Sunday, January 3, 2010

By Reviewed by Mark Howell

Eugene O'Neill:

The Complete Plays

1913-1943

Library of America, $100

God help me, please. Like that crazy housewife who, in one year, served up every recipe in Julia Childs' cook book, I have decided to inhale every one of Eugene O'Neill's 50 published plays by the end of 2010.

Oh, the tragedy of it....

I took on the challenge in order to learn about dialogue. Having been asked to write a novel, I must master dialogue and dialogue is tricky in fiction. O'Neill was famous for writing what he called a "sequencing" of each of his plays before he wrote one word of the dialogue. That way, he could be sure of each of his characters before they opened their mouths.

As a consequence he was able to create a drama like "Strange Interlude," the 1928 play that earned him a Pulitzer Prize, a million-dollar plagiarism lawsuit from a woman who claimed he'd stolen the story from her privately published novel -- he won -- and a movie deal starring Norma Shearer and Clark Gable.

"Strange Interlude" is the first play I decided to read in the Complete Plays (a $100 investment in three volumes, more than 1,000 pages in each) because "Strange Interlude" is directly about the matter at hand. Not only is there dialogue but the actors also speak what they truly feel. It makes amazing reading but I can't quite conceive of it with actors; perhaps there's a reason the movie is not yet available on Netflix.

Here's how "Strange Interlude" is so amazing. The double-dialogue reveals O'Neill's God-like skill at carving characters out of air. It shows he knows what propels people. And he knows women, too; that's a key (you don't have to look far to find Eve in these pages). The Norma Shearer character is pregnant by one of the male characters while she is in love with another of the male characters but will marry still another male character. Since all these characters are on stage at the same time, through decades of time (it's a nine-act play in two parts), there is a wild and sublime discordance between what they say and what they think.

All three men, of course, have got it all wrong. They're thinking about each other; they're in competition with each other. Over her, of course, which is what they ought to be thinking about.

Ought is the wrong word. O'Neill was not a moralist (except to his daughter, who once ran away to Key West to escape him). O'Neill was a tragedian (he lost his daughter to Charlie Chaplin, just one year his junior).

Tragedy happens when we become the playthings of the gods, that's the bottom line. And drama happens when we discover this. But drama moves in mysterious ways and, in "Strange Interlude," the two strands of dialogue weaving through the characters' ears and minds are like snakes in the garden.

Let me tell you how I first encountered O'Neill. It was in a musty old anthology, the only play in the book. It was called "The Moon in the Caribbees" and it is one of the reasons I'm here today. My teenage self closed the book when that one-acter was done and thought, "What the hell was that?" It stayed with me for days, weeks, still does. There's a baffling line in it, spoken more than once by Smitty, a sailor offshore listening to the islanders singing. "I wish they'd stop that song. It makes you think of -- well, things you ought to forget."

Things you ought to forget. "The Moon in the Caribbees" is on page 527 of Volume One. It was later gelled with "Bound East for Cardiff" and "In the Zone" as a John Wayne movie called "The Long Voyage Home," the only movie of his work that O'Neill liked. (It was released the same year as he began work on "Long Day's Journey Into Night," masterfully filmed but after his death.)

I was also in thrall, like many Welsh teenagers at the time, with the Gelbs' massive biography of O'Neill, a husband-and-wife effort that introduced a rakish O'Neill to a new generation that needed to hear the tragedy of his magnificent life and the women in it. They range from his teenage daughter (Mrs. Oona Chaplin) to his socialist lover Louise Bryant to the crazy Carlotta Monterey, his last lover and the reason there are only 50 plays left (she got rid of the rest, God bless her; less is more). In the biographical mix are people like John Reed and Dorothy Day and Saxe Commins, a dentist who became his editor at Random House and is the reason why there exist these ultimate folios of the work (the last plays were not all staged in O'Neill's lifetime).

Be warned about this man. On first reading he can be hopelessly clunky with notoriously made-up adverbs ("frightenedly," "difficultly") and stage directions so detailed they read like novels and cannot hope to be matched by specific actors in the real world.

But the effect of the plays is undeniable. They jump right in and they put you through the ringer. All of human life is there. They are not Twitter books.

He was very sick toward the end, with a kind of Parkinsons that was not properly diagnosed. His pencil trembled. But in 1941 (he died in 1953, survived by the dreaded Carlotta and the divine Oona), he suffered merely from prostate and digestive disorders and bronchitis -- this from the excellent chronology at the back of these volumes. He otherwise had his most marvellous year. He worked away at what would become his posthumous masterpiece, "Long Day's Journey into Night," about his actor father, morphine-addicted mother, drunken brother and his own wretched self (played by Dean Stockwell in the movie). He also finished "The Iceman Cometh," a monster play with impossibly lengthy parts; a famous British actor once froze during a revival of the play and it had to be cancelled. As far as I am concerned, it is clearly O'Neill's real masterpiece.

"The Iceman Cometh" is the second play I have read in the O'Neill Challenge (I gave myself a head start; this is not a movie). It stretches from page 561 to page 713. It's set in Harry Hope's bar, in 1912. It sounds like it's about "pipe dreams," as Harry's barflies and "hop" smokers call it, but it is actually about addiction and despair. Page after page of epic delusion.

Who is the iceman? He's the fellow who delivers ice to your wife while you're in the saloon.

A fellow called Hickey enters the scene with a promise that he can unhook these denizens by a simple trick of the mind. (All of addiction counselling is here.) But guess what? Life is tragic, otherwise you wouldn't go to the theater.

Hickey's own wife is visited by the iceman.

So he pops her.

Whoa! What was that?

I have so much more fun to look forward to. Just consider the titles, let alone the themes. "Ah Wilderness" is about a boy growing up. I'm ready for that. I can't wait for "A Touch of the Poet" and "More Stately Mansions." From 1914 comes "Abortion." Then there's "All God's Chillun Got Wings," "The Great God Brown" and "The Emperor Jones" (clunky, yes, but O'Neill knows his races as he knows his genders). "The First Man," "The Hairy Ape," "Marco Millions," "Lazarus Laughed" all await as the year unfolds.

Many of these plays, like Verdi operas, are too big to produce but in the reader's mind they can be as vast as need be.

A whole year of "Whoa, what was that?"

I can't wait for "Desire Under the Elms."

mhowell@keysnews.com