Trying to Hate Eugene O’Neill--Bless Him

One sure prediction for 1988: We will be hearing a lot about Eugene O’Neill. It is his centennial year, and here are a few of the ways it will be observed:

Jan. 18-20--Glenda Jackson stars in a three-part version of “Strange Interlude” for “American Playhouse” on PBS.

March 22-May 21--Colleen Dewhurst and Jason Robards offer two O’Neill plays in repertory at Yale--”Ah, Wilderness” and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” The latter will be staged by the century’s master O’Neill director, Jose Quintero. This package will go to New York and probably tour.

April 27--Four early O’Neill sea plays open on board the C. A. Thayer, a three-masted 1895 schooner moored at the Hyde Street Pier in San Francisco. (Producer John Bruno needs $6,000 more for this nonprofit project: call (415) 434-1528.)

June 6-9--”Eugene O’Neill: World Playwright,” an international conference sponsored by Nanjing (China) University and the Eugene O’Neill Society. Similar conferences will be held in Sweden and Belgium.

Sept. 16--San Francisco City College offers the complete “Mourning Becomes Electra” in repertory with the complete “The Oresteia.”

And so on, up to and beyond O’Neill’s actual 100th birthday, Oct. 16. There is even a contest to find the best new play about O’Neill, whose last years with his wife, Carlotta, were right out of “Dance of Death.” (Write to Frederick C. Wilkins, Suffolk University, Boston, Mass. 02114.)

The centennial will not hurt the growing O’Neill tourist business. Visitors can tour the Monte Cristo cottage in New London, Conn., where “Long Day’s Journey” is set, and Tao House in Danville, Calif., where it was written. O’Neill sweat shirts are on sale at the National Playwrights Conference a few miles from the Monte Cristo Cottage.

There is even an O’Neill postage stamp. More celebrated than this an American playwright cannot get.

Yet when O’Neill died in 1953, he was looked on as a writer who had outlived his fame. As Mary McCarthy had sniffed in her review of “The Iceman Cometh” (1946), you couldn’t write a tragedy using the language of “Casey at the Bat.”

It was Quintero’s 1955 revival of “Iceman” that made people listen to O’Neill again. With Robards reading Hickey’s monologue about killing his wife out of love for her, you had to listen.

That production led O’Neill’s widow to entrust Quintero with the American premiere of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” in 1956. Again Robards was featured, as O’Neill’s alcoholic brother, Jamie. Again audiences found themselves fascinated. Being Irish, O’Neill’s family ghosts did go on and on. But they took you somewhere.

In ‘65, Quintero and Robards did a late, unpublished O’Neill one-act called “Hughie”--another success. In the 1970s, Dewhurst joined them for a revival of “Moon for the Misbegotten,” again concerned with Jamie. This was another long journey up the mountain. But the view justified it.

It’s these late plays, as interpreted by Quintero, that force the recognition that O’Neill was indeed a great playwright--damn him.

Why the resentment? Because he was also, and often, a terrible playwright. This was especially true when he dealt with metaphysical issues, which he took as his province in the ‘20s and ‘30s--the death of the Old God, the failure of Science and Materialism, and such.

The following passage from “Lazarus Laughed,” which had its premiere at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1928, is characteristic of O’Neill the mystic:

“Man’s loneliness is but his fear of life! Lonely no more! Millions of laughing stars around me! And laughing dust, born once of woman on this earth, now freed to dance! New stars are born of dust eternally! The old grown mellow with God, burst into flaming seed. . . . But there is no death, nor fear, nor loneliness! There is only God’s eternal laughter!”

O’Neill the psychologist isn’t much more convincing. The celebrated asides in “Strange Interlude” (voice-unders, one might call them) are stunningly obvious. Here is O’Neill’s heroine, Nina Leeds, sizing up her husband:

“How weak he is! . . . he’ll never do anything . . . never give me my desire . . . if only he’d fall in love with someone else . . . go away . . . not be here in my father’s room . . . I even have to give him a home . . . if he’d disappear . . . leave me free . . . if he’d die . . . (Checking herself--remorsefully) I must stop such thoughts . . . I don’t mean it . . . Poor Sam!”

Memorizing nine acts of sentiments that a capable actress could convey with a look wasn’t easy on the original Nina, Lynne Fontanne. “This is like childbirth--it isn’t worth it,” she groaned on opening night. Fontanne’s friend Alexander Woollcott called the play “the ‘Abie’s Irish Rose’ of the intelligentsia.” That applies to much of O’Neill.

Fontanne also didn’t think that O’Neill knew the first thing about women. Reading his life story--the best biography by far is Louis Sheaffer’s two-volume “O’Neill: Son and Playwright” and “O’Neill: Son and Artist” (Little, Brown)--you wonder if he knew the first thing about anybody besides himself.

His letters are quite incredible. About to elope with Carlotta, he accuses his second wife, Agnes, of pushing him out of the picture. Having eloped with Carlotta, he writes his children that he is taking his departure harder than they are, because they are “not old enough” to know what real suffering is.

It’s not surprising that O’Neill’s first son committed suicide and that his second son died a drug addict. The man had a talent for tragedy: not just for writing it, but for living it. The most telling remark he ever made applied to his own life. “The interesting thing about people,” he said, “is that they don’t want to be saved.”

Unfortunately, this is true. In the end, you have admit that the man did have a tragic vision and was able to get it down on paper more compellingly than any other playwright of his time, almost all of whom had a more clever pen.

Given the right actor, this comes through even in plays that seem quite obsolete on paper, such as “Anna Christie.” Liv Ullmann played Anna in New York in the 1970s, and even the business about “dat ole dabbil sea” worked. Ullmann shone through her lines, like a lamp through a parchment shade, and you could see that this was one damaged person who intended to be saved.

I could never sneer at the play after that, and I have given up sneering at O’Neill. He could write awful tripe but, except for “Ah, Wilderness,” a charming play, he never wrote comfortable tripe. He thought that life was a dark business, and he said so, more powerfully than any playwright in this century except for Beckett, another Irishman.

O’Neill was also on record as calling the United States a great failure, compared to the country it should have been. (That was the gist of his cycle of American history plays, most of which he and Carlotta destroyed in manuscript.)

Not a comfortable character at all. As a young writer, he had resolved never to be influenced “by any consideration but one: Is it the truth as I know it--or, better still, feel it?” He stuck to that, in a theater no less venal than ours, and that is a good part of his greatness.

How Los Angeles theater will celebrate his centennial isn’t clear. The Mark Taper Forum and Los Angeles Theatre Center are thinking about various projects, but haven’t settled on one yet, and South Coast Repertory, which did “Ah, Wilderness” recently, is only starting to think about it.

Somebody should think about an O’Neill film festival. MGM’s “Anna Christie” (Garbo talks!) is an obvious choice, but how about showing the alternate version, where Greta Garbo talked in German? Blanche Sweet also did a silent version of “Anna Christie” in 1923, which O’Neill, to his surprise, rather liked.

Sidney Lumet’s film of “Long Day’s Journey” is a must, with Katharine Hepburn as Mary Tyrone, and a kinescope is available of the “Play of the Week” version of “Iceman,” with Robards as Hickey. Some archive also must possess James O’Neill’s silent version of the play that made him and broke him, “The Count of Monte Cristo.” This could be the Hollywood contribution to the year of O’Neill.