Making It New: 1900–1945 427bewilderment, and despair. He ceases to think of himself as a man, a meaningful
creature, and despises himself as a “hairy ape.” He feels, and is, abandoned in a
world that is both brutally material and bafflingly mysterious – one that, like the
world experienced in fog, in darkness, or alcoholic haze (all common situations
and figures in O’Neill’s plays), is abruptly at hand but unseen.
The younger son of a popular actor, O’Neill began writing drama when he was
confined in a sanatorium. During this period of enforced rest and reflection, he
produced a series of one-act plays based on his life at sea and among the outcasts in
many places: he had been, at various times, a prospector for gold, a merchant
seaman, and a beachcomber. His first play, The Web (1913–1914), was followed by
nine others. Gaining further dramatic experience with George Peirce Baker’s 47
Workshop at Harvard in 1914–1915, he then spent a winter in Greenwich Village,
New York. Then, in 1916, his involvement with the Provincetown Players brought
him, and the company, to the attention of the New York public, initially with a series
of plays about the S.S. Glencairn and its crew, among them Bound East for Cardiff
and The Moon of the Caribbees (1918). With the production of his Beyond the
Horizon in 1920, O’Neill was acknowledged as the leading American playwright
of his day. For a while, from 1923 to 1927, he helped manage the Greenwich Village
Theatre; he was a also a director of the Provincetown Players and a founder of the
Theatre Guild, which produced his later plays. But he devoted more and more of
his time to writing, in a variety of styles, to express and explore his view of life. Plays
that gravitated toward naturalism included Chris Christopherson (1920), rewritten
as Anna Christie (1921), All God’s Chillun Got Wings, and Desire Under the Elms
(1924). As such plays revealed, O’Neill was not afraid to explore difficult and, for
their time, even controversial subjects. Anna Christie is a prostitute, All God’s Chillun
is concerned with interracial marriage, in Desire Under the Elms a woman bears a
child by her stepson only to kill the child when her husband, learning that it is
not his son, repudiates and disinherits him. A similar daring, a willingness to test the
boundaries, and extend them, is also a feature of O’Neill’s more experimental and
expressionist work. Only now the boundaries that are tested are as much a matter
of dramatic form as social norm. In The Hairy Ape, for example, the fall of the
central character into consciousness, exile, and death is charted in eight scenes that,
as O’Neill explains at the beginning, “should by no means be naturalistic.” The play
concludes at the zoo, where “the hairy ape” goes to see a gorilla, the only creature
with whom he can now feel kinship; then, when he liberates the beast, to help him
wreak destruction on a world he never made, it responds by crushing him to death.
A similarly stunning, symbolic, and almost surreal conclusion marks The Emperor
Jones (1920), which is remarkable among plays of the time, not least because a black
character dominates the stage in the central role. To the incessant thumping of a
tomtom, Brutus Jones, an ex-convict who has presided as autocratic “emperor” for
two years over a West Indian island, tries to flee his former domain after an uprising.
He returns in mind and vision to earlier phases of his own life and the history of his
race – the prison chain gang, a slave auction, a slave ship, and so on – before being
hunted down and killed by the people over whom he has presided.GGray_c04.indd 427ray_c 04 .indd 427 8 8/1/2011 7:53:57 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 57 AM