned from Bermuda and gushed over the island’s tropical climate. O’Neill remembered when Susan Glaspell and Jig Cook mentioned back in 1920 how, after he’d finished with Beyond the Horizon and Chris, they should go down to visit the writer Wilbur Daniel Steele, who’d sent them “entrancing letters” from Bermuda.149 They hadn’t, but now he needed no further persuasion—that’s where they would escape the punishing New England winter.150 Desire Under the Elms, along with the two-volume The Complete Works of Eugene O’Neill, forthcoming that December through his publishers Boni and Liveright, promised enough in royalties for them to sail to Bermuda in late November for an indefinite stay.151
Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts Page 33