Exorcism
2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/eugeoneirevi.34.1.0028
ISSN2161-4318
Autores Tópico(s)Theatre and Performance Studies
ResumoThe 1919–1920 season of the Provincetown Players, the season in which Eugene O'Neill's play Exorcism was presented, proved to be its most capricious since their New York beginning in 1916, primarily because for the first time they were not led by George Cram Cook. Bickering between the older and younger members of the company, particularly about the issue of paying their actors, finally caused Cook and his wife, Susan Glaspell, to decide that the younger members of the company should run things for a year while they took a sabbatical in Provincetown to write. The company was put under the direction of James Light and Ida Rauh, with Edna Kenton, Mary Eleanor Fitzgerald (“Fitzie”), and O'Neill as the seasoned veterans to work with the new regime. Internal conflict caused Rauh to leave her leadership position early on in the season, but not before directing O'Neill's The Dreamy Kid and casting the black roles with African American actors, a first for any white theater company in New York. The young company members believed they would be able to evolve progressively with Cook away, increasing the number of performances in each bill and paying their actors after expenses were covered, but they found the task of obtaining plays worthy of performance daunting and more frustrating than expected. Light complained about the problem in the newspapers and made some odd programming choices, including a play by Arthur Schnitzler, the Players' first by a non-American. He also attempted to adapt a short story by Edna Ferber into a play without her permission. These activities would lead critics to reprimand the company in print and remind them of their original goals as an organization. Ironically, when the group programmed truly experimental works by Alfred Kreymborg and Wallace Stevens, these would be ignored by the critics. Though the Players began the season financially sound, this was undone in the spring of 1920 when the Internal Revenue Service demanded two years of unpaid war tax on their ticket sales. Glaspell's sabbatical meant the group would present no plays by her that season. The company premiered three new plays by Village writer Djuna Barnes, and the first, titled Three from the Earth, created a stir with its unique dramaturgical style. The bright spot of the season would be Edna St. Vincent Millay's Aria da Capo on the second bill; New York Times critic Alexander Woollcott called it “the most beautiful and most interesting play in the English language now to be seen in New York.”1O'Neill was a busy man throughout the 1919–1920 season, but perhaps more in his business and personal life than in terms of playwriting. His son Shane was born in Provincetown the night before the Players' production of The Dreamy Kid opened on October 31, 1919, though the play had been written a year before. Unlike Cook, O'Neill seemed to have no problem working with those commandeering what was later called the “Year of the Youth” at the Playhouse. Susan Jenkins, who was married to James Light at the time, later wrote that “Gene, Ida and the much-loved Fitzie got along beautifully with the young people.”2 Though the war had ended in 1918, much was still changing in the country and, toward the end of the third bill of that season, Christine Ell threw a “Farewell to John Barleycorn” party in her restaurant above the Playhouse, marking the end of legal alcohol; Prohibition took hold nationally on January 16, 1920. On January 30 it was announced that O'Neill's first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, would be presented at matinees at the Morosco Theatre. This announcement came after O'Neill had spent over a month in New York pushing producer John D. Williams, who had optioned the play, into setting a production date. When the Players found out that O'Neill's first play was to appear on Broadway, Kenton wrote that “Broadway was ‘experimenting’ with Gene” and that the members attended the opening “en masse, not realizing that we were witnessing the premiere of the 1920 Pulitzer Prize play, but thoroughly aware that in Beyond the Horizon we were seeing a fruit of our laboratory theatre.”3 The play was a hit and ran until June 26 of that year, closing after 111 performances.O'Neill's father, actor James O'Neill, embraced his son's success and expressed his pride to others. Eugene actually lived with his mother and father for a few weeks in their hotel suite as he recovered from a mild case of influenza, his illness coming at the tail end of the worldwide epidemic. Then, on February 10, James suffered a stroke and, while he was in the hospital, tests revealed he also had intestinal cancer. Eugene shuttled between spending hours at his father's bedside and attending rehearsals for his play Chris Christophersen, which producer George Tyler had decided to try out in Atlantic City after rehearsing it in New York. As O'Neill was about to travel with the company for the play's opening, he received word that his wife had taken ill in Provincetown, so he rushed back to Cape Cod to be with her. Though she did not remain sick for long, he used her illness as an excuse to stay in Provincetown even when the production of Chris, having been mildly successful in Atlantic City, was moved to Philadelphia. Being in Provincetown gave O'Neill an objectivity that allowed him to see the weaknesses in the play, which he concluded could not be fixed, but he would later use the play as the impetus for a new one, resulting later in “Anna Christie.” Though Tyler wanted him to come to Philadelphia to fix Chris, O'Neill told him to abandon the play, that he wanted to rewrite it completely, and instead to continue with plans to produce his play The Straw. The now-nervous Tyler wanted to give that play a tryout in matinees in Boston with an eighteen-year-old Helen Hayes in the lead. After wrangling with O'Neill about the choice of actors and director, Tyler dropped this production as well. If this wasn't enough in one playwright's life, O'Neill was also working on a new play titled Gold, which had already been optioned for production.It was during this whirlwind of heady activity, multitasking, and family drama in O'Neill's life that the Players' production of Exorcism was presented. The play was part of the fifth bill of the season and began later than expected, most likely because of the financial turmoil with the IRS, opening a full month after the last bill closed on March 26, 1920. The bill of three plays ran for two weeks until April 9, the average time that all of the other bills of that season had run.4 In the previous bill, three of the major critics refused to seriously review what the Players felt were the most experimental and expressionistic plays their company had ever produced, Kreymborg's Vote the New Moon and Wallace Stevens's Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise. Light's frustration was voiced strongly in a newspaper interview as he claimed that the quality of the American plays being submitted to the Players was diminishing and warned that “the hitherto American theatre in Macdougal Street will be adulterated with translations from the foreign drama.”5 When taking on the leadership of the Players, Light had failed to see that part of Cook's never-ending work had been to foster and inspire playwrights to supply the stream of work the Players needed. Making good on his threat, a week or so later Light sent out a press release written by himself and without the approval of the Players' executive committee, announcing his scheduling of Schnitzler's 1901 play Last Masks to open the fifth bill; this was the first and only time a play not written by an American was presented by the company.6 Set in a state hospital in Vienna, Last Masks presents two terminally ill patients and explores the theme of “the tyranny of love softened in the retrospect,” something Schnitzler looked at in a number of his plays.7 The second play on the bill was Djuna Barnes's Kurzy of the Sea; set in Ireland, it tells the story of a mermaid appearing to an unmarried Irishman, an event that turns out to be instigated by his parents meddling in his life.Exorcism had been written in 1919 during a minor lull in O'Neill's creative output, the Gelbs stating that 1919 had been “his least productive year since he had begun writing”; O'Neill's only completed output during this time was the full-length play Chris Christophersen and Exorcism, his only one-act (O'Neill also wrote but destroyed Honor Among the Bradleys and The Trumpet that year).8 The play was most likely written in mid-to-late fall of 1919, Sheaffer citing a letter from O'Neill to producer and director George C. Tyler on October 27 that he'd already mapped out two new plays, naming Gold as one, and Sheaffer believes that the other was probably Exorcism, subtitled “A Play of Anti-Climax.”9 O'Neill used as source material for the play his own suicide attempt at Jimmy the Priest's in January 1912. Around that time, O'Neill was depressed and despondent, as the Gelbs write, “filled with helpless rage over what he and his family had done to each other.”10O'Neill felt particular shame after agreeing to a lawyer's drummed-up scheme to be found in bed with a prostitute, giving legitimate grounds for his divorce from Kathleen Jenkins, and he was unable to numb his feelings completely with drink. Deciding to end it all, O'Neill went to various pharmacies and collected Veronal tablets, took what he thought was enough to kill him, and lay down in his room at Jimmy the Priest's. His next-door neighbor was Jimmy Byth, whom O'Neill had known years before as his father's one-time press agent, but who had drunk himself out of many jobs and was now living in the same waterfront rooming house for derelicts. James Findlater Byth, as Sheaffer tells it, was not a man who appeared discouraged: “oh, no, not at all, he assured Eugene; he was going to take a new grip on himself ‘tomorrow.’ He was confident everything would be all right ‘tomorrow’!”11 O'Neill portrays him as a character named “Jimmy Tomorrow” in his short story “Tomorrow,” written in 1917, and later in The Iceman Cometh, also set at Jimmy the Priest's. In Exorcism he is simply Jimmy, Ned Malloy's roommate, and Alan McAteer, who played the role in this production, confirms he was “similar to Jimmy Tomorrow in The Iceman Cometh.”12 Sadly, Byth committed suicide himself in 1913, jumping from an upper-story window at Jimmy the Priest's, the same death O'Neill gives the young character Don Parritt at the end of Iceman. After O'Neill took the pills and failed to answer Byth's calls or knocks, Byth broke down the door and found him in a coma. His friends at the boarding house took turns walking him around until the effect of the drugs wore off. Byth contacted O'Neill's father about the incident, receiving money from him to take O'Neill to the hospital, the lion's share of which was spent by them on drink.The Players' production of Exorcism was directed by Edward Goodman, who had been the director of the Washington Square Players but who did not join the reformed group when they became the Theatre Guild. Actor Jasper Deeter, who played Ned, told Players' scholar Robert Sarlós that Goodman was the first to give him “competent direction at the Provincetown” and that O'Neill had insisted Goodman be called to direct.13 In a notebook entry, O'Neill listed that there were originally only three characters in the play: Ned, Jimmy, and Major Andrews, who was based on Major Adams, an Englishman who had served in the Boer War and was another boarder at Jimmy the Priest's. If this was the case, then two additional characters were added sometime before or during the rehearsals of Exorcism, these being Ned's father, Mr. Malloy, and another boarder, a Swede named Nordstrum. Deeter had been a Broadway actor who became disillusioned with the uptown commercial approach and, after attending a number of the Players' performances, finally met Light. He was first cast that December in the second bill and then was given roles in every bill the rest of the season; he would go on to play Smithers in O'Neill's The Emperor Jones that fall. McAteer, playing Jimmy, would work for Goodman again on Broadway in plays by Max Halbe and John Galsworthy. Mr. Malloy, Ned's father, was played by Remo Bufano, the actor and famed puppeteer, who had also joined the Players that season. Major Andrews was played by William Dunbar, and Nordstrum was played by Lawrence Vail. Vail had been an early lover of Djuna Barnes, would later marry Peggy Guggenheim, and in 1920 wrote the Players' (and perhaps America's) first surrealistic play, titled What D' You Want. The only comment from the critics on the acting in Exorcism was by Woollcott, who wrote that “its central role is madly miscast,” referring to Deeter.14McAteer recalled that O'Neill was “more than normally worried about the play during rehearsal.”15 Sheaffer writes that “of all of O'Neill's early works, Exorcism is the clearest indication that a biographical impulse, a need to bare and justify himself, was a major element in his creative makeup.” One must remember, however, that critics and audiences would not have known at the time that this incident was autobiographical. At some point in the process, one assumes after the play opened, O'Neill instructed Fitzgerald to collect all copies of the script and return them to him; in 1922 he said, “Exorcism has been destroyed and the sooner all memory of it dies the better pleased I'll be.” Why O'Neill did this can only be a matter of speculation. There's no documentation that O'Neill ever saw a performance of the play (something he rarely did anyway), though we know he participated in rehearsals. O'Neill's biographers agree, though their comments were written before they could actually read the script, that the play had been “too revealing about the bleakest period in his life.”16 He later told a number of people about his suicide attempt, but would often change facts or would try to make it funny or farcical, all of this showing a certain “duality in his nature,” with a need to be private and an equal need to bare all.17 In fact, at one point O'Neill named the play as one of only two comedies he wrote after 1918.18 Sheaffer believes (again, never having read the play) that “the most reliable index of Eugene's frame of mind after his suicide attempt” can be found in Exorcism, and that “like its protagonist, he felt that he had exorcised his ‘devils’; at last he was free to leave [Jimmy] Condon's place and make his peace with his family.”19 The Gelbs, after having read the play, feel that O'Neill retracted the scripts because he was so concerned for his father's health and well-being, not wanting him to be humiliated by the telling of his son's suicide attempt.20 Sheaffer felt that he destroyed the scripts because the play was just “too autobiographical” for his comfort.21Woollcott's critique of Exorcism was that it was “uncommonly good,” and that “one of the most important factors in O'Neill's force as a playwright” is seen in the play, which is “the surplus creative energy which enables him … to people it with original and distinctive characters, brought into the theatre with the breath of life in them and backgrounds that ask no aid from the man with the brush.” Comparing other plays on Broadway that typically have one vivid character with the others more wooden, Woollcott writes that in an O'Neill play “all the parts are clearly what theatre folk call character parts, as if, poor dears, there were really any other kind.” He uses examples like the Captain from Bound East for Cardiff to mark the playwright's “aptitude for sketching in a figure in a few telling speeches.” He believed that Exorcism and Beyond the Horizon were “unmatched by any other plays of the season,” except for two by St. John Ervine, which were presented by the Theatre Guild.22 Heywood Broun did not take the same view, calling Exorcism “not quite up to the standard” of O'Neill's other one-act plays. Observing that it has “moments of blazing real dialogue and of intense poignancy,” he says “its course is unsure and its outlines are blurred.” He grants that O'Neill has “been powerfully successful in painting the atmosphere of that lodging-house room, the disgust with life which comes with the spring to the boy, the fierce depression and the fiercer hilarity in which depression is drowned by these derelicts.”23 A critic for Variety wrote that the play was a “most depressing affair, devoid of all uplift…. The weakling's observations on life and things are of the most morbid kind, showing a depraved, degenerate mind which nothing can alter.”24 It is important to note again that no critic mentions the autobiographical nature of the play, as they were clearly unaware that the story was from O'Neill's life.Why would O'Neill allow the play to be produced in the first place? By spring 1920, he certainly had plenty of plays on which he was working, though none of them seem intended for the Players to produce. Once the full-length Beyond the Horizon was produced on Broadway in February 1920, O'Neill shifted to primarily writing full-length plays and negotiating the mounting of their professional productions with Broadway producers. The only exceptions to this were the later-written The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape, both of which he gave to the Provincetown Players to produce before each transferred to Broadway runs, both one-act plays and much more experimental in nature. However, James Light and O'Neill were good friends, and O'Neill had given Light his support through this season of his leadership, and one suspects that the strongest reason O'Neill allowed production of the play was Light's deep desire to have a new O'Neill play on the bill. Exorcism was the only new and unproduced one-act that O'Neill had written in the recent past, and so, like The Dreamy Kid that past fall (a play he'd written earlier, which had remained unproduced), it is likely O'Neill gave it to Light at his insistence.After viewing a staged reading of Exorcism at Tao House in May 2012, I was struck by an unusual structural moment in the play, one that did not stand out to me when I first read it, but then seemed glaring in performance. What appears to be the climactic scene structurally is the conversation between Ned and his father, who leaves agreeing to let his son stay in his dingy room until he's a day stronger. After that, O'Neill gives us a scene with Ned and the Major. The Major bears similarities to Captain Cecil Lewis in The Iceman Cometh, both in use of language and in his repeated life story. The Major bursts into Ned's room drunk, first declaring that Jimmy is bringing a bottle up, and then, between hiccups, telling Ned that his father who has just left seemed to be an “estimable gentleman.” Voicing disapproval at Ned's “attempt at self-destruction,” the Major appears to sympathize with Ned's father and tells the story of his own daughter's attempts to control him, a story Ned has clearly heard many times before.25 The Major follows this up with a story of being attacked in battle by a spear, again something Ned has clearly heard him speak constantly as if from a circular script that the Major can't stop himself from repeating, and it is in this moment that Ned seems to realize something important. When the Major asks if he'd ever shown Ned his scar from the spear, beginning to roll up his pant leg to do so, Ned replies “(with solemn seriousness) Since the last time, Major, you never have.” This moment of “solemn seriousness” seems to be a moment of epiphany for Ned, his realization that he does not want to become like the Major and Jimmy as well, men who have given themselves excuses in the form of repeated scripts that blame others for their own failings and trapped condition.Just moments later, after Jimmy and Nordstrum enter his room, Ned bursts out, declaring that the past is dead, that his intentions to kill himself “were of the best,” and that intention is what God judges a man by. He offers a toast, “looking forward to the new life, reform or no reform, as long as it's new.”26 While this may not be the strongest climactic moment in a play dramaturgically, as it relies on the actor playing Ned to make his subtle epiphany clear (the sort of thing O'Neill rarely trusted actors to convey without stronger stage directions), I think its inclusion cannot be ignored as central to the play's structure and perhaps also to its weakness. The importance of this moment seems to have stood out to Woollcott as he shows in his synopsis of the play: “You see him slowly reviving, only to find the ugly, inescapable world still closing in around him, with its intolerable tedium represented by the two souses, each still telling, over and over again, his favorite story.” Woollcott doesn't even mention Ned's father coming to visit him. He follows with: “The suicide comes back to find everything wearisomely the same—everything except himself.”27It would also seem no accident that these two characters from Exorcism join many others from O'Neill's life among the throng of trapped souls who inhabit Harry Hope's bar in The Iceman Cometh. By extension, one might reason that Exorcism was an early impetus (if not the impetus) for what would become Iceman, set in the same building, but in the latter without the autobiographical O'Neill character, who instead seems to hover above the sad mélange as he relays their stories, having escaped the prison of pipe dreams in much the way we hope Ned's experience has allowed him to do.Even after O'Neill's edict that all the copies of Exorcism should be destroyed, Deeter claims to have held onto a copy but lost it when he left his belongings because he couldn't pay the rent on his Greenwich Village apartment. For over ninety years, what no researcher had known, not even O'Neill apparently, was that his second wife, Agnes Boulton, had held onto a copy. Toward the beginning of divorce negotiations with Boulton in 1928, O'Neill, who was in Europe with his mistress Carlotta Monterey, sent his lawyer Harry Weinberger to Bermuda, where O'Neill and Boulton had been living, with the aim of removing his personal papers and manuscripts. Fifteen years later, O'Neill told the Princeton University Library that these were never recovered.28 Arthur and Barbara Gelb assume in Life with Monte Cristo that the account of O'Neill's attempted suicide given in Agnes Boulton's Part of a Long Story must have come from a letter or an account written by him because the long monologue in which she conveys the story sounds like it's in O'Neill's words. Knowing now that Boulton had a copy of Exorcism for many years adds to her depth of understanding of the incident, though her written account is much more detailed than anything in the play.The script of Exorcism was discovered in 2011 among the papers of screenwriter Philip Yordan by his second wife, Faith. Yordan had died in 2003, and eight years later she was going through an old file cabinet in their San Diego home when she found the script inside an envelope with a message on a Christmas gift label saying, “Something you said you'd like to have,” signed “Agnes and Mac.” Mrs. Yordan called her friend Paul Nagle, who for years worked for the William Morris Agency as a vice president and head of Longform Television Packaging. Nagle is also a part-time faculty member at UCLA and the biographer of screenwriter Samuel Bronston, with whom Yordan worked in the days of blacklisted screenwriters in the 1950s. Nagle emailed Diane Schinnerer of the Eugene O'Neill Society, who with a couple of questions verified the likelihood that this was an original O'Neill script. They engaged the services of Glenn Horowitz, who represents estates as an agent for the sale of archives. Arthur Gelb reports that Horowitz phoned Barbara and me to tell us about the discovery of the script and asked us whether we'd be interested in writing an article about it. As startled as we were about his amazing report, we were compelled to turn down his request, since we were concerned at that point about losing time in making Penguin Putnam's deadline for finishing our new O'Neill biography.29Ultimately the script was sold to Yale University's Beinecke Library, which houses one of the preeminent collections of O'Neill materials in the world, and they have published an edition of the play this year (2012), first allowing the New Yorker magazine to print the script with a forward by John Lahr in their October 17, 2011, issue.How the Academy Award–winning screenwriter Yordan came to receive the script cannot yet be traced exactly, but an important fact in the mystery is that Yordan's first wife, Marilyn Nash, was a young actress who was hired at only eighteen by Charlie Chaplin to appear in his film Monsieur Verdoux. Chaplin was newly married to Oona, daughter of O'Neill and Boulton, and, as she and Nash were about the same age, they became close friends. In fact, it was actually Oona who introduced Nash to Yordan, who often played tennis at the Chaplins, as did Nash, and they were soon married.30 Boulton at the time was living in a trailer park in Los Angeles with her new husband, Morris “Mac” Kaufman, and they were aspiring screenwriters. Boulton had pushed for Oona to meet Chaplin when she first came to Hollywood, and once they became a couple, she quickly became very involved in their lives, often accompanying them to movie premieres and parties. Most likely Boulton and Yordan met during this time. Ironically, Yordan's first triumph as a writer had been as the playwright of Anna Lucasta, which he was inspired to write after reading O'Neill's “Anna Christie” and then wrote a play with a very similar plot, but with a Polish family at its center. His play was later reinterpreted in 1944 by the American Negro Theatre and was a long-running Broadway hit, a rarity for a play with an all–African American cast. One can imagine that in the many social gatherings that Boulton attended with Oona Chaplin, and with Nash and Yordan being among Oona's closest friends, the discussion of O'Neill and his work, plus the revelation of Boulton's possession of the Exorcism script, could easily have taken place, with Yordan expressing his desire to have the script. We can only be grateful that Yordan's request was granted by Boulton, even if it has taken so many years for us to be able read this lost jewel in the O'Neill oeuvre.
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