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 by David Baughan
O'Neill is best known for his tragedies - The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey into Night and Mourning Becomes Elektra. These plays were his favourites but it may well be that his only comedy - Ah, Wilderness! - is where he truly expresses himself. Through a compelling combination of the tragic and the comic he explores alcoholism, prostitution and middle-class hypocrisy. In his own life, O'Neill blamed his father for the family insecurity and his mother's morphine addiction. He was also steeped in the peasant Irish-Catholicism of his father, contrasted with the genteel mystical piety of his mother. The dramatic conflict of these early influences is clearly evident in his plays. He was educated at various boarding schools. When the family wasn't on the road, they spent summers at a small house in New London, Connecticut. He spent a year at Princeton University and was then suspended. He married against the wishes of both families, before setting off by himself for South America on what he called his "life experience" - travelling on ships, prospecting for gold in Honduras, living as a derelict, drinking to excess, re-marrying and divorcing, and attempting suicide. It was on these travels that he found a love for the sea and where he met and lived with those on the fringes of society, who were to become characters in his works. He succumbed to tuberculosis in 1912 and entered a sanatorium, where he read among others the works of August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen (Hedda Gabler), George Bernard Shaw (The Quintessence of Ibsenism), and Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray), and began to explore the techniques of realism that would characterize his dramas. Generally his plays feature characters who live on the fringes of society and struggle to keep alive their hopes and dreams, but ultimately fall into disillusionment and despair. REALISM The realist movement in theatre can be traced to the late 19th century and to the work of Ibsen and Anton Chekhov and in the training of actors by Constantin Stanislavski at his Moscow Arts Theatre that led to the acting movement called "the method." Simply put, realism is where actors move in a naturalistic setting and speak in a way that is similar to everyday behaviour. O'Neill was the first playwright to use realism in North America. This was a complete rejection of the highly stylized melodramas, spectacle plays, comic operas and vaudeville that had dominated the theatre scene in the Victorian period. Realism was fed by the political uprisings in Europe and societal changes influenced by the writings of Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Auguste Comte and Karl Marx. Realism used natural settings and speech, as well as emotional inner thought and beliefs to explore everyday life. The drama became a reflection of the audience's day-to-day life, which was shaped by the individuals' social and physical environment. It dealt with ordinary people leading ordinary lives. Ibsen's plays attacked societal values and dealt with unconventional subjects within a tight, well-constructed play. He examined the realities behind the facade. He replaced soliloquies and asides with exposition motivated by an inner psychology. Remember CTF's recent production of A Doll's House and how shocking even today the idea of a mother leaving her husband and children was - but how inevitable too. Hedda Gabler takes these ideas a step further and Ibsen creates an even more controversial and psychologically complicated character in Hedda, who commits suicide to escape what she understands as the boredom of society. Chekhov is also known for his compelling psychological reality. He claimed that he wrote comedies, but in general they are sad and tragic. His characters are fated as a direct result of their inner flaws, and there is an illusion of plotlessness. In The Three Sisters, for example, the sisters want to move to Moscow but never do; in The Cherry Orchard, cultural futility reigns as the family return to their estate to try to save it but end up doing nothing about it. Chekhov uses language and a particular irony to reflect the characters' situations in his plays. In Ah, Wilderness! the role of Richard Miller can be understood to represent the young Eugene O'Neill rebelling against conventional morality and orthodox thought. It is in essence a coming-of-age story. Note the mention of the various books that Richard has been reading (and hiding from his mother) and how he quotes from many of the sources of realism. O'Neill set the play at a time when books that encouraged virtue and virginity, honour and honesty would have been regarded as socially acceptable or appropriate in North America. Literature that even alluded to the possibility of sex was scandalous, and books promoting alternative political viewpoints opposed to the status quo were shunned. The title of Ah, Wilderness! is taken from the 12th quatrain of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (among Richard Miller's favourite poetry), which celebrates momentary hedonism: A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
All the books that Richard (and by extension O'Neill) reads are by "foreign" authors and would have been controversial, especially works by Swinburne, Wilde, Shaw and Thomas Carlyle. NOSTALGIA O'Neill used Ah, Wilderness! to re-create his childhood memories - it is a nostalgic look at how he wished his childhood had been. The desolation and feelings of abandonment of his own childhood are put aside to explore the optimism of a long-lost America or even an America that may never really have existed. It is set in 1906 (before the onset of the Great Depression) on the 4th (and 5th) of July - an American folk ritual coming vividly to life with fireworks, picnics, drives in the car, moonlit beaches and old songs. Contrast this with Long Day's Journey into Night, which describes in great detail the disintegration of the Tyrone family and is considered to be the most autobiographical of O'Neill's works. Ah, Wilderness! examines the same family situation, but through a different lens. The Miller family is everything the Tyrone family is not. The house is a symbol of stability - they live there all year round; it's not just a summer house - and the parents are successfully educating their children to be independent people. The family freely leave the Miller house, unlike the permanently trapped Tyrones. In a letter written after the New York opening of Ah, Wilderness! O'Neill stated: "I hope you liked my nostalgic adventure into comedy in Ah, Wilderness!. I think it should hand you many reminiscent grins. You will remember those good old days as well as I, and you must have known many Miller families. ... It's astonishing. And a proof to me, at least, that emotionally we still hanker after the old solidarity of the family unit."
THE TRAGIC PLAYS O'Neill used realism, nostalgia and the family as a base for his extraordinary work and although some of his plays were only recognized posthumously, he is today understood as the major player in American theatre. In 1920, with the Broadway production of Beyond the Horizon, he began a steady rise to fame that led to his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936, a feat no other American playwright has accomplished. But then his career hit a roadblock as a new generation of critics began to question his abilities. After the failure of A Moon for the Misbegotten, he fell into obscurity that deepened until his death in 1953. Ironically, it is during this period that he wrote the so-called tragic plays, including A Touch of the Poet, More Stately Mansions, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey into Night, A Moon for the Misbegotten and Mourning Becomes Elektra. He struggled with depression and alcoholism throughout his life and in 1943, after a stroke, he started to suffer from the crippling illness that prevented him from even holding a pen. He died in a Boston hotel. Most of the tragic plays were neither published nor produced during his lifetime. He requested that his works not be made public until 25 years after his death. His third wife ignored this request and the first Broadway production of Long Day's Journey into Night took place in 1956, just a few years after O'Neill's death. It went on to win a Pulitzer Prize, and O'Neill was again recognized as one of the great dramatists of all time. His propensity for the tragic is understandable considering the difficulty and desolation of his childhood and failures in his personal life. But it is to his great credit that within his oeuvre of tragic plays, he is able to view some part of the world with optimism as in Ah, Wilderness!.
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America's greatest playwright was destined to spend his life in the theatre. O'Neill was born in 1888 in a hotel in New York because his father, James O'Neill, was a successful touring actor in an adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo. He spent much of his childhood in hotel rooms, on trains, backstage and in the wings of theatres.
O'Neill's actual family history reads like a trashy magazine article. His mother became a morphine addict after his birth; he fell into depression and alcoholism later in life, and "ran away" from his first marriage before his first child was born. O'Neill didn't see his son until 11 years later, and Eugene Jr. would commit suicide at the age of 40. O'Neill's second marriage also ended in divorce (one child from this marriage drifted into a life of emotional instability, and O'Neill's daughter, Oona, married then 54-year-old Charlie Chaplin when she was 18 and O'Neill immediately cut her totally out of his life). The playwright's third and final marriage was full of turbulence. For the final ten years of his own life he was unable to hold a pen because he was suffering from cerebellar cortical atrophy, and he sat in a hotel room waiting to die. Combine all this with the deaths of his father in 1920, his mother in 1922, and his alcoholic brother, Jamie, in 1924, and there is more than enough tragic material in O'Neill's life to fill several volumes.
Although O'Neill had a taste of the romantic poets of the late 19th century, he was no romancer. As his pieces increased in length, so they decreased in subject matter. He wrote everything in longhand in a tiny and chiselled form that revealed his explorations of a small private world - the life of a few people, often related, in a dark room or rooms with little connection to a time frame. The subjects became what lay within himself. While working on the third draft of Days Without End, he awoke one morning remembering the dream of a play. And in one long day's work he outlined the scenario of Ah, Wilderness! The play was completed in six weeks. It was not entirely the result of breaking away from the struggles of Days Without End. A month earlier he and his wife at the time, Carlotta, had returned from a long exile in Europe on a pilgrimage to rediscover the old family summer home in New London. What they found eventually was something that appeared small and unimpressive, the way that the source of memory revisited can often seem. Carlotta called it "a quaint little birdcage." The sight of the house stirred up memories of pain and regret. It was as though his life until then had been an encompassing journey around that house. Actually, although there was much tragedy in his life, at the time of writing Ah, Wilderness! O'Neill was in good spirits. His mother had returned from a morphine addiction clinic and it appeared that she might fully recover. She had also had a successful operation for a breast tumour. The play reflects his feelings of nostalgic reminiscences - it's truly a "dream walking." But within the context of his whole body of work it becomes a far more poignant play.
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