All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (15 page)

Margalo Gillmore might have lacked the soaring wonder with which Kukachin is ideally invested, though Baliol Holloway’s Khan and Dudley Digges’ Chu-Yen, the court sage, apparently gave weight to the Chinese scenes. Alfred Lunt was Marco—surely one of Lunt’s tours de force, as he hints of the potentially expansive personality that the nitwit deliberately limits in himself. Indeed, he must if he is to succeed, for—as other titles have already warned us—American business culture creates mediocrity. Its salesmen purvey it; its customers demand it.

No one seems to have liked
Marco Millions,
though all agreed that Mamoulian and Simonson had given O’Neill his spectacle. In 1964, José Quintero and his designers, David Hays and Beni Montresor, tried a spare
Marco
for the first season of the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center, in its temporary home in Washington Square. Hal Holbrook, Zohra Lampert, and David Wayne (as Kublai Khan) led a cast all but excoriated as unworthy, and the play again impressed no one.

Yet the O’Neill
classics
hold the stage.
Strange Interlude,
which the Guild unveiled only three weeks after
Marco,
brings us to the more familiar O’Neill, depicting a contemporary American world in which nobody really gets what he wants and what little one does get costs more than the ego can afford. Because Lunt and Fontanne had not yet teamed conclusively, he was playing
Marco Millions
at the Guild while she played
Strange Interlude
at the John Golden; and she wasn’t happy. Much later, she claimed to have instituted cuts in the script, apparently unbeknown to O’Neill; it was an open secret on Broadway that the ninety-minute dinner intermission started a good twenty minutes early. One wonders if Fontanne ever heard the joke in
Auntie Mame,
when sidekick Vera fusses over being late for an audition at the Guild. She can’t quite recall the title of “this lovely, lovely play where everybody thinks out loud and it runs four and a half hours”:

VERA:
It’s called
Strange
 …
Strange Inter
 …
Inter
 …
Inter
 …

MAME:…
course
?

O’Neill probed the psychosexual nature of humankind in
Strange Interlude
especially in that his protagonist, Nina Leeds, is surrounded by men who find her overwhelming or simply aren’t “man” enough to match up to her. These are, for starters, her professor father (Philip Leigh), described in one character’s aside with “condescending affection”:

Good little man … he looks worried … always fussing about something … he must get on Nina’s nerves …

That speaker himself, Charles Marsden (Tom Powers), comes off no better in one of Nina’s asides:

Nice Charlie doggy … faithful … fetch and carry … bark softly in books at the deep night …

Meanwhile, Sam Evans (Earle Larimore) is there “to mother and boss and keep [Nina] occupied,” in the opinion of Edmund Darrell (Glenn Anders), the only male lead who isn’t a girly man. Darrell is the Clark Gable role in the 1932 film, and it is Darrell who, at least, can sire upon Nina a bastard who grows up eagerly joining in the wars for possession of one another’s soul that obsessed his elders. “The sons of the Father have all been failures!” Nina cries near the play’s end.

It’s a Strindbergian notion: all O’Neill studies refer to the Swedish dramatist first and anyone else after, and following O’Neill’s death the right of premiere passed from the Guild to the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. But didn’t Strindberg like a real battle? His most enduring work (at least arguably so) is called
The Dance of Death,
the murderous tango of a married couple.
Strange Interlude
never shows us Nina’s interaction with her sole magnetic opposite, a sublime hunk with the sublime-hunk name of Gordon Shaw, an aviator killed in the war. As many have pointed out,
Strange Interlude
is really a novel that for some unexplained reason is being performed on a stage. True, the asides are in effect a dramatization of what a garrulous novelist might have stated as “explanations.” Yet the piece is some four hours of asides; worse, everyone is so
dreary
.

Not Nina, perhaps—or not entirely. But after such twisty O’Neill inventions as Brutus Jones and
The Hairy Ape
’s Yank, after the grimy wistfulness of the one-act sea plays, after even the deadpan listing of the extras in the racially explosive
All God’s Chillun Got Wings
(1924) as “Whites and Negroes,”
Strange Interlude
’s presentation of library, dining room, sitting room, and terrace as a set of Freudian mosaics finds O’Neill horribly lacking in Old Broadway panache. True, Act Eight (and how many other plays even have one?), set on the afterdeck of a cruiser, features an offstage boat race and a fatal heart attack; but it’s too little, too late, as one says. Is there a single moment in all these nine acts as instantly inductive of character as Anna Christie’s entrance into Johnny-the-Priest’s saloon? She drags her suitcase to a table, plops down, and orders the first of the evening:

ANNA:
Gimme a whiskey—ginger ale on the side … And don’t be stingy, baby.

Immortalized in the 1930 talkie as the first words heard from Garbo’s lips on a movie screen, the bit might be O’Neill at his most quotable, challenging Mary Tyrone’s “I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.” The last note sounded in the resonant echo texture of
Long Day’s Journey Into Night,
it is a curtain line of superb and conclusive irony. It truly
finishes
the play.

Is there any such writing in
Strange Interlude
? Beyond the interplay of all those asides, there’s little in it at all that is truly theatrical, except for a boat race and a heart attack. Yet the show played 426 performances, the mark of a smash in the 1920s. And it sent out those two road companies, won the Pulitzer Prize, and sold one hundred thousand copies of the text in cloth.

“The
Abie’s Irish Rose
of the pseudo-intelligentsia,” Alexander Woollcott called it. Worse, Lynn Fontanne had sent Woollcott the script while the play was in rehearsal, and
Vanity Fair
published his scornful response a few days
before
the opening, creating a scandal. But then, by this time O’Neill was already becoming what he has been ever after—the disputed genius, undeniably ambitious yet
at times
stubbornly deficient in talent. Or was he too full of content ever to edit it down to fair portion? For all his flaws, he was
the
hot-date playwright of New Broadway, just as expressionism was New Broadway’s finery and the Theatre Guild its tailor. O’Neill is the third of our twenties innovations—and see how interlocked the three are. The Theatre Guild produced
The Adding Machine
and
Processional
as well as O’Neill, and O’Neill drew heavily on expressionism in his early years.

O’Neill was, if nothing else, the great breakaway playwright, in length, in his physical demands on design technology, in subject matter, in his reclamation of the Classical monologue. And O’Neill was something else in any case: the writer who reinstructed the stage on its ancient role of interpreter of myth.
Desire Under the Elms
(1924) retells Phaedra’s love for Hippolytus, son of her husband, Theseus, setting the tale on a New England farm in 1850. And note that O’Neill did not leave the look of the piece to the designer’s imagination but specified—indeed, characterized—the visual environment in two huge elm trees that loom over the farmhouse with an aspect of sinister maternity, a crushing, jealous absorption. O’Neill actually drew matrices for set designer Robert Edmond Jones (who also directed) to work from. O’Neill’s use of masks, in
The Great God Brown
(1926), unites ancient Greek usage with Freudian concepts. The actors raised or lowered the masks according to the narrative context, developing an arresting (and troubling) visual conceit of the kind favored by such Little Theatre progressives as Jones and another O’Neill collaborator, producer and dramaturg Kenneth Macgowan. O’Neill tried Christian myth as well in
Lazarus Laughed
(1928), a pageant that the Guild simply couldn’t afford; it came forth at the Pasadena Playhouse. O’Neill even explored twentieth-century myths, not only using Freud but trying to combine Oedipus and electricity into a parable of the New God in
Dynamo
.

And what of O’Neill’s sheer love of the different forms of theatre? His output is vivaciously diverse, more so even than that of Maxwell Anderson, who could mystify you with a verse play one season and then write book and lyrics to a musical. The average theatregoer may not be aware of how many kinds of O’Neill there are because of the emphasis on the famous later titles, all dire and long in the
Mourning Becomes Electra
(1931) manner—though
Ah, Wilderness!
(1933) falls into that group as well.
6

Of course, when they haul out O’Neill’s less celebrated twenties titles for a fresh look—the more picturesque items such as
The Great God Brown
—they can seem finicky and affected, vaingloriously determined to dare. Then, too, after the excruciating dialect used in the early 1920s (as in this snippet of
Desire Under the Elms
: “Sun’s a-rizin’. Purty, hain’t it?”), suddenly O’Neill goes into Standard English, with little of the poetry we expect of a great playwright.

That’s the half-empty. The half-full gives us the real-life coming of age of a romantic young man. He is not an arresting wordsmith, but something larger: a great carpenter of theatre, building on, first, his father’s grand old stage (“Mine, the treasure of Monte Cristo! The world is mine!”); second, on the Little Theatre’s wish to remake the stage into a religion of ceremony and terror somewhat in anticipation of the theories of Antonin Artaud; and, third, as the handsome yet resentful guy who was either the victim of one of those Great American Destinies or the inventor and master of a new kind of destiny.

For instance, O’Neill’s career proves that there
are
second acts in American lives. The writing kept improving—and yet that very early
Anna Christie
is as hardy as any later O’Neill title. It is his least experimental piece, though it does bear an extremely O’Neillian symbolization of the sea as a fate: “Dat ole davil” is how Anna’s seaman father, Chris, refers to it. The first version of the play closed out of town in 1920. Oddly, though it turned on a triangle of father, daughter, and her suitor, with a single appearance for a hokum queen as the father’s on-and-off girl friend, Marthy, the original script was otherwise very different from the final version we know today. For one thing, Anna was originally a refined young lady with an English accent. In
Anna Christie,
she’s a prostitute.
7

Well, of course: possibly the most famous prostitute of the American stage. (This is not implied; the text places her former employment in a brothel in Minnesota.) Her romantic opposite also gave O’Neill trouble. In
Chris,
as Paul Andersen, he’s a pallid Prince Charming. Dumbed down to the oddly spelled Mat Burke in
Anna Christie
, he stands far from O’Neill’s tortured young men, so often in love with their mothers or obsessed by manias. Mat seems so good for Anna, so much the cure for what vexes her, that audiences kept thinking that
Anna Christie
ended happily ever after when O’Neill purposefully left Anna’s future ambiguous. In O’Neill, it’s Once vexed, always vexed, and Anna may be beyond cure. Ironically, public satisfaction and the second of O’Neill’s three Pulitzer Prizes (
Beyond the Horizon
won the first) told O’Neill that he must have accidentally written a bagatelle. It turned him against the work forever.

Everyone else likes it. It’s especially good for actors, even if that wonderful jalopy of a Marthy disappears early on. Broadway has seen Celeste Holm and Kevin McCarthy in a 1952 City Center revival, briefly moved to the Lyceum; the musical version,
New Girl in Town,
for Gwen Verdon and Thelma Ritter’s expanded Marthy, in 1957; Liv Ullmann and John Lithgow in 1977; and, for the Roundabout in 1993, Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson, conveying great erotic juju, to the town’s acclaim. Adding Garbo and Pauline Lord, already mentioned as the first Anna Broadway saw,
8
we might now ask why so many actors have exalted themselves in O’Neill if the charge is true that he’s talky in clumsy language. There have been failures—Claudette Colbert baffled by
Dynamo,
James Barton fumbling the first Hickey. Yet the merely capable Fredric March made a stunning James Tyrone, as if the role itself, the
writing
of it, gave him stature; and Jason Robards Jr.’s reputation is based almost wholly on his ease in O’Neill. His
ease
! So O’Neill is a naturalistic writer, after all?

He
thought so, though his naturalism was in effect a “higher” realism—“to probe,” he said, “in the shadows of the soul of man.” O’Neill wasn’t trying to write what his characters say: he was writing what they are. Yet he felt betrayed by his players. He actually told Lawrence Langner that he filled
Strange Interlude
(and
Dynamo
) with those asides because actors were too one-dimensional to play a subtext.

But “It is a great mistake to suppose that they don’t know good actors here,” an important visitor wrote in a letter to a friend back home. The writer was a thespian himself, one of the twentieth century’s most influential theorists on acting, and he went on to praise David Warfield’s Shylock in David Belasco’s
Merchant of Venice
as being beyond the talent at home. John Barrymore’s Hamlet was hailed with qualification—“far from ideal but very charming”—and “such a Peer Gynt as [Joseph] Schildkraut we have not got in Russia.”