428 Making It New: 1900–1945O’Neill’s interest in experiment drew him toward the use of symbolic masks for
the actors in The Great God Brown (1926), a play that fuses symbolism, poetry,
and the affirmation of a pagan idealism in an ironic critique of the materialism of
the modern world. It also led him to experiment with a dramatic form of
stream-of-consciousness in Strange Interlude (1928), where conventional dialogue
is juxtaposed with stylized internal monologue to reveal the inner lives of the
characters. The more romantic impulse in O’Neill, that straining toward affirmation,
some source of hope, that is typical of so many of O’Neill’s characters is given
freer play in The Fountain (1925), which is dominated by a celebration of what is
called here “the Eternal Becoming which is Beauty.” The comic impulse is more
evident in Ah, Wilderness (1933), a gently humorous, nostalgic portrait of New
England life that draws on O’Neill’s memories of his own family. More generally
typical, though, of his use of drama as a means of exploring human abandonment,
the human fate of spiritual orphanhood, wandering and homelessness are Dynamo
(1929), Days Without End (1934), and the trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra (1931).
In Dynamo, the electrical device of the title becomes a divine symbol, in an uncanny
echo of Henry Adams; it replaces the old God but destroys its worshippers. In
Days Without End, the hero is irresistibly drawn toward Catholicism to heal his
existential despair. And in Mourning Becomes Electra, the Oresteia of Aeschylus is
retold as a story of the Civil War, with the classical sense of fate replaced by an
emphasis on character conceived of in Freudian terms. The essential elements of the
ancient Greek story of the curse on the house of Atreus are retained here in this
story of a New England family called the Mannons: a woman in love with her father,
a man in love with his mother, the wife who kills her husband as an act of vengeance,
the son who kills similarly in vengeance and is consumed by the “furies.” These
elements, however, are redrawn and reset in modern terms, theatrical and conceptual:
the chorus, for example, is replaced by choric characters and the “furies” that pursue
the son, leading him in this case to commit suicide, come from within, his own
devouring sense of guilt. More to the point, there is no final tragic recognition, no
sense of an ultimate purpose or resolution. At the end of Mourning Becomes Electra
the surviving member of the Mannon family, the daughter Lavinia Mannon, simply
shuts herself up in the house, to live with the ghosts of her father, mother, and
brother. “Love isn’t permitted to me,” she confesses. “The dead are too strong!” She
is imprisoned in the past, not liberated by it; there is for her, and the audience,
no final tragic insight into the meaning of suffering, because it seems to have no
meaning; no end to the pain is promised, just further pain.
After the failure of Days Without End, O’Neill maintained a long theatrical silence,
during which he suffered severe mental and physical ill health. The silence was
broken by The Iceman Cometh, his first new play to be produced after a gap of twelve
years. Set in a run-down New York bar, it is a tragicomic exploration of O’Neill’s
obsessive theme, the need for meaning, expressed here as the human need for a
saving illusion: as one of the barroom regulars puts it, “the lie of the pipe dream is
what gives life.” Other plays written after this were, many of them, produced after
O’Neill died. A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions, part of a projected cycleGGray_c04.indd 428ray_c 04 .indd 428 8 8/1/2011 7:53:57 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 57 AM