James Light: “The Parade of Masks” ( c . 1928)
2020; Penn State University Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/eugeoneirevi.41.1.0006
ISSN2161-4318
Autores Tópico(s)Theatre and Performance Studies
ResumoOn November 24, 1925, Eugene O'Neill, “disgusted” and despondent after a rehearsal of The Fountain, arrived at his former director James Light's apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side.1 O'Neill had by this time won two Pulitzer Prizes; two more and a Nobel Prize were on their way. His standing as the greatest dramatist America had yet produced was inarguable, but “Jimmy” warmly greeted “Gene” as “a friend with whom he could say what he needed to say,”2 never mind the theatrical titan O'Neill had become since their work at Greenwich Village's Provincetown Playhouse.2 Feeling more confessional than he might have with theatrical powerbrokers like George Jean Nathan or Kenneth Macgowan, O'Neill informed Light that he was giving up playwriting for good. “Crowding a drama into a play,” he said, “is like getting an elephant to dance in a tub.”Over the past fifty years, the great discovery for O'Neill scholarship was Exorcism (1919), the one-act dramatization of O'Neill's suicide attempt in late December 1911. Exorcism also turned out to be a prequel to O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (1941), the finest tragedy every written by an American, and, as Edward Albee suggests, a codicil of sorts to The Iceman Cometh (1939).3 But “The Parade of Masks,” by O'Neill's fellow theatrical impresario of the Provincetown Playhouse, James Light, long dormant but published here for the first time, outshines Exorcism for its dramaturgical if not biographical insight.O'Neill's primary consternation about playwriting derived from what the era considered “modern” drama, borne of Ibsen and Chekov, by which the soliloquy was rendered obsolete. But what then? In “The Parade of Masks,” Light explains the use of masks in O'Neill, Robert Edmond Jones, and Kenneth Macgowan's production of August Strindberg's The Spook Sonata, and the use of masks and a “dome” (or cyclorama, or Kuppelhorizont) in the “Triumvirate's” production of O'Neill's dramatized Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1924). He also comments extensively on O'Neill's Lazarus Laughed (1926), glances at Strange Interlude (1928), and generally provides a stunning bounty of revelations about staging O'Neill's middle-period expressionistic plays.Most importantly, in Light's final section, he answers O'Neill's all-important question about a theatre beholden to realism: how was a dramatist to reveal the inner workings of the human condition without infecting his characters' genuine thoughts with public speech? In this way, Light's essay acts as a kind of Rosetta Stone for comprehending O'Neill's artistic resolve during his evolution from The Great God Brown (1925) to A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943). To my mind, “The Parade of Masks” is an indispensable tool for understanding the dramatist's entire canon. Here's why: in it, Light clarifies what O'Neill, early on in his career, found so inadequate and perplexing about his chosen genre, and with uncanny foresight he helps us understand what O'Neill chose to do about it.O'Neill had already completed four works of fiction that we know of: “Tomorrow” (1916), “The Screenews of War” (1916), the lost “The Hairy Ape” (1917), and “S.O.S.” (1918). But he quickly recognized that his forays into prose writing were no good. “Tomorrow,” the only short story published in his lifetime, struck him later as “inferior stuff not worth republishing.”4 He had previously attempted to merge drama with fiction in his full-length dramas Beyond the Horizon (1918) and Chris (1919); the latter, he confessed, “was a special play, a technical experiment by which I tried to compress the theme for a novel into play form without losing the flavor of the novel. The attempt failed.”5Beyond the Horizon, his first Pulitzer winner, had been dreamed up as “wedding the theme for a novel to the play form in a way that would still leave the play master of the house. I still dream of it.”6 Yet he wondered if “such a bastard form deserved to fail” and if the genre-bending that interested him then might actually be “impossible.”7 (In his 1933 mask play Days Without End, O'Neill revealed himself once again as a frustrated novelist, titling acts “Plot for a Novel” and “Plot for a Novel Continued.”)Illustrious novelists hadn't fared much better when the positions were reversed: Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Dean Howells, Jack London, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, and F. Scott Fitzgerald had all determined to make a triumph on the boards—none of them successfully. Fitzgerald, author of the hapless play The Vegetable (1923) and subsequently a scriptwriter for Hollywood, remarked in 1922 that “so many novels are all full of thoughts and psychology. It's impossible to make much of that interesting on the screen.”8 “Forget not,” Henry James had warned American playwrights after his humiliating fiasco Guy Domville—roundly mocked by the London gentry in 1895—“that you write for the stupid.”9The fact that O'Neill wrote his plays to be read as books, in the literary mode of the novelist, was not news to Light. What was news was the degree to which O'Neill had desired to resort to fiction instead of plays, why he wished to do so, and how this resolve influenced his writing in the years to come. O'Neill would experiment with numerous theatrical techniques before and after his confession to Light—expressionism, masks, “thought asides”—and yet, reckless as this might sound at first, the “Master” discovered his solution with intoxication by alcohol and opioids. Nearly all of his late work—The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, A Touch of the Poet (1942), and A Moon for the Misbegotten—are built on in vino veritas soliloquies, or, in Mary Tyrone's case, in morphino veritas.For the life of me, I can't recall the exact circumstances that led to the unearthing of this invaluable document at the New York Public Library. Whatever the case, stumbling across “The Parade of Masks” was an experience the Chinese might call Yuanfen, a common Mandarin term that's nearly impossible to translate into English. But while touring Chinese universities to promote O'Neill and his work, I and the O'Neill Society's Secretary for Asia, Shiyan Xu, belabored over its English definition and collaboratively came up with this: “an auspicious happenstance with cosmic implications for the future.” (That O'Neill was born in 1888 at Forty-Third Street and Broadway, the epicenter of what is now “Broadway,” at a time when “Broadway” had not yet been invented, is Yuanfen.) What I hope for future O'Neill scholars to recognize, as I had when I first came across “The Parade of Masks,” is the boundless gift that Light delivered to us posthumously. So read what's below and say it with me: “Yuanfen!”Alexander Pettit assisted in the preparation of Light's typescript for publication. Our text is based on the typescript held at the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library (James Light typescripts; *T-Mss 2001-050). The typescript is accompanied by a title sheet identifying the essay as Light's and providing the author's address. The typography and, especially, orthography are sufficiently shoddy to suggest an amateur typist, possibly Light himself.The dating of “The Parade of Masks” depends, imperfectly, on the fact that Light discusses no play later than Strange Interlude, which premiered in January 1928. Readers will benefit from knowing that Light refers to himself as “the writer” throughout that document.Only modest editorial intervention has been required to generate a text that reconciles readability and accuracy. Unintentionally run-together words have been silently corrected, as have instances of obviously unintended punctuation (e.g., a terminal comma). One autograph correction (“When I first had ↑ ve ↑ the idea”) has been entered without further notice. Orthographical errors and typographical short-cuts (e.g., “facade”) have been emended and are tabulated at the end of the text. The tabulations take standard bibliographical form: lemmatic (left of the bracket) readings record passages from the edited text; stemmatic (right of the bracket) readings record the passage from the copy-text. Entries appear seriatim, with surrounding words where these stand to help readers locate the passages at issue. We have not attempted to add sense to obscure passages or to correct solecisms.Though at the Provincetown Players the Greek drama, aside from the standard literary and critical evaluations, had been discussed in its physical aspects, i.e. the threshing floor, the statue of Dionysus, the Skene, the chorus, the mask of the hero-victim, and the concluding hymn; and though George Cram Cook offered the stage of the Provincetown Players to as many American poets as he could find as the “drum of dramatic poetry”, no one had used the mask in its essential function as the focus of dramatic action. At that time there were plenty of cultural efforts including Professor Murray's reviving of the Greek drama in the open air, with choruses speaking in unison and in robes, carefully stepping out the come, go and return of the Greek hymns in William Morris English. But no use of the mask, the primal instrument of the myth, in modern dramatic literature. Its use had disappeared along with other fundamental tools of the theatre, such as the aside, the soliloquy, the prologue, and the epilogue. “Naturalism,” the wildest contradictions in terms except for “Realism,” had de-theatered the theatre and made of drama a series of accidents resulting in a smiling audience picking up their hats and coats --- smiling for two reasons, “How like me,” or “How unlike me.”The first use of masks at the Provincetown Players was in the production of Strindberg's “Spook Sonata” urged on the reorganized Provincetown Players by O'Neill. As is well known, O'Neill considered Strindberg as his teacher and master, and as the greatest of modern dramatists. In addition to its own importance as a play, it offered an opportunity for an experimental use of the mask. Although Strindberg does not call for masks, his chief character, the young student, who is a “Sunday Child” and has the gift of second sight, provides a justifiable reason for their use. He alone sees the ghost of the drowned milk-maid as an actual figure on the stage. He sees the dead, clad in his winding sheets leave the apartment in which he died; he sees the characters linked together by their mutual guilt towards one another as the living dead awaiting release by Death's final gesture. It seemed, therefore, a furtherance of Strindberg's dramatic intention, to give these characters the masks of their dominant emotions, cupidity, fear, stupidity, pride and hate. The student with his “second sight” saw them as they were in essence and the drama of their mutual destruction lay in the struggle between them in terms of their paramount emotions.The writer in making the masks avoided the obvious sharply contrasted method of the Greek tragic and comedy masks. Instead, the face of the character was imagined in repose, the repose of sleep, for instance, when the forms of the face, the muscles, rested in the development that years of habitual and repeated emotion had formed them. The masses and planes of the face were modeled in soft relief without deep contrasting incisions or ridges. The writer depended on the lights hitting the masses of the mask to bring out the characteristic expression. The effect was that of a very thin veil over the features, through which the emotion shone.It was “Expressionism” though not pushed to the point at which the physical setting takes on the anthropomorphical shape of the dramatic conflict. It was a successful production but more than that, it gave O'Neill a demonstration of the possibilities of the mask, not as an archaeological feature of classical theatre, but as a tool for the exposition of emotional conflict in plays dealing with man as he is today. (I hesitate to say “modern” because at any time in the history of man he is “modern” and thinks himself ahead of the ages and suffering the especial birth pangs of tomorrow.)The next use of masks by O'Neill was in the Provincetown Players' production of Coleridge's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” arranged by O'Neill. This use of the mask was not that of a device to expose psychological conflict, but the formal equipment of a ceremonial. O'Neill called for a bare stage elevated three steps above the forestage, with our concrete dome as background. This dome had an almost unlimited capacity for suggesting mood, even weather, by means of lighting. The wedding guests traversed the forestage on their way to the wedding. The Mariner sat on the steps of the stage and “stoppeth one of three.”In spite of guests' protests the Mariner fixes him with his hypnotic eye. At the line, “there was a ship,” eight figures dressed in identical neutral costumes of grey jersey, grey dungarees, bring onto the stage three stylized sections of a ship --- the prow, the mast and the stern with rudder and tiller and set them up as a symbol of a ship. Each of these figures wears identical masks, the mask of the drowned sailor. There was no attempt to disguise the fact that they were masks. The writer in making them, strove for the effect of the face of a man fixed in the last spasm of death with an overlay of water and seaweed. One figure took his place at the tiller, another on the prow as lookout, --- though they echoed the pantomime, they never left their posts.As the Mariner tells his tale, the masked figures pantomimed the action described. As the hypnotic effect of the Mariner's tale takes hold on the Wedding Guest, the Mariner slowly leads onto the ship so that the Wedding Guest undergoes all the experiences, the ice, the joy of the good omen, the albatross, the thirst, the death and the resurrection of the crew.For the Seraph band, who animated the corpses of the sailors, the costume was a floor length white cape, the masks of silver. The design of the mask was severe. Simple, almost archaic forms of the brow, eyes, mouth and cheeks, were used similar to those of early Gothic sculpture.At the sinking of the Ship, the chorus removed the elements of the Ship in a solemn recessional, leaving the Mariner and the Wedding Guest where they were when the Mariner began his tale with the music of the wedding feast flooding the stage.The mask is not a “face”. Certainly not a “false face”. Just as the actor is not a “man”, but the agent (of the original meaning of “actor”) for the character in the drama. On the actions of the actor, not the “man”, the spectator makes up for himself the dramatic action. The prime example of this is the mime. His gestures and postures evoke the character out of the memory and the emotional resources of the spectator. This action is called by some critics “identification”. However, while the word is long it falls far short of the action. If these critics witnessed most of the Elizabethan plays they would be found hung on the branches of their own “identification”, or released on their own “identification”. The mask is the show-place of the emotions. However, the actor has no manner or means by which he could change the rigid planes and lines of the mask. It is we, the spectators, who living the past experience of the character and undergoing the immediate agony, place kinesthetically, our emotions on the face of the mask. They are our emotions. As one magnetic field induces a current in another field, so do we, by empathy induce the serenity or the torture on the lines and planes of the mask.********With Strindberg we had experimented with the psychological use of the mask, --- this was the ceremonial use of the mask. As yet, there had been no trial of the mask of the “hero”.In “Lazarus Laughed” O'Neill's intention was the celebration of man's tragedy and his courage facing it. He chose the form of the Oberammergau Passion Play. That form is a survival of the ancient ritual of the threshing floor and its yearly ceremonies. The play demands a community for its production. The Pasadena Players provided the opportunity. The writer did not see that production, so the following remarks are made on the basis of the script alone.As far as the use of the mask is concerned “Lazarus Laughed” shows no development beyond the previous examples, that is, the complete mask and the half-mask.O'Neill had long been obsessed with the Eleusinian mysteries and the death and reappearance of Adonis. The seed in winter and the plant in bloom, to give in autumn the fruit and the seed again to be buried and awaited by men with the help of women. The Eleusinian mystery extended in the history of religion from unknown periods through Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew and Christian history. What better subject than the Adonis “Lazarus” who died and was born again? Since the spread of the “cult” went through towns, villages, provinces, the new Adonis, “Lazarus” needed a technique usable by a community.Hence the masks for the choruses. While a cadre of experienced actors can play the characters of the play in half-masks, the members of the seven choruses, senators, legionnaires, followers of Lazarus, Roman populace, male and female sycophants of Tiberius, crowds at the arena, wear the full mask with the appropriate costume. With these means a community of non-actors could celebrate a pageant, a ceremonial devoted to the theme “There is no Death”. Lazarus wore no mask.In the ancient religions use of the mask as the appearance of the God-Hero, would have been as much a desecration for the priest-actor to remove the mask and continue the ritual, exposing his own face, as it would be if the celebrant of the Mass today asserted that the Host was his own body and the wine his own blood. Without doubt, the primitive priest-actor behind the mask, acted the suffering, the triumph of the Hero-God, --- his pantomime and his dance, his gestures and song would have been meaningless else. No matter what severity, what castigation, what purification he went through, the wearing of the mask and with the mask re-creating the presence of the God-Hero, was his sacred office.The next step in the Parade for O'Neill, was the deliberate violation of the mask of the priest-actor. In “The Great God Brown”, the word “Great” was chosen deliberately as was also the word “Brown”. The “God” was chosen as the epithet for “Dionysus” and “St. Anthony”. The struggle in the play is between the Dionysian principle and saintly torture of St. Anthony.The violation of the use of the mask enabled O'Neill to dramatize the change of character in the protagonist and the antagonist in revealing their opposite developments by the removal by the actor of the mask. The actors' make-up behind the mask, showed the new state of the character's soul. Thus, there were two masks --- one, the actor changed, and one the mask maker changed.O'Neill, remembering the formulae of the theatre attempted to expand the “local” modern slice of “life” naturalism, into a “large as life and much larger” naturalism --- the “naturalism” of the spirit of man.O'Neill had long contended against the limitations, the rigidity of the dramatic form in modern usage, especially the artificial requirements of the “realistic” school. At least, in the Classic or the Romantic theatre the dramatist had a wide sweep of action. He could, untrammeled by the demand for factual verisimilitude, better his hero with tempests, harrow him with ghosts and visions, give him golden words for ecstasy and with what Strindberg defined as “the hand of God” crush him with the ironic “long-arm of co-incidence”.But, most important, the non-Realist had the means to expose the heroes' inner springs of action. The most secret feelings, the sources of his strength and his faults, all the involutions of his will could be brought into play as the inner dramatic action whose counter-point is the play itself, by the soliloquy, --- not the “Confidante” or the “Faithful Friend” scene but the undisguised plain soliloquy. The “Confidante” or the “Faithful Friend” are too limited by their relation to the hero and by their own personal disposition to bear the full force of revelation. Iago could never have kept a “Faithful Friend” after disclosing the hellish landscape of his soul, except perhaps Iago himself and that he already has. Horatio can be nothing but his good practical self when Hamlet, after accepting the challenge to the duel, intimates his premonition of death. It is an engaging thought, that perhaps a soliloquy of death to equal or surpass the grandest in the play was blocked by the presence of the good, “down-to-earth” “faithful friend” Horatio.The “Faithful Friend” is of limited dramatic use because to him the hero shows what he considers the “real” self --- the image by which he wishes to be loved. It is between the image he shows the world, and the reality residing deeper within him. As Dostoevsky says somewhere, “No man of honesty capable of self-examination and sensitive to the moral implication of his feeling, can have any self-respect”. It is in this field that the soliloquy is an unreplaceable device; It is here that the soliloquy reveals not an image but a scene of unrelenting, unholy war --- a storm in the depths that wrecks the gallant vessel on the waves above.Another gyve on the legs of the poet is our rejection of anthropomorphic nature. It is not altogether a gain that crags no longer beetle, storms lower, chasms yawn, winds moan, rains pelt, streams gurgle, landscapes smile. We lost a lot of innocent merriment as well as dramatic impact when we cut off the elements as partners in our drama and exiled King Lear's howling tempest along with the snow flurry into which the errant daughter and her babe were cast in “Way Down East”. That the interplay of our environment and us, was a necessity is shown by the revolt of the Expressionists after some decades of meticulous Realism. Though they did not follow literally the metaphorical methods of the Romanticists they did extend to stage design, speech and movement, the psychological and emotional states of the characters in drama, that is, they worked anthropomorphically from the inside outwards, whereas the Romanticists worked from the outside toward the inside.Often arbitrary and over simplified, yet they recognize the need of the environment and its use as reflection of emotional states. King Lear is given a storm to rant in; the Expressionist hero in anger walks on a street, and all the perspectives of walls, windows and doors are awry and tortured.******O'Neill had been for some years established as the great American dramatist, appreciated more in Continental Europe than he was in his own country when he called on the writer as a friend with whom he could say what he needed to say. He announced that he was giving up the writing of plays. “Crowding a drama into a play is like getting an elephant to dance in a tub.” From then on, he would write only novels. In a paraphrase of Shelley, he said, “When I first have the idea, it is a blazing fire. When I have written it, it is glowing coals. When it is rehearsed and acted, it is warm embers. When an audience sees it, it is ashes.” His objections to the dramatic form as a means of creating a work celebrating the human tragedy, are, as nearly as I can convey them, the following considerations.The dramatist is restricted to cumulative action. He is restricted to the mountain-top. He hasn't the opportunity as the novelist has to build the character from its beginning, to analyse the forces moving and forming his characters. The stories within stories which make up the saga of the hero is the novelist's privilege and opportunity. The novelist and his reader can live a day-to-day intimate life with the characters, not only in the physical world but more important in the inner world of feelings and desires. The novelist has the advantage of critical comment, of interpretation, he can be God and Satan. The dramatist is limited in O'Neill's phrase to “getting his character onto the stage and letting him unpack his trunk”. The arena of vital action, the island of immediacy the dramatist certainly has, but the submerged mountain holding it up to the present remains submerged. To disclose this submerged foundation, the dramatist has only the soliloquy. But the soliloquy is in the dramatic warehouse relegated there by modern realism, and occasionally refurbished and vitalized by some modern dramatist in the form of psychopathic raving. It is still realism and not passé dramaturgy if the heroine is psychotic and the lines do make literal sense.The novelist as God, as reporter, as surrogate for the hero has both exterior and interior command of his work. The dramatist has only exterior command and what interior life of his characters he can reveal to his audience must flash through the palings of the stockade enclosing him. Providing he remains true to his theme and his character, the choice open to the novelist is wide. Philosophy, social comment, descriptions of nature, human moods, satire, even dramatics, all and almost everyone, are allowable in a novelist's medium. Though he have as deep and inevitable insight, as revealing an interpretation of the human condition as the novelist, the dramatist's effect is achieved by song-and-echo, blow-and-impact, fight-and-victory, whereas with the same human material the novelist has built a cathedral or at least a chapel of the understanding.O'Neill neither gave up writing plays nor did he write a novel. He did, however, write “Strange Interlude”. In this play, he again used the mask but this time not the physical mask. In this play he used the novelist's prerogative of inner revelation. The means by which he accomplished both artistic ends was the soliloquy used forthrightly and continuously as no other playwright before him has dared to use it. By the insight furnished by the soliloquies we as audience, can project the emotions, the true not the apparent ones onto the face of the characters as he presents a facade to the rest of the world. It is the mask returned, making possible two levels of dramatic action.Dionysus] Dyonysis; Skene] Skena; shone] shown; writer in making] writer in aking; solemn] solomn; Elizabethan] Elizabethean; Oberammergau] Oberrammergau; legionnaires] legonnaires; severity] severety; castigation] castagation; mask of the priest-actor] mask of, the priest-actor; “Faithful Friend” scene] “Faithful Friend” seene; Dostoevsky] Dostoievsky; gyve] gyre; anthropomorphically] anthromorphically; passé] passe'; prerogative] perogative; soliloquies] solliquies
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