By Women Possessed

by Arthur Gelb

  He credited Nathan with hitting “the nail on the head” with his rebuke. “But,” he said, “I venture to promise that this will be less true with each succeeding play—that I will not ‘stay put’ in any comfortable niche and play the leave-well-enough-alone game. God stiffen it, I am young yet and I mean to grow!”

  He concluded that if he had “the ‘guts’ to follow the dream,” he would, in time, and after struggle, attain the means to express his “real significant bit of truth” and thereby “merit victory.”

  Demonstrating beyond a doubt that he was not staying put “in any comfortable niche,” after writing Gold, O’Neill rapidly crafted three more plays: Anna Christie, Diff’rent, and The Emperor Jones. All three were completed before the end of 1920—each so startlingly unlike the other two they could have been written by three different playwrights of diametrically diverse backgrounds, outlooks, and temperaments.

  Anna Christie was the first to be completed. True to his promise to producer Tyler (and himself), it was a total rewrite of the failed Chris Christophersen, and he finished it in the summer of 1920. Keeping the basic character of “Chris,” he transformed his ladylike daughter into someone far more interesting and original: a remorseful former prostitute who calls herself Anna Christie.

  Written in a naturalistic style, the play on its surface is a girl-meets-boy love story, if not quite a conventional one: Anna, who has recently come to live with her father on his coal barge, meets Mat Burke, a virile, naively idealistic seaman, when he is rescued from drowning by Chris; Anna finds redemption in her love for Mat and he returns her love—until she confesses her past—at which point he furiously rejects her. At play’s end, he accepts Anna’s repentance, acknowledges her transformation, and they marry.

  By O’Neill’s own account, he wrote both Diff’rent and The Emperor Jones during the fall of 1920. In Diff’rent, drawing once again on his own family dynamic, he reimagined the character of a favorite cousin, Lil Brennan, an unmarried woman in her fifties, with whom he’d become reacquainted in New London during visits to his dying father.

  Dwelling on the psychological reasons for his cousin’s adamant spinsterhood, he depicted her as the sexually repressed Emma Crosby in Diff’rent, set in a New England village of the 1890s; Emma could also have been a sketch for the later, more fully realized, sex-repressed Lavinia Mannon of Mourning Becomes Electra. (Lillian Brennan was also the model for the more benign spinster aunt in Ah, Wilderness!)

  While Diff’rent was one of O’Neill’s lesser accomplishments, The Emperor Jones was the most daringly experimental of the three plays—a tale of primitive terror and devastation and a deliberate distortion of reality. It is one of O’Neill’s few major works not emanating from his feelings about the angst-ridden members of his family. He wrote the play in pencil in minute letters, cramming its eight scenes onto three sheets of standard typewriter paper.

  Accompanied by throbbing native drumbeats, the play’s action centers on a black Pullman porter, Brutus Jones, who has fled to a tropical island after killing a man in the States. The natives, of whom he has made himself the greedy and despotic ruler, stage a revolt, and Jones attempts to escape through the jungle.

  The natives, brainwashed into believing that only a silver bullet can kill him, resourcefully melt down coins to make the bullet and then go in pursuit. As he plunges through the nighttime jungle, Jones, facing one ghost after another, loses his way and is caught by the rebels, who kill him with their silver bullet.

  The jungle’s terrifying effect on the human imagination was drawn by O’Neill from the fear he himself experienced at twenty-one while prospecting for gold in the tropical forests of Spanish Honduras: “a wall of darkness dividing the world,” as he described it in his stage directions.

  The actual plot came from a circus employee, Jack Croak, who drank with O’Neill in the bar of the Garden Hotel, nearby the old Madison Square Garden on Madison Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street.

  Croak, who enjoyed talking about the experiences he’d had while touring the West Indies with the Sells Circus tent show, once told O’Neill a story concerning the five-month dictatorship, in Haiti in 1915, of the late president Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, who was assassinated during a popular uprising.

  This was to the effect that Sam had said they’d never get him with a lead bullet; if necessary, he would get himself first with a silver one. My friend, by the way, gave me a coin with Sam’s features on it, and I still keep it as a pocket piece.

  A year elapsed. One day I was reading of the religious feasts in the Congo and the uses to which the drum is put there; how it starts at a normal pulse-beat and is slowly intensified until the heart-beat of everyone present corresponds to the frenzied beat of the drum. There was an idea and an experiment. How would this sort of thing work on an audience in a theater?

  Adam Scott, a black bartender O’Neill had known in New London, provided a part model for Brutus Jones’s sardonic view of life when, in an early scene, Jones explains he’s no longer the religious Baptist he was as a Pullman porter.

  “I’se after de coin, an’ I lays my Jesus on de shelf for de time bein,” says Jones, sounding like Scott, who on Sundays acted as an elder of the Shiloh Baptist Church and, when asked how he reconciled his religious belief with his job of tending bar, would reply, “I’m a very religious man, but after Sunday I lay my Jesus on the shelf.”

  • • •

  O’NEILL READ The Emperor Jones aloud to Jig Cook and his wife, Susan Glaspell, at Peaked Hill Bars, and they sat enthralled, visualizing Brutus Jones, his self-reliance and pride crumbling, his splendid uniform being torn from his body as he stumbled and clawed his way through the tropical jungle.

  They listened to O’Neill’s evocation of the quickening beat of the voodoo drums, while the emperor’s crazed subjects hid and danced in the hills, waiting for their victim to lose his way.

  Cook instantly recognized the play’s powerful potential; but it was not quite a full-length play, and he agreed with O’Neill that its brevity and boldness dictated its presentation at the Playwrights’ Theatre rather than on Broadway. Cook leaped into the task of creating a visually groundbreaking production and, for once, O’Neill did not have to wait long before seeing a play of his come alive. On November 1, 1920, it was the first of his three newly completed plays to be staged.

  Climbing new heights of ingenuity, Jig Cook had fashioned a cyclorama—a cement dome—that could be lighted to magical effect on the small stage of the Playwrights’ Theatre. Even viewers seated in the front row had the illusion of distance; an actor could stretch his hand to within inches of the dome’s surface and still seem a long way from it. O’Neill, impressed by Cook’s passionate dedication as director, left the production entirely in his hands.

  Cook puzzled over the casting of Brutus Jones. In 1920, no black actor had ever played the leading role in an American drama, and some of Cook’s colleagues argued that the part should go to a white actor who would wear blackface—the conventional solution for its time.

  Other colleagues, however, disagreed, thinking back to the year before, when the Players broke new ground with O’Neill’s one-acter The Dreamy Kid (which opened on October 31, 1919, at the Playwrights’ Theatre); for that play, about a young black gangster who risks arrest to visit his dying grandmother, the Players had recruited their four-character cast from a black acting troupe in Harlem—the first time a “white” theater company in New York had taken such a bold step.

  Pointing to this example, the Players argued for a black actor to play Jones, and Cook agreed. Interest focused on Charles S. Gilpin, who had recently drawn good reviews in a small role on Broadway in John Drinkwater’s Abraham Lincoln. Out of acting jobs since then, Gilpin—forty-one, handsome, light-skinned, brawny—was found running an elevator for a living.

  He was hustled down to the Playwrights’ Theatre, where a script was thrust into his hands. He read
the role superbly and was engaged on the spot; as the production’s only star, he received the highest salary—fifty dollars a week. The total cost of the production, cyclorama and all, was $502.28.

  • • •

  AFTER MOVING Agnes and Shane into winterized quarters in Provincetown, O’Neill paid an edgy visit to New York in October to check on rehearsals. He expressed his approval and hastened back to Cape Cod, where he stayed, bypassing the play’s opening on November 1 and missing the volcanic applause that greeted it. The critics, occupied with openings on Broadway, didn’t arrive downtown until two days later, but once there, they reported their stunned reactions.

  The Emperor Jones was “just about the most interesting play which has yet come from the most promising playwright in America,” said Heywood Broun in the Tribune, also lauding Gilpin for “the most thrilling performance we have seen any place this season, a performance of heroic stature.” Gladdening the heart of Jig Cook, Broun praised the setting as “fine and imaginative and the lighting effects uncommonly beautiful.”

  Woollcott in the Times called the play “an extraordinarily striking and dramatic study of panic fear,” adding that it reinforced “the impression that for strength and originality [O’Neill] has no rival among the American writers for the stage.”

  Not long after its thunderous opening, Jones moved to Broadway, leaving the Playwrights’ Theatre free to receive Diff’rent on December 27; despite its shortcomings, the play found its audience and ran for a respectable one hundred performances. Meanwhile, The Emperor Jones was launched on what would be a hugely successful run of two hundred and four performances; it toured nationally for two years and later became a hit in London.

  Gilpin was grateful to O’Neill, but feared his newly acquired stature might be short-lived.

  “I am pleased,” he movingly told interviewers, “especially with the generous praise of the critics. But I don’t fool myself about the stone walls that are in my way. Mr. O’Neill made a breach in those walls by writing a play that had in it a serious role for a Negro.”

  O’Neill had proved, he said, “that a Negro can act” and that “a play can be written that will give a colored actor a chance.” But how many such plays, he asked, would be written? “Where do I go from here?”

  It was soon after The Emperor Jones moved uptown that Gilpin collided with one of those stone walls. He was invited, along with several other actors, to be an “honored guest” of the Drama League’s annual dinner. When several members of the League expressed their offense at being asked to dine with a Negro, the League, in some embarrassment, withdrew the invitation to Gilpin.

  O’Neill was irate. In spite of his painful shyness, he paid calls, accompanied by his friend Kenneth Macgowan, on most of the other actors who had been invited to the dinner and asked them to decline their invitations. Virtually all of them did and the League felt obliged to re-invite Gilpin. The dinner was a huge success, with six hundred guests attending, compared with the previous year’s three hundred.

  While O’Neill fought for Gilpin’s rights, he grew irritated with what he regarded as his star’s unprofessional behavior as the run continued through 1921. Believing success had gone to Gilpin’s head, O’Neill complained that the actor had begun substituting the phrase “black baby” for “nigger”—as called for in the script—along with other terms Gilpin deemed more genteel.

  One night—well fortified by drink, unable to control his black-Irish rage, and armed with bravado—O’Neill engaged in a shameful confrontation with Gilpin backstage. “If I ever catch you rewriting my lines again, you black bastard,” he hollered, “I’m going to beat you up.”

  Evidently Gilpin’s performance continued to deteriorate, and O’Neill insisted on replacing him for the play’s London production. He justified his decision in a letter to his old friend, the Communist writer and editor Michael Gold:

  “Yes, Gilpin is all ‘ham’ and a yard wide! Honestly, I’ve stood more from him than from all the white actors I’ve ever known—simply because he was colored! I’m ‘off’ him and the result is he will get no chance to do it in London. He was drunk all of last season and, outside of the multitude of other reasons, I’d be afraid to risk him in London.”

  For the role in London, O’Neill continued, he’d chosen a young actor with “wonderful presence & voice, full of ambition and a damn fine man personally with real brains—not a ‘ham.’” He was not someone who would “lose his head if he makes a hit—as he surely will.” The actor was Paul Robeson. An outstanding Columbia Law School graduate, he had abandoned a legal career for the stage.

  O’Neill eventually forgot his anger at Gilpin, recalling only the actor’s brilliant portrayal when he originated the role. At the end of his writing career, O’Neill had only lavish praise for Gilpin. “As I look back on all my work,” he said in an interview with The New York Times, “I can honestly say there was only one actor who carried out every notion of a character I had in mind. That actor was Charles Gilpin the Pullman porter in The Emperor Jones.”

  The play’s move to Broadway’s Selwyn Theatre brought the Provincetown Players their first unconditional recognition from uptown audiences and producers. The Emperor Jones thrust the Provincetown Players into national prominence, which they found themselves ill-equipped to deal with.

  The Players were to last only one more season, undone by internal conflicts and rivalries. Dedicated to experimentation and to the freedom granted by their amateur status, they could not survive the fame and professionalism that had come with Jones.

  Jig Cook blamed O’Neill for the Players’ decline and, in truth, O’Neill deserved his share of the blame. In spite of their splendid production of The Emperor Jones, O’Neill had for some time been grumbling to Agnes and others that he’d outgrown the Players.

  • • •

  EARLY IN 1921 and still awaiting the production of Anna Christie, O’Neill began work on The First Man, a play that was transparently autobiographical. When Agnes read the first draft, she must have wondered if O’Neill was signaling that he’d outgrown not only the Provincetown Players but his marriage as well. Certainly the play could have been interpreted as evidence of an increasing hostility toward her. Their relationship had been insidiously shifting, and The First Man gave it another nudge, edging ever closer to the miasma of Strindbergian “love-hatred” that “hailed from the pit”—although Strindberg would have rightly dismissed the play as travesty and disowned O’Neill as a pathetically inept disciple.

  Curtis and Martha Jayson of The First Man are in their late thirties. Curtis is an anthropologist and romantic idealist, and Martha is a selflessly devoted wife, absorbed in her husband’s work.

  The play takes its tone from Martha’s expository dialogue, a perfunctory and ludicrous story about the death of their two young children ten years earlier (presumably a symbolic, if unsubtle expression of O’Neill and Agnes’s wish to permanently eradicate Eugene Jr. and Barbara Burton from their lives).

  “It was a Sunday in winter when Curt and I had gone visiting,” Martha babbles to a friend. “The nurse girl fell asleep—or something—and the children sneaked out in their underclothes and played in the snow. Pneumonia set in—and a week later they were both dead.”

  At this point, Curtis and Martha—like O’Neill and Agnes—solemnly swear they will have a childless marriage and devote their lives exclusively to each other.

  At the play’s beginning, they have returned home after ten years of anthropologic research so that Curtis can write a scientific book. But it seems Martha has betrayed him by becoming pregnant. Curtis greets this news with some dismal dialogue: “How can I pretend gladness? Haven’t we been sufficient, you and I together? Can you expect me to be glad when you propose to introduce a stranger who will steal away your love, your interest—who will separate us and divide me from you!”

  Martha is conveniently killed off in the third
act as, offstage—to the accompaniment of agonizing screams—she gives birth to a son while Curtis prays for the child to be stillborn. No such luck. The child emerges, a strapping eleven-pound boy, and the play ends with Curtis’s limp proviso that when his son is old enough, he will “teach him to know and love a big, free life.”

  The First Man was a jolting reminder that O’Neill was still evolving; nor was this awful play the last of the missteps he would take as he groped his way to becoming Strindberg’s worthy disciple. When it was finally produced, in 1922—well after Gold, Anna Christie, The Emperor Jones, and Diff’rent—it was a flop.

  It would seem O’Neill was motivated to write the play by an urge to publicly express how much he resented being a father—not to mention being the husband of a disobliging wife—and the message, at that, is mixed.

  Even after venting the anger and frustration he felt about his own situation in The First Man, he continued to cling to Agnes; as for her, the effect of his self-flagellation in the play seemed to be liberating. It was as if she were telling herself, Well, he’s finally got that off his chest, now we can move on. (But to what?)

  She grew brisker and less submissive in dealing with O’Neill, even at times venturing to taunt him with an ironic tone. Ever more assertively, she was wriggling out from under his thumb. For one thing, she was no longer disconsolate during their separations.

  • • •

  SOON AFTER THEIR third wedding anniversary on April 12, 1921, O’Neill had to leave Agnes for two weeks to have his teeth attended to; he’d always had trouble with his teeth due to neglect during his derelict days. Since money was always a concern, he had gratefully accepted the offer of free dental sessions from his friend Saxe Commins.

  O’Neill had befriended Commins in Provincetown, where he was spending his 1916 summer vacation along with his formidable aunt, Emma Goldman, and his sister and brother-in-law, Stella and Teddy Ballantine, members of the Provincetown Players. Recently established as a dentist in Rochester, New York, Commins felt miscast in his profession and was drawn to the literary community.