My Transformation through the O'Neill Society
2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/eugeoneirevi.34.2.0227
ISSN2161-4318
Autores Tópico(s)Theater, Performance, and Music History
ResumoI first heard of Eugene O'Neill in 1957, from the late Dr. J. Preston Cochran who directed plays at my alma mater, Alabama A&M. He had been cast while a doctoral student at the University of Iowa in the title role of The Emperor Jones. My mother was on the A&M faculty, and we had a rich Lyceum series, a marvelous amateur theater group, and an annual production by the Shakespeare Players, but no O'Neill.Then, in 1976, when I was a doctoral student at the University of Iowa, Dr. Thomas D. Pawley taught a course on the Black Man in American Drama, in which he lectured on O'Neill's The Dreamy Kid and All God's Chillun Got Wings. Pawley, who is ninety-six at this writing, published essays on O'Neill and traveled to China as a member of the Eugene O'Neill Society, but he was distressed with O'Neill's portrayal of Jim in All God's Chillun Got Wings as “the black man who failed.” I, too, have never liked what O'Neill wrote about black people: the Negro dialect, the low self-esteem, the focus on ne'er-do-wells from the lower depths. I do know some black people like these characters, but most do not fit the description, and the most severe communication cripple does not speak like Brutus Jones. Discussing that role with Jasper Deeter, Paul Robeson said, “You may know this kind of person, and Mr. O'Neill may know this kind of person, but I don't.”1 If some degree of universality is to be found in O'Neill, it is in his white characters, as most people of any race know a Hickey or an Anna. As James Earl Jones said to me in a 1998 interview, “O'Neill wrote about the common man … and most black people have common man roots.” However, on the subject of race per se, O'Neill's sense of the human family seems to have been limited, and I took little interest in seeing or teaching his plays.Then, in 1998, Daniel Larner, a board member of the Eugene O'Neill Society, invited me to join, and it is no exaggeration to say that doing so changed my life, transforming my research, my teaching, and my horizons. The annual meeting of the MLA was in San Francisco that year, and I asked Danny to accompany me to my first meeting of the Society, in Danville. We took the shuttle up to Tao House, that “final harbor,” as O'Neill called it, where I observed all the relics of his years there, including the desk where he wrote his late plays. On that occasion and the next day, when I attended the O'Neill session, I felt included in a way unlike what I had experienced at other academic conferences.Around this time I began teaching O'Neill's plays at Michigan Technological University, where I had been on the faculty since 1990. One student, who went on to receive a PhD in physics, wrote to tell me that The Iceman Cometh was “one of the most transformative pieces” he had found. Another, who had been the only black student in my class that term, was inspired by that same play to write a poem, “Ashamed,” about the Negro gambler Joe Mott, who was ashamed of his race.I liked having students do lively readings of the plays, as well as writing critical papers and performance analyses, and a play they especially liked was Desire under the Elms. I relished showing photos of the African American actor Carl Jay Cofield as Eben in a 1998 production at the Pecadillo Theatre. The actress playing Abbie was white. I also taught The Hairy Ape at times and had students read portions of the Gelbs' biography of O'Neill. Most students were fascinated by the playwright, although one male physics major said, “Lady, you really have peculiar tastes,” when I showed the film of The Hairy Ape.The Fifth International Conference of the Eugene O'Neill Society at Le Plessis and Tours, in 2003, was my second encounter with the world of O'Neill scholars. Traveling to Paris fulfilled a long-deferred dream, which a transportation workers' strike nearly ruined, but my taxi ride to the Gare Montparnasse took me along the Seine, which was peppered with boats, and by the Eiffel Tower. As I drank an espresso on the bullet train, I spotted my dear friend Felicia Londré. My French was rusty, but hers excellent, so we made our way without difficulty to the Hotel l'Univers in Tours. On our arrival, Sheila Hickey Garvey introduced us to Paul Libin, an American producer who was being awarded the O'Neill Medallion. He and I sat in the hotel lounge where he shared with me that he and Ted Mann of the Circle in the Square Theatre received bags of hate mail when they cast James Earl Jones as Hickey in their 1973 production of The Iceman Cometh.The next morning, I gave my paper, “‘Interlopers’: African-American Actors in Non-Traditional Roles in the Works of Eugene O'Neill,” complete with slides of rare photos, some from African American actor Ruby Dee's private collection. She had played Mary Tyrone in an all-black version of Long Day's Journey Into Night, with Earle Hyman as James Tyrone. Some slides had come from the Gordon Heath Collection at the University of Massachusetts. Gordon Heath, a gay black intellectual and expatriate, was a Broadway actor with whom I had corresponded in the 1980s. He had played dual roles in Owen Dodson's 1944 Howard University Summer Theatre production of The Homecoming, the first in the trilogy of Mourning Becomes Electra. The following day all the conference participants visited the château that O'Neill and his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, had rented from 1929 to 1931, having to put in indoor plumbing and electricity (see fig. 1). That house inspired the setting for Mourning Becomes Electra. One evening the new owners fêted us with a garden party under a white tent. Their charming bilingual sons served paté, and afterward the whole group stood on the steps for a photograph. I also moderated a panel on “O'Neill in France,” in which we heard about O'Neill listening to black blues artists on his Victrola and driving his Renault at ninety miles an hour.I was moved when an attendee from Moscow asked if she could buy my book No Surrender! No Retreat! African-American Pioneer Performers of Twentieth-Century American Theater, a copy of which I had brought along. Toward the end of the conference, I delivered the book to her. She told me, “When we were children, in 1946, Paul Robeson came to Moscow. Unexpectedly, he opened a window and began to sing Negro spirituals, Russian songs and ‘Old Man River.’” She visibly shook as she recalled, through fifty-seven years, how the crowd gathered to hear this non-pareil. She concluded with an explanation of her zeal, “I could not buy this book in Russia.” Seldom has anyone so vividly given me a sense of the value of my scholarship.On the return trip through Paris, I asked the Moroccan taxi driver to take me down the Champs Élysées, something I had wanted to do since I was in Madame Drake's French class at Alabama A&M. I thought of Josephine Baker strolling down the boulevard with her cheetah. The day was Pentecost, a French holiday. As we neared the Arche de Triomphe, driving became close to impossible, as hordes of people, including struggling artists, overflowed the area. At the Hotel Scribe, where I spent the night, I was treated like royalty. At breakfast, I enjoyed the best coffee I have ever tasted. Then, in blinding rain, with a doorman holding a black umbrella over my head, I headed homeward.Two years later, I attended the Sixth International Conference of the O'Neill Society, in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which was well attended by a mix of prolific scholars, actors, directors, a dentist, a radiologist, and contingents of scholars from Russia, Israel, India, St. Tropez, and Japan. All presenters gave papers, including many good ones, in the Provincetown Theatre. One evening, Arthur and Barbara Gelb talked of their half-century of research on O'Neill. Joining them was Ric Burns whose documentary on O'Neill aired on PBS in early 2006. I told him politely that he had no black actors in his documentary, even though many of our people have had major roles in O'Neill's plays. To Burns's credit, he later added the now-deceased Lloyd Richards (Broadway director, former artistic director of the Eugene O'Neill Center, and dean of the Yale School of Drama) to be a major part of the documentary before it aired.I gave a paper on the “uneasy collaboration” of O'Neill and Paul Robeson on three of the early plays. Later that day, a man I had never met, who had heard me speak, offered me a glass of champagne and a kiss on the cheek. I accepted both. Afterward, program chair Steve Bloom and his wife offered me a ride to see O'Neill's Thirst on Fisherman's Wharf inside a warehouse. I had not read this rarely performed play about a mulatto man and two others on a lifeboat. It was a compelling performance. The Atlantic Ocean and the sky served as a breathtaking backdrop when a man opened a sliding door behind the set.The next international O'Neill Society conference was three years later, in Danville (see fig. 2). I spoke on “A Call to Restore the Classics at Selected Historically Black Colleges; For Example, Eugene O'Neill.” Dan Larner chaired my panel, and later he and his wife, Pandora, treated me to a glass of champagne. Many years earlier, I had acted the part of the maid in a production of Thurber and Nugent's The Male Animal, in which he played one of the leads. From that humorous play we had both somehow come to O'Neill, as teachers and scholars.In the ten years that I was able to be active, my life was enriched by the friendship of such people as I have mentioned, also Don and Dianne Schinnerer, Brenda Murphy, Harry Elam, Yoshi Kurokawa, Jackson Bryer, Zander Brietzke, and others. While I had been fortunate to have been raised on a historically black college campus that gave me considerable exposure to the arts and to have acquired graduate degrees from Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Iowa, nothing could match the opportunity to travel with people who were so well connected to this interesting subject.A large number of students have benefited from the teaching that emanated from these rich experiences and friendships that money alone could not buy. I have truly come to understand humankind better. W. E. B. DuBois said: “Herein lies the tragedy of the age: Not that men are poor—all men know something of poverty; not that men are ignorant—what is truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.”2 As I enjoy my seventy-fourth year of blessed living, I owe a profound debt of gratitude to the members of a Society who made my latter years of teaching and researching so rich.
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