Reading O’Neill Creatively: Perspectives and Offerings
2023; Penn State University Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/eugeoneirevi.44.1.0061
ISSN2161-4318
AutoresAlanis King, Alex Roe, Adrienne Earle Pender, Annabel Capper,
Tópico(s)Theatre and Performance Studies
ResumoWhat an opportunity out of the blue by editor Alex Pettit and the Eugene O’Neill Review. Suddenly realizing my friend, poet and doctor to our Anishinaabe language—Margaret Noodin—is to blame.It brought me back to my National Theatre School of Canada days in 1992, as the first Indigenous woman to graduate—hey, that’s all I got!I remember my class called “Melodrama” led by director Peter Wilde in my second year at theater school. We had a bunch of play scenes to choose from and mine was from Mourning Becomes Electra. I didn’t know what Mr. Wilde had in store for us, but he and I connected and melodrama became not so much an overacting exploration but instead an overacting exploration based in character truth and physicality. I loved the exercise and watching my classmates’ final delivery of our selected scenes was very entertaining.I remember making my exit as Lavinia in the scene at the end of act 3 from The Haunted, leaping and waving my hands in true melodramatic fashion at the imaginary portraits on the wall. Being six feet tall with raised arms and a small platform in our studio would have been a sight of heightened proportion given the melodrama I was directed to convey:It made me feel powerful, not ridiculous. It brought laughter and applause from my classmates. It brought compliments from Peter; he felt there was a truth to my delivery. I have many fond memories of my classmates and teachers while there.Fast forward to the year 2014 and now I address Mourning Becomes Electra in a whole new light with an experience more recent. I had a playwriting commission from U-Milwaukee—Noodin again—remember her? She invited me to write a play about Electa Quinney. It was held on the Potawatami reservation just on the edge of the city in a beautiful state-of-the-art studio and theater space inside their brand-new school.I am of the Three Fires People, that is the Potawatami (the Firekeepers), the Ojibwe (the Ceremony keepers), and the Odawa (the Traders). This alliance was struck in the 1800s because our landbase and language were interchangeable and the roles strengthened our resilience to continue to thrive in our traditional Great Lakes territory forever. Remember this was an atrocious time period in the United States when killing Indians was sanctioned by the government all in an attempt to eradicate “the Indian problem.”It was at this time the first Indigenous school teacher, Electa Quinney, made her mark on the education of her people. Born around 1807 and raised in Stockbridge in New York State, she was Mohican or Muheakantuck, also the river name they lived beside for thousands of years. Muheakantuck translates to “people of the waters that are never still.” This eastern tribe then was forced to relocate to west of the Mississippi, settling in Michigan Territory in 1828. She was an extraordinary teacher who persevered in uncertain times of upheaval, loss, and remarriage. I titled the new play Morning Becomes Electa because her passion for education got her up every day to be at the front of the classroom and effect change for her people. I did a play on the title, thank you Mr. O’Neill, although no one in the room really noticed—and certainly no one questioned it.As a playwright I admire Eugene O’Neill. His plays are easy to read, always entertaining, and have clearly defined characters. I have not had the opportunity to see a production, but if ever there was a chance, I’d get my ticket. I don’t know another playwright who can set up a scene with such expansive detail before a line is uttered. It makes me think how much it informs any set, prop, or costume designer as it sure beats a Greek myth playwright who only puts “Zeus enters.”So here I come full circle and actually write something about Eugene O’Neill and his play Mourning Become Electra and relate it to my own lived theater experience. Here goes . . .First we start with The Homecoming or, in theater speak, “the set-up,” where family returns home, the patriarch, soon, from the Civil War. Our homelands too awaited their loved ones’ return home given the number of Indigenous men who fought in this war. My great-great-great grandfather J. B. Assiginack fought for the British in the War of 1812. He became a decorated soldier; some of his duties were as an Odawa interpreter to fellow comrades as well as achieving heroic feats on the battlefield. I believe your anthem recognizes “the dawn’s early light” after our side burned down the White House.The Homecoming could be relatable as Indigenous children returning from residential school. While the characters are all adults in Mourning Becomes Electra, it is their stilted behavior that makes me think how generational trauma has made them this way. The rampant sexual abuse and predatory behavior Indigenous children suffered while attending some of these institutions were all led by the churches. Adultery—perhaps lack of effective parenting—living in an alternate reality—all made me see why these characters are so extreme and manipulative in the play. Christine loves her father, Orin loves his mother, both in unhealthy ways since neither was a perfect role model—knowing parents are fallible and human, unlike gods and goddesses of Greek myth. We know this play is an adaptation of two of them. Sadly, the sickness of incest is a sickness that permeates reservation people still today. Many move off the reserve to leave this behind. But we know flight does not resolve the fight. We have our own myth that is all about high stakes, life or death, Superbeings, legendary characters—a total magic realism I’ve created in many of my plays. What leads our core belief system is known as the Law of Orders, whereby our myths and the legendary characters that exist within them are for teaching, for reminding us we live in gratitude of this good life. Humans are last in the order and count on everything created before them for their survival. Indigenous people live in a worldview that is diametrically opposite to dominant society, who have shown that controlling and over-pillaging the land and its original people does nothing for our collective future as a human race.The killing of the father by the mother in a crime of passion, in this case poisoning him for love of other, is classic. As dramatic as this is, I think of the women’s prison population in North America, which has a high Indigenous representation that stems from this dysfunction. Most Indigenous women who kill their mates do it as a last resort to protect their children. They are not fully themselves given that substances consumed trigger their rage and the final acting out of their anger results in drastic consequences. But here nobody goes to jail. So what is justice? It is still an elusive construct to many Indigenous people throughout history.The Hunted comes next. Which to me not only parallels the rising line of tension but also magnifies the obsession and lengths of people’s passions to deal with hard truths they must face. Tables turn as Christine’s darling son, Orin, kills her lover and in turn she commits suicide. Hunting in our traditional belief system is a give-and-take. We live in the Law of Orders, whereby the deer being hunted is actually a gift from the Creator. As such, tobacco is offered over the animal’s body, acknowledging its sacrifice. But here we have no such generosity shown. Orin has absolute hatred for Brant to annihilate him so he can replace him in his mother’s desires. Twisted reasoning, not very well thought through, is a denial. Justification may be a quick-fix mindset in the immediate but truly it leads to the turmoil an audience witnesses in the final part of the trilogy.The Haunted for me becomes living with the consequences of all your actions. In our culture, to have any success at this, one would seek self-help through ceremony. At our core we want redemption—it makes for a fully rounded character. A banishment from community would have occurred for a length of time first. To come back is to make oneself as whole as possible again: the sweat lodge, the shaking tent, our healing arts with medicine people administering certain barks and plant medicines to deal with trauma, anxiety, addictions, remorse, retribution, to promote forgiveness and possibly self-love. Here none of these scenarios seem remotely possible. Suicide is a statistic that is disproportionate to the Indigenous population versus non-Indigenous people. It ends Orin’s possibility to deal with his past. At the play’s end the solution is to further shut down. To be a shut-in literally for the rest of her years is Lavinia. What a tragedy.I like to imagine O’Neill’s dramaturgy shaped by the actual practice of stagecraft. Mounting those early works in Provincetown and Greenwich Village, working with self-appointed actors, directors, and scene-makers, taking a hand in constructing the stage itself, he confronted the practicalities of translating written word to dramatic action. On those intimate stages, the false gesture, the disconnected performance, the very buffoonery associated with the gaslit melodramas we like to say his work repudiated falls flat as a painted drop. Here was the ideal place to hone his gift for articulating the nuances, contradictions, and undercurrents of life as lived, rather than staged. Here was a workshop in which to craft a new dramatic form, open to intimacies, vulnerabilities, and psychological “truth.”And yet, for all his daring and invention, O’Neill’s unembarrassed embrace of American theatrical tradition gives me the greatest pleasure. He held a front-row seat to the triumphs of his father and witnessed the engaging power of the melodramatic stage with its self-aware characterizations, unapologetic plots, “nick of” timing, and sensational stage effects. If the excesses of that tradition are redirected, or sublimated (!), they remain driving forces in O’Neill’s work, so alive in passions, battles, physical and psychological violence, all lurking beneath the surface, offstage, or upstairs.At the confluence of these two courses—the Provincetown sui generis theatrical experiment and the American theatrical tradition—floats The Great God Brown. This tale of an average American striver’s (Billy Brown) rivalrous entanglement with his vulnerable genius friend (Dionysus Anthony), in which he appropriates his wife (Margaret), his confidante (Cybel), and ultimately his identity, depends on a device of stagecraft: the donning and doffing of character masks. The play lives or dies on actors’ technical business. At the same time, that business draws on the oldest sacred traditions and foregrounds the artifice of theater. More, it self-consciously celebrates that artifice with the aspiration to tap into the art’s greatest social and spiritual promise: revealing a society’s essence and illuminating our relationship to the divine. To produce the play is to grapple with its particularly daunting practical challenge. The reason to produce The Great God Brown is to realize a stunning theatrical promise.To begin with the challenge: The Great God Brown illustrates its characters’ private, “true” selves in conflict with their social identities by mingling masked with unmasked characters. The play explicitly charges its characters—through the relative lyricism of their language, their appraisals of one another, and their soliloquizing—with distinct, opposed modes of existence; it phases from scenes of unmasked modern realism into scenes of masked presentation; and it asks characters to shift modes themselves as they assume or remove their masked personae.Doing so, the play quotes and mocks, but also depends upon the artifice of both ancient and merely old forms, hearkening not only to the Greeks, but to François Delsarte’s system, fundamental to the American melodrama, of expressing character through facial expression. At the same time, the play demands psychological realism, in which actors on stage before us pretend to be real people and pretend that they’re not doing it. (Though between us, what could be more artificial than that?) At the very least, marrying conventions of ritual worship to those of the melodramatic stage to those of modern drama promises a grinding of the gears for the audience.Challenging though it may be, that collision of conventions, with its abrupt, even desperate shifting from one performance mode to the other, is not merely the mechanism of The Great God Brown: it is the fundamental concern of The Great God Brown. The play’s characters all aspire to the divine and are ever disappointed: by the limits of their own imaginations, by their fear of one another’s authentic selves, by the constraining conventions of the society they keep, by the financial transactions that keep them connected. The struggle of socialized man and woman with their own limitations, be they limitations on achieving greatness, earning recognition, or finding understanding companionship, is neatly figured by twentieth-century figures forced into the conventions of classical tragedians.And if it is challenging, that challenge is theater’s aspiration: to marry the secular and the divine. Success of this coarse, most corporeal of arts depends upon transubstantiation, in which every mundane and present object or person on stage, and indeed even the very stage space itself, becomes something they are not in some time they are not. To marry ancient holy practice with modern stage convention in order to manifest the tension between that which is holy and that which is profane is to celebrate the improbable transcendence of theater.So how can one resist?But how, actually, to do it?One imagines the chorus of Dionysus, the clowns of commedia, the enticing revelers of the Carnevale, the sacred, colorful, and exaggerated spirits from Bali, Central Africa, Oceana, Guatemala. What a world of possibility! But one imagines these masks as objects of aesthetic beauty. The sacred masks of ritual, though exquisitely beautiful and artistically crafted, are not meant to be admired as objets d’art, and even the most extraordinary mask remains inert if its use is misunderstood. Only if the mask can be truly magical, even shocking, can we expect to hang the whole play on it.For all that masks evoke a holy theater of ecstatic celebration, on the contemporary stage the metaphor of the masked self and the true self seems dangerously trite. More practically, the masks themselves may simply dull the theatrical experience. How, then, to access their uncanny power to create a delightful, even transcendent event?For guidance I look to Keith Johnstone’s extraordinary Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (Theatre Arts, 1990). Johnstone, best known for his insights and exercises to unleash our most surprising and unfiltered inspiration, devotes nearly a third of his book to working with masks. Masks are filled with personality and spirit, and it is up to the ritual wearer to meet them, enter into a trance state, and be possessed by them.Such a notion is not so foreign as it may seem: it is familiar to many actors who only fulfill their roles when they put on costume and makeup. Johnstone quotes Charlie Chaplin, from his autobiography, discovering his Tramp: “I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and make-up made me feel the kind of person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked on the stage he was fully born” (145). A mask, in this light, is a character one inhabits, sufficiently developed and succinct, though inert without the actor fulfilling it, that Johnstone identifies as a Mask.Impro explores the process by which actors meet the Masks, how they ritually don them, and how the Masks “turn on,” truly coming alive as creatures independent of the actors who play them. In this description a Mask, once so invigorated, must be taught to speak, to move, to interact with the world and other Masks in it. These passages of Impro are exciting and, of course, entirely beyond the pale for the harried director of a contemporary stage production. Who has eight weeks to help a company of actors learn to walk or sit down, and to speak only a handful of words when there are 19,000 (give or take) in the play? And to commit fully to the spirit of possession and trance, one may well wind up with a company of beautifully fulfilled Masks that has no interest in performing O’Neill.Doing so cannot be the point, but respecting the masked characters of Dion, Margaret, Cybel, and Billy wearing Dion (or is it Dion wearing Billy?) as different characters, all their own, must be the point. When masked, as some are through nearly one-half of the play, the actors must be equally as alive as they are without them, and they must be other than they are without them. If not, the device of the mask is nothing but a signifier for the audience, but a ham-handed one, and one that degrades the theatrical event. Watching an actor whose vitality is hidden behind a piece of costuming—talk about an obstructed view!There is a middle ground, though, between attaining the kind of possession one might seek in a mask workshop and bringing The Great God Brown to life through an inspired company of masked actors, transitioning from one being, and one state of being, to another with the carefully learned and embraced techniques of respecting the Masks.A few questions:Full or half masks? I’d be inclined to the half-mask, which reveals the mouth and usually jawline of the actor, giving access to the actor’s expressive mouth. The caveat is the possibility of allowing a character, perhaps Billy in the final moments as Dion, to be so fully consumed by the mask that a full mask is the best representation.How to make/find the masks? One wants the Masks to have their own identities and to introduce them into the rehearsal process as early as possible. At the same time, one wants the Masks used in the play to be personal and specific to the actors’ interpretations of their characters. If the masks—the physical objects—are created too early, before the actors have encountered the characters and before the play is known to the company, the Masks will be imposed on the play and the actors, akin to a second company that never auditioned. By including the actors in the design process, molding the masks to their faces, and by including the mask designers in the rehearsals, allowing them to respond to the actors’ insights, we can abet a meeting and inhabiting of the Masks that is specific and true to the production.How to make the transitions? Each existence—masked and unmasked—wants to be alive, filled with need and intention, and there is a distinct tension between them. Without belaboring the ritual at the expense of the drama, the transition from one “state” to the other can be thrilling, even shocking to the audience.How do masked and unmasked characters relate to the audience? The unwritten part in every play is given its audience, and the characters onstage always play a relationship to it. In “realistic” drama, we pretend to pretend that audience doesn’t exist, but we nonetheless play to its perceptions. That interaction between performer and audience, inescapably born of their shared presence, is vital to the experience. The Great God Brown opens a whole new dimension in the differences between masked and unmasked characters’ performances for and to them.The lion’s share of a director’s role comprises such practical considerations. But they serve the whole, and here is where an appreciation of O’Neill as an old-school showman aspiring to the highest effects achieved by his artistic antecedents informs the staggering ambition of The Great God Brown.While the visceral appeal of staging the play is the shameless theatricality of its core stylistic device, the more compelling reason to stage the play derives from its homage to theater—I blush and quail to say its meta-theatricality. “Character” in the play, in both the dramatist’s and the moralist’s meaning of the word, is manifestly an artifice, whether represented by a masked or unmasked face. Yet this conceit is merely the foundation of The Great God Brown’s signal theatrical aspiration.Through the mask conceit, through the teasing allusions of the play’s title, through Dion(ysus)’s name (and tangentially, the Phrygian mother-goddess Cybel’s), through its flirtation with Nietzschean philosophy and dramaturgy, The Great God Brown explicitly identifies itself with classical tragedy. But what is Tragedy in modern life? Disabused of the romantic ambitions of the past, deflated by a thousand pricks of psychological insight, robbed of heroes and villains by a pervasive sense of complicity, cynical about established spiritual practice—a thoughtful, feeling American of the 1920s (let alone the 2020s) might well see that the tragedy of American life is that it is too small for Tragedy at all.And yet, still we live, ablaze with a divine spark, yearning for transcendence, metaphysical connection, and love, all the while knowing we will die. Even in spite of ourselves, our hearts travel a hero’s journey, however constraining our traces.Confoundingly aware that we are possessed of the divine but tethered to the mundane, is our only recourse that sworn enemy of tragic significance—irony? We feel ourselves to be so important; we know ourselves to be so petty! Or might it be, paradoxically, that this very debased recognition could be the stuff of modern tragedy? Perhaps the modern tragic is a tragedy of disappointment, and in this play of self-consciously posturing characters who repeatedly deflate their own posturing, the tragedy is deliciously expressed as disappointment in itself.Marrying naïve hope to cynical detachment defines O’Neill’s oeuvre in some measure. The Great God Brown does so formally, and it thereby aspires to classical grandeur while (and by) doubting the possibility of doing so. The tragedy of modern life, as articulated by this drama of conflicting styles, is this: trapped by quotidian fears, doubts, and norms, we still yearn for divinity. It’s a neat trick, an audacious trick—a showman’s trick—and it is the tightrope walker’s challenge of producing the play.In 1930 Sinclair Lewis became the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature. In his acceptance speech in Stockholm, Lewis praised several writers whose work was worthy of the win. Of O’Neill, he said:By then O’Neill had won three Pulitzer Prizes for drama and had indeed transformed American theater, vowing never to be influenced by any consideration but one: “Is it the truth as I know it—or, better still, feel it? If so, shoot, and let the splinters fly where they may.”2 And fly they did. O’Neill’s next offering, Mourning Becomes Electra, premiered on October 26, 1931. This play cycle, set in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War, is a retelling of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. At its core, Mourning Becomes Electra dramatizes the story of a daughter who loves dad and hates mom, a son who loves mom and hates dad, and parents who return hate for hate. Hijinks ensue. Though O’Neill’s great masterworks were still to come, Mourning remains an outstanding play that stands as one of O’Neill’s most theatrical works.Mourning was revived on Broadway in 1932, and again in 1972. Other noteworthy adaptations include the 1947 film version starring Rosalind Russell; a full-scale operatic version from the Metropolitan Opera; a five-hour television miniseries from 1978 produced by PBS Great Performances; two productions in 2003 (one in London starring Helen Mirren, and the other in Amsterdam, directed by Ivo van Hove); and, most recently, in India, a 2010 film called Elektra. Each play in the trilogy (Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted) contains four to five acts, with only the first act of The Haunted divided into actual scenes. A performance clocks in at well over four and a half hours, making Mourning an extremely difficult play to produce.Tasked with staging Mourning today, I would first tackle the main structural considerations that could be an impediment to any production, and clearly the sheer length of the play must be reduced. In-person audiences simply aren’t trained to sit through that much theater, especially post-pandemic. O’Neill’s plays are nothing if not dense; though there is a wealth of material to consider, cuts to Mourning would have to be specific and targeted. The PBS miniseries combined an edited Homecoming with the first act of The Haunted, which made for an interesting ending as a first play in the cycle. The 1947 film, however, ended Homecoming immediately after Ezra Mannon’s murder, just as the play does, and it follows the play’s structure throughout as well. The film’s brisk pace puts the time of Homecoming at exactly an hour, with forty-nine minutes each for The Hunted and The Haunted. To keep this pace on stage, edits would have to eliminate the minor town characters that stand in as the Greek chorus. This and other changes would keep each play to an hour or less; collectively, they would cut the cycle to just under three hours. This makes performing all three plays comfortably in one evening possible—an imperative now—though O’Neill would have hated every single edit.The post–Civil War setting is actually inconsequential to the story. Ezra and Orin Mannon are returning from “the war,” but there is no specific tie to the Civil War. Indeed, the Civil War was a stand-in for the Trojan War in the Oresteia; it could be any conflict. Adam and Peter served as well, but it’s barely mentioned. Bringing the play to the post-Vietnam era might add an extra dimension to Homecoming. And O’Neill himself noted that “the house, the period costumes, the Civil War surface stuff, these are the masks for what is really a modern psychological drama with no true connections to that period at all.”3 Any war or conflict could be used.The repressive New England Puritanism in the play is more central to the story, but that too can be replicated in any closed, restrictive community. Reducing or eliminating the townfolk shrinks the cast to about eight characters, which, while larger than most casts today, could suffice to create an air of oppressive emotional claustrophobia, if done correctly. And cutting the extraneous text leaves room to play—with melodrama.Melodrama in Mourning is why, other than the length, I believe most theater companies don’t produce it. Despite being a champion of advancing trends in theater—and despite his experimentalism and earlier expressionism—O’Neill still had traditional theater in his bones: Monte Cristo and other plays from James O’Neill’s era were in his DNA. Though considered by some a tragedy, Mourning is rooted in melodrama with its stylized sensationalism and exaggerated characters and its strong dash of Freudian analysis. Ninety years ago, Arthur Hobson Quinn hailed the trilogy as “a landmark in the history of American drama.”4 Today it is these exaggerated emotions, extraordinary characters, and heavy stylizations that can make it a challenge to read, let alone sit through a production of over four hours.Mourning was the first O’Neill play I read as a young actress, and it holds a special place in my heart because of that. I love the scale and the audacity of it, but now as a playwright I see its strengths and its weaknesses in clearer light. It isn’t that the importance of O’Neill’s words is diminished; it’s that today the style he uses to express those words reads as dated and in some respects camp. That is precisely what I would jump head first into, and lean heavily on: the melodrama and the camp. Here’s exactly how I would do it:Mourning Becomes Electra in the style of a telenovela.The serialized dramas produced primarily in Latin America tell a self-contained story and are usually shorter than standard American soap operas (one year or so, versus open-ended). Cutting the cycle to just three hours pushes the boundaries of the genre but doesn’t break them. Of the categories of standard telenovelas, Mourning fits perfectly into the “historical romance” category. Typical telenovela stories feature rivalries between two or more people or families. The Mannons have all that and more, all contained within one family: Christine, who desperately needs the love of two men (Adam and Orin) for different reasons (or are they?); Lavinia, torn between three men (Ezra, Adam, and Orin); Orin, manipulated by both his mother (Christine) and his sister (Lavinia); and Adam, the illegitimate cousin who romances both Christine and Lavinia—but does he love either one? Hijinks indeed. I imagine a Mourning telenova as a “breathless blend of Camp, melodrama, and cliffhanger.”5The finer points on the definition and influence of camp have filled volumes. That some of O’Neill’s earlier works can be seen as camp today is not as far-fetched as it may sound. Susan Sontag’s 1964 “Notes on Camp” names Strange Interlude as being “almost Camp, or could be played as Camp.”6 For this production, we are not working under the view of Camp as lowbrow or kitsch; in fact, Sontag notes, “Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious.’ One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.”7 The frivolity of Camp could actually bring more pathos to the over-the-top seriousness of O’Neill’s words and themes.The production would never dismiss the importance of the narrative and would perform it with all the earnestness it requires—only through a lens of spectacle. Mourning is absolutely spectacle. It was written to be excessive and grand in scope and scale, but not with respect to the Greek temple columns of the exterior house, or the costumes, or the physical properties of the design. Mourning is a spectacle of emotion, a sheer intensity of feeling that builds and builds, on and on, relentlessly to the end. None of that would be lost.A telenovela might be a difficul
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