ARTicles vol. 3 i.3b: Eugene O’Neill and the Birth of Desire

Writing about Desire Under the Elms in 1926, Barrett H. Clark recognized the power and paradox of O’Neill’s drama: “When I left the theatre I knew I had never been more profoundly moved by any other play. Desire purges the soul, sears, tortures and twists it, only to exalt it in the end. O’Neill has built a shining edifice, an epic drama of the workers of the soil, with ingredients as ugly and as beautiful as can be found in our contemporary civilization.” O’Neill first made a name for himself as a playwright in 1916 with the Provincetown Players, a collection of bohemian artists committed to new work. Rejecting the tawdry melodrama epitomized by his father James O’Neill’s histrionics in The Count of Monte Cristo, O’Neill welcomed the opportunity to experiment with style and subject in a nurturing environment. Over the next five years, the Players produced a number of his one-act plays including Bound East for Cardiff, Thirst and Moon of the Caribbees. With the full-length, critically-hailed Beyond the Horizon (1920), O’Neill earned the first of four Pulitzer Prizes and emerged as the most promising American playwright. O’Neill charged into the 1920s with the creative gusto that led to Desire Under the Elms. A string of full-length plays including Anna Christie, which won his second Pulitzer, The Hairy Ape, The Emperor Jones, Welded and All God’s Chillun Got Wings solidified his reputation as the most promising American playwright. A voracious reader, O’Neill devoured Nietzsche, Freud and Jung. He studied the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles with an eye to reviving Greek myths for a contemporary audience. Above all, O’Neill revered August Strindberg for his honesty in exploring the brutality of love. When the Provincetown Players staged The Spook Sonata in 1924, O’Neill contributed a rare program note: “Strindberg still remains among the most modern of moderns, the greatest interpreter in the theatre of the characteristic spiritual conflicts which constitute the drama – the blood – of our lives today. … Truth, in the theatre as in life, is eternally difficult, just as the easy is the everlasting lie.” The seeds of Desire Under the Elmsbegan to take root in the fall of 1923. An entry from O’Neill’s work diary detailed his concept: “Play of New England – locate on farm in 1850, time of California gold rush – make N.E. farmhouse and elm trees almost characters in play – elms overhanging house – father, hard iron type, killed off wives (2) with work, (3) sons – all hate him – his possessive pride in farm – loves earth to be as hard – in old age in a moment of unusual weakness & longing marries young woman, brings her back to farm, her arrival brings on drama, youngest son falls for her.” In conversations with friends, O’Neill mentioned an idea for a New England play about a Scripture-quoting farmer and his volatile son. His interest in behavioral psychology led him to Twelve Essays on Sex and Psychoanalysis by William Stekel, where he read the case history of a seducing stepmother. Finally, the onslaught of tragedy in his own life compelled O’Neill to draft his ground-breaking portrayal of a family destroyed by desire. Within three years, his father, mother, and older brother Jamie died. According to scholars Louis Sheaffer and Travis Bogard, O’Neill’s writing, already shifting towards realism, grew more autobiographical in response to personal losses. The Puritanical New England of Desire Under the Elms recalled his childhood home in New London, Connecticut; the near-incestuous affair between Eben and Abbie alluded to Jamie’s obsessive adoration of their mother; and the anger towards a stingy patriarch mirrored O’Neill’s resentment of his own father. The playwright camouflaged the fierce desire of the O’Neill men to monopolize Ella’s maternal affections in a historical narrative of Puritan lust and greed. Lionel Trilling acknowledged the power of O’Neill’s play in an article for The New Republic: “We do not read Sophocles or Aeschylus for the right answer; we read them for the force with which they represent life and attack its moral complexity. In O’Neill … this force is inescap-able.” In O’Neill’s words, Desire Under the Elms was “a tragedy of the possessive – the pitiful longing of man to build his own heaven here on earth by glutting his sense of power with ownership of land, people, money – but principally the land and other people’s lives.” Because Desire Under the Elms probed forbidden desires critics blasted the play for its bleak depiction of humanity, labeling it, “a tale of almost unrelieved sordidness,” full of “hideous characters.” Fred Niblo of The New York Morning Telegraph grumbled that, “the play itself will be hailed as realistic. No one will call it entertainment, but at the slightest suggestion of its foulness, many will rise to exclaim: ‘But that’s life – that’s real!’ Sure. So is a sewer.” Not all reviewers were nauseated. Stark Young of The New York Times wrote that the “poetry, terror and … unflinching realism rise above anything that O’Neill has written.” In The Nation Joseph Wood Krutch said that seeing the play was “an experience of extraordinary intensity.” When Desire Under the Elms moved to Broadway on January 12, 1925, the scandal surrounding O’Neill’s play of adultery reached fevered pitch. In February, O’Neill’s literary agent informed him that New York City District Attorney Joab H. Banton, having failed to suppress All God’s Chillun Got Wings the previous year, labeled the new play obscene and threatened to halt its production. The critic and producer Kenneth MacGowan, long-time friend and collaborator of O’Neill’s, suggested that the decision be left to a “citizens’ play-jury,” and Banton reluctantly agreed. Desire Under the Elms was acquitted, but the notoriety attracted playgoers, intrigued by the allegedly lurid nature of the production. O’Neill, though pleased with the play’s success, lamented the reason: “It attracts the low-minded, looking for smut, and they are highly disappointed or else laugh wherever they imagine double-meanings. We got a large audience but the wrong kind of people.” Attacked in New York, banned in Boston and England, and the cast arrested in Los Angeles,Desire Under the Elms provoked outrage from critics and spectators. Too often the play’s notoriety overshadowed its importance as a milestone of modern drama. This simple family tragedy propelled O’Neill into the mature phase of his career. Born of deep anguish, Desire Under the Elms reveals, in O’Neill’s own words, “the poetical vision illuminating even the most sordid and mean blind alleys of life.” Stella Gorlin is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.