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Chapter 1: Introduction

Experimentation, The Wooster Group, and Early O’Neill

Rick Mitchell

The very roots of modern drama—which in the US is dated from Eugene O’Neill’s early plays—came from the avant garde.

—Christopher Innes, Avant-Garde Theatre: 1892-19921

The Wooster Group restores fire, outrage, scandale, and the sensation of something new.

—Peter Sellars, Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group2

Not unlike the early work of another theatrical giant of the twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht, whose first play—the poetic one-act Baal (1918)—some now consider to be more original and timely than his great full-length dramas, some of O’Neill’s early plays could be more effective today than his later masterworks. Ironically, the over-identification of O’Neill with his late dramas of psychological realism can cause him to be viewed as Brecht’s antithesis in spite of his early plays utilizing expressionism, theatricality, and protagonists-shaped-by-history that adumbrate Brecht’s epic theater. Due in large part to their innovative form, several of O’Neill’s early one-acts—hammered out within the progressive crucible of the art-theater of the Provincetown Players, which produced the works between 1916 and 1922—are still aesthetically and politically relevant, especially when produced in ways that de-ossify and recontextualize the texts, thereby enabling their inherent theatrical potential, encrusted and altered by time, to break through during performance.

In this introductory chapter, I’ll be discussing some of the plays’ innovations and the Wooster Group, the experimental theater company which produced, many decades later, several of O’Neill’s one-acts that were originally mounted by the Provincetown Players. I won’t, however, be spending a great deal of time examining specific details of the Wooster Group productions of O’Neill, since two of this book’s chapters—by Murphet and Hunter—already do that, as does an interview with Wooster Group artist Kate Valk, while the essays by Fiet, Dawahare, and Hernando-Real provide thorough, detailed analyses of several plays themselves, and relevant contexts. This chapter will focus primarily on the Wooster Group’s approach to O’Neill’s texts, experimental peformance in general, and some of the innovative aspects of O’Neill’s early dramas.

The Wooster Group and O’Neill

Whether working with realistic dialogue by Arthur Miller, a “hot” routine by black vaudeville comic Pigmeat Markham—who regularly performed in blackface, for mostly black audiences, from the nineteen-thirties through nineteen-fifties—or O’Neill’s early experimental work, the Wooster Group, which began in the mid-1970s, remains unapologetically experimental. In his book American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History, Arnold Aronson provides an overview of the Wooster Group’s approach to theater-making as he discusses the company’s Route 1 & 9 (1981), which began with Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and soon incorporated other texts and different performance genres:

By breaking down the structure (“language”) of a particular play, resituating it, and placing it in juxtaposition to other shards and fragments of culture (other “language systems” as it were), the underlying assumptions and social codes of the original texts were exposed, and new meanings and understandings emerged. In this way, classical works could be reintegrated into contemporary popular culture, but always through the prism of the collective vision of the Wooster Group.3

Since the ensemble of artists shapes the work collaboratively, the artists’ roles are not strictly limited, as in a conventional theater production, to actor, designer, director, etc. Founding company member and actor Kate Valk, for example, prefers to be called an artist rather than an actor since, in addition to acting, she participates in developing the work. In the Wooster Group’s recent production, Early Shaker Spirituals (2014), another of the company’s active founding members, Elizabeth LeCompte—the director of nearly every piece the company has produced over its three-plus decades of existence—has reversed primary roles with Valk, who is now directing LeCompte and the play’s other actors.

While working in a collective fashion, usually under the direction of LeCompte (a recent exception was the Early Plays [2012], a collaborative production with the New York City Players directed by the Players’ Richard Maxwell), the company’s way of making theater remains eclectic and irreducible to a particular style. As Aronson further elaborates,

it was as if the group took a Brechtian sense of alienation from the Performance Group [the company from which the Wooster Group emerged], chance methodology from [John] Cage, a minimalist emphasis upon the frame over content from the art world, and a non-hierarchical approach to culture from postmodernism, and then mixed it through the solipsistic and self-referential world of performance art.4

Productions by the Wooster Group often feature numerous written texts, even when one of them is a full-length (usually cut-up and shortened) play, although the company found it unnecessary to add other written texts to its productions of O’Neill’s stylistic bookends, The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape, because these two expressionistic plays already offer a pliable theatrical form that realistic plays lack.

Another production, the aforementioned Early Plays, featured three of O’Neill’s early “sea plays”—The Moon of the Caribbees, Bound East for Cardiff, and The Long Voyage Home. Each short one-act was performed in its entirety, as written, although in an affectless manner that foregrounded the writing itself, bringing to mind Brecht’s notion of the onstage “literarization” of a play which Brecht believed could facilitate “complex seeing.”5 By stripping away conventional aspects of realistic acting, such as empathy and accents, from dialogue that is meant to be spoken with accents, director Maxwell created a more literal presentation of the plays which, by blocking the spectator’s usual empathetic identification with dramatic characters, allowed the spectator to hear the writing more clearly, including O’Neill’s oddly spelled lines of dialect. This distancing effect also helped to undercut aspects of the plays that could be construed (by today’s standards) as overly expository or melodramatic. Subsequently, the spectator was able to gain a renewed appreciation for the originality of O’Neill’s writing, as writing, even within these short one-acts which, while crucially important to the development of American drama (as discussed later in the chapter), are still considered minor within O’Neill’s oeuvre.

The one other O’Neill play utilized by the Wooster Group, within their production of Point Judith (1980), was none other than Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the realistic, personally cathartic full-length drama that cemented O’Neill’s legacy with its posthumous premiere in 1956. Focusing on a single character, played by Spalding Gray, Point Judith presented a brief (but intense) version of O’Neill’s long play as part of a montage of other texts, including an opening piece, Rig, by Jim Strahs—which Strahs based on Wooster Group improvs that came out of Long Day’s Journey—as well as a film. Long Day’s Journey Into Night itself—whose regular running time can exceed three hours—was done as “a thirteen-minute version…at breakneck speed.”6 The radical cutting-up of the text, along with the performance’s extremely rapid pace and frenetic, non-realistic movement, subverted the work’s realistic conventions, which were further undermined by the cross-gender casting that featured Willem Dafoe as Mary, the character based on O’Neill’s morphine-addicted mother.

In productions by the Provincetown Players and (during very different times) the Wooster Group, several of O’Neill’s early plays have shown themselves to be both formally innovative and dramatically effective. Indeed, along with many of his other plays that pre-date his late masterworks of realism, these plays provide “a dynamic, imaginative world replete with theatricalism,”7 suggesting that O’Neill was intensely involved with a wide range of aesthetic strategies.

Theatrical Experimentation: 1922

Although the Wooster Group deploys, today, a non-realistic, postmodern aesthetic that enables them to re-energize O’Neill’s nearly century-old texts for contemporary audiences, the original productions of some of the same plays still required a decidedly non-realistic and non-naturalistic mise-en-scène. The 1922 production of The Hairy Ape, for example, which O’Neill considered a “direct descendant” of The Emperor Jones, demanded a highly theatrical presentation. As O’Neill himself advised in the stage directions at the top of scene one: “The treatment of this scene, or of any other scene in the play, should by no means be naturalistic.”8 (See p. 123.) Suggesting that the non-naturalistic mise-en-scène requested by O’Neill was integral to all aspects of the play’s original production, critical reviews of the play pointed to a lone actress who veered from the dramatist’s above stage direction. As Ronald H. Wainscott notes, the only performer “singled out for ineptitude”9 was Mary Blair, who played Mildred, the young woman who visits the stokehole. According to O’Neill’s stage directions the character should look “as if the vitality of her stock had been sapped before she was conceived.”10 (See p. 124.) Yet “Blair’s emotional methods [according to Wainscott]…almost precluded her ability to approach such an artificial [theatrical] character.”11 Subsequently, when the production moved uptown from the Provincetown Players’ Playwrights’ Theatre to Broadway, the director replaced Blair with an actress capable of performing in a style that was more in synch with the play’s theatricality.

The critical praise for actor Louis Wolheim, who played The Hairy Ape’s protagonist, Yank, also suggests the importance of non-naturalistic acting to the production. Wolheim, a Princeton graduate and former boxer who, according to critic Brooks Atkinson, helped turn the drama “into a savage hubub with devastating philosophical and political overtones,”12 “alternately engaged and alienated his audience, always returning to the empathic suffering in Yank’s journey.”13 Apparently, Wolheim’s acting style, which was also noted for its intelligence, alternated between the sort of engagement and alienation, empathetic identification and distancing that would later become hallmarks of Brecht’s persistently non-naturalistic epic theater.

The critical and commercial success of The Hairy Ape, as well as the professional limitations of the Provincetown Players, which had originally been founded as an amateur company, led to the break up of the Players shortly after the production (although a watered-down version of the company would eventually manage to reconstitute itself, from 1925-1929, without O’Neill). Nonetheless, the success of the expressionistic, highly stylized The Hairy Ape, appearing two years after The Emperor Jones first established O’Neill’s international reputation, was a fitting culmination to the dramatist’s incredibly productive, mutually beneficial six-year tenure with the Provincetown Players.

Although somewhat controversial for its “squalid” dialogue—the NYPD unsuccessfully tried to close the production down for using obscene language—reviewers of the play generally found aesthetic value in its slang-filled dialogue and, especially, in the play’s theatricality, which included masked characters. Critic Walter Prichard Eaton, for example—who saw The Hairy Ape during its original run at the Provincetown Players’ “dingy little playhouse on Macdougal Street”14—suggests that the drama’s theatricality was central not only to the work’s success, but also to the future of American theater:

Certainly, never on our stage has such use been made of the rank realism of vulgar speech… We may say also quite as certainly, I think, no such fusion of dialogue and scenery, of the intellectual, the emotional, and the pictorial, into a single thing which is only to be described by the word theatrical, has ever before been accomplished by an American playwright… In Eugene O’Neill the new art of the theater in America has found its playwright at last. To see “The Hairy Ape” is to see the bright promise of what is to come, not the pale promise of what has been.15

Indeed, the Provincetown Players’ production of The Hairy Ape, the last of O’Neill’s dramas that the company would produce, “stood apart as a leading theatrical event not just of the season, but the decade.”16

Old-School Criticism and the Great American Playwright

Although many of his plays were highly theatrical, much criticism of O’Neill remains rooted in a dated approach to literature and theater that prioritizes not only realism, but also biographical interpretation. This is due, in large part, to the enormous impact of O’Neill’s autobiographical Long Day’s Journey Into Night, considered one of the greatest plays of modern drama, as well as to the oft-consulted, still-influential “definititve” biographies by Louis Sheaffer, Travis Bogard, and Arthur & Barbara Gelb, which in addition to covering O’Neill’s life, interpret most of his plays biographically. Plus, O’Neill’s Irish-Catholic family history—which includes being raised by a conflicted, drug-addicted mother, as well as a famous actor-father from Ireland (who grew up dirt poor) against whom O’Neill rebelled, socially and aesthetically, on his way to becoming “the first great American playwright”—is quite dramatic in itself, and thus further encourages biographical readings of the plays.

The over-reliance on biographical literary analysis is not, however, the only reason for an under-appreciation of some of O’Neill’s early plays. Although highly theatrical dramas such as The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape resist simple biographical interepretation, those plays, along with the rest of O’Neill’s early dramas, are frequently depicted as earnest “apprentice work.” Subsequently, O’Neill’s early, experimental playwriting (and much experimental drama in general) is viewed as being less mature, and thus inherently less effective, than the later realistic drama. In his critique of a standard bearer of O’Neill criticism, Travis Bogard, Thomas F. Connolly points to the limitations of this sort of scholarship, which can drastically distort and diminish O’Neill’s wide-ranging accomplishments as an innovative playwright:

Such commentary sees O’Neill’s body of work as a dramaturgical Road to Damascus. O’Neill’s true dramatic mission is to be a realistic writer steeped in bourgeois psychology, rendered unique via O’Neill’s aesthetic of autobiography. All past plays are prologue to Long Day’s Journey Into Night.17

In spite of this type of all-too-common criticism which suggests otherwise, the main focus of O’Neill’s career was not on writing plays that adhered to the conventions of mainstream realism. While the late masterworks are, indeed, high points of American drama, except “for [those] final, putatively autobiographical plays—O’Neill has scant interest in conversation plays.”18

The Wooster Group and the

Importance of Form

The Wooster Group, too, has little interest in conversational realistic plays, or in staging them in conventional ways. According to Elizabeth LeCompte, her process of directing a written play always entails reinvention rather than a simple restaging of the text. What she says of her approach to a work by another groundbreaking playwright of modern drama, Anton Chekhov, is equally relevant to her direction of The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape: “I’m not just going to do Chekhov [or O’Neill]. I’m trying to—I’m trying to make it present for me. Which means literally reinventing. I mean—‘reinventing’ it—it’s an over-used word. I mean reinventing it from the ground up.”19

Even if LeCompte were to reverse her renovative aesthetic inclinations and try to stage O’Neill (or any dramatist) in a traditional manner, she could not simply return to the theatrical past of the Provincetown Players and remain there for the duration of an O’Neill one-act play. Besides, such theatrical time-travel—especially from the twenty-first century—would prove antithetical to the relentless experimentation of both the Provincetown Players and O’Neill during the nineteen-tens and -twenties, not to mention the Wooster Group. Plus, as Brecht reminds us, “Literary forms [of the past] have to be checked against [current] reality.”20 Yet the reality of the present is, like O’Neill’s texts, also tethered to the past, while performance takes place in the here and now. Thus, the presentation of a written play will always contain inherent tensions—between history and “the now,” the anterior existence of the written script (and the rehearsal period, etc.) and live performance—although conversational realism will often attempt to conceal such tensions.

As O’Neill continued to develop and experiment with an aesthetically diverse body of dramatic work during the nineteen-twenties, Bertolt Brecht, of whom O’Neill was surely unaware at the time, began exploring drama’s inherent tensions within his epic theater. Similar tensions were also being explored by Walter Benjamin, a friend of Brecht’s who, in addition to writing about Brecht’s theater and other products of modernity, encouraged a non-linear, montage-based approach to history that may have been influenced by epic theater. Benjamin believed that, since it is impossible to efface the present and “show things as they really were,” the historian should show history as “time filled by the presence of the now.”21 In other words, the historian must brush history against the grain because traditional history, treating the past as if it exists in itself, reifies the past and thus engenders mystification. In a passage reminiscent of Brecht’s belief that traditional (with-the-grain) realistic drama encourages passive (rather than active) spectatorship, Benjamin observes that “the history which showed things ‘as they really were’ was the strongest narcotic of the century.”22 Similarly, a “faithful” (i.e., traditional) (re)production of a hundred-year-old play which purports to show the work “as it was meant to be” could narcoticize spectators into thinking that they’re seeing “what really was,” and thereby discourage them from becoming aware of a work’s dialectical tensions, as well as its relationship to their own historical moment, and vice versa.

Herbert Blau, evoking the distancing techniques of both Brecht’s epic theater and, indirectly, Benjaminian historiography, suggests that directors should exploit theater’s inherent tensions by taking “things [including plays themselves] out of perspective, restoring them to history.”23 Brecht wrenches conventional perspectives away from spectators by disrupting their empathetic identification with the play’s characters, and by utilizing montage-like juxtapositions that require the audience to fill in gaps in order to find meaning. While lacking—at least on the surface—Brecht’s interest in social change, the Wooster Group’s experimental aesthetics similarly disrupt conventions, but in more extreme ways that move performance even further beyond traditional realism. Although a Wooster Group-style production of a play by O’Neill will inevitably show the text in a new light, it is important to keep in mind that even realistic productions of a particular work will always create, from production to production, a somewhat different experience for the play’s respective audiences. As Marvin Carlson observes,

a dramatic author…must recognize that his characters are in a much more radical sense only partly his own, since in the theater they will be embodied by persons whose views of reality will be necessarily different…and when the play is created [or mounted] in another chronotope its discourse will necessarily move even further from his own. In addition, the whole production apparatus, including the director and potentially a whole range of contributing artists working on scenery, lighting, sound, costumes, and so on, will provide yet other views of reality and fresh “voices” in the articulation of the produced play.24

New contexts always create, according to Carlson, a “fresh perspective on an inherited expression, the play and its performance tradition.”25 Yet performance contexts, which can include a different time period than that of the dramatic text and/or radically different approaches to theater-making, vary widely, as do the levels of “freshness”—or staleness, as the case may be—of productions of the same play. Thus, one must distinguish conventional productions, those that attempt to reproduce the (often realistic) play in ways intended by the author (and genre), from more experimental work that opens up interpretive possibilities. Experimental theater companies such as the Wooster Group, for example, will often foreground (rather than conceal) theater’s signifying processes in order to complicate dramatic representation, which is never as simple or transparent as many spectators assume.

Dramatic realism, on the other hand, limits a production’s ability to help audiences gain new insights. Rather than creating a performative environment that explores and makes visible the dialectical tension between past and present, actor and character, realism smooths over such tensions while helping to perpetuate the (apparently stable and thus unchangable) status quo. Indeed, realistic dramatic form, even moreso than a work’s content—radical or otherwise—encourages the audience to continue seeing theater, and thus the world, through the lens of hegemonic ideology. As Elin Diamond points out, “Brechtian hindsight” enables us to see that traditional realism

mystifies the process of theatrical signification. Because it naturalizes the relation between character and actor, setting and world, realism operates in concert with ideology. And because it depends on, insists on a stability of reference, an objective world that is the source and guaranator of knowledge, realism surreptitiously reinforces (even if it argues with) the arrangements of the world.26

Paraphrasing Derrida, Diamond suggests that realism “is mimesis at its most naive—its positivist moment.”27

Revivifying Early O’Neill:

The Postmodern Turn

In order to circumvent realism’s aesthetic and ideological limitations, a contemporary theater company could, like the Wooster Group, radically undermine a dramatic work’s realistic conventions. Such a move could, according to Michael Vanden Heuvel in his book on experimental theater, help to

revivify traditional textuality by incorporating avant-garde idioms and performance strategies as a language within the dramatic text, an idiom appropriate to the theatricalized and transformational sensibilities of the present day.28

Or a theater company could begin with an already experimental text which, due to its “avant-garde idioms,” offers greater potential in itself for the destabilization of conventional representation and thinking. Unsurprisingly, the Wooster Group has—as suggested above—been drawn to O’Neill’s early, more experimental works, which they’ve presented without inserting other written scripts into the plays (as they are wont to do), or radically cutting-up the original, although the Wooster Group still subverts realistic elements and traces that these plays contain.

The Wooster Group productions that utilize more or less realistic texts—such as L.S.D.: Just the High Points, brief sections of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible or, in Routes 1 & 9, parts of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, as well as the previously discussed Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Point Judith)—usually feature only brief, cut-up samples of those texts, which the company radically juxtaposes with other texts and performance forms while imploding illusionistic conventions. O’Neill’s early texts such as The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape—much more theatrical than realistic—remain more amenable, “as-is,” to innovative theater productions, which could help to explain why the Wooster Group has chosen to present those plays, unlike the more realistic plays they’ve worked on, in their entirety.

I do not mean to suggest, however, that these plays can be simply put onstage, unembellished by revivifying performance strategies, in the twenty-first century. The Emperor Jones, for example, features an African-American protagonist, Brutus Jones, whose language—which dominates the play—is sometimes not far removed from turn-of-the-century blackface minstrelsy. Rather than alter the written text, however, the Wooster Group altered how the text was performed by having Kate Valk, a white, female performer, play Brutus Jones. While Valk’s race and gender destabilized conventions of realistic representation, any claims to “authenticity” implied by the dramatic text were further subverted by Valk’s onstage appearance, which included blackface make-up, her neck painted red, and a colorful, clearly non-Western costume from the highly stylized Japanese theater form of Kabuki.

Surprisingly, at least for me, Valk did not see the Emperor’s dialogue as being at all problematic. During a 2013 interview (published in chapter seven), she told me that she’s widely read in African-American literature, of which she’s very fond—she especially likes Zora Neale Hurston’s work—and she views Jones’ language as a “white man’s take,” which she nonetheless finds to be both musical and highly poetic. Positively responding to the play’s dialogue upon first reading the role aloud with the Wooster Group, Valk found the Emperor’s words to be “like an aural hallucination. It was like music to me,” she recalled. Additionally, she experienced a strong attraction to Jones himself: “I felt it deeply that I had to play that character… There was no distance; it was me the first time I read it.” I still assumed, however, that she might have altered some of the dialogue, but when I asked her if she had adhered to O’Neill’s script, she was taken aback: “Of course!” she responded. “It’s like notes of music. Why would I try to play Bach and generalize?”

Surely, Valk’s intimate, even passionate connection to the character and the play’s language had much to do with her tour-de-force performance and the show’s critical acclaim. At the same time, however, the various production elements—such as Valk’s blackface (along with her white, unpainted hands), her non-Western Kabuki costume and Kabuki-like dances, the microphone through which she continually spoke, and the play’s overall mise-en-scène influenced by Kabuki and Noh theater, as well as her gender and race—distanced and undermined realistic conventions of representation by displaying the tensions between Valk and her character, performance and the written script. Additionally, the play’s distancing elements allowed the spectator to partake, like Valk herself, in the pleasure of O’Neill’s text, which would surely be more painful than pleasurable should it be performed today without distancing devices that help the spectator to appreciate the writing, and even blackface performance, as artistic constructions rather than merely as (problematic) attempts at “authentic” representation.

One could also view the Wooster Group’s complex blackface aesthetic, which the company has utilized for other productions, too, most notably Routes 1 & 9, as a way of foregrounding the unpresentable, a perspective that would align the company’s production of The Emperor Jones with a concept of postmodernism developed by Jean-François Lyotard. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard argues that the postmodern

puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable.29

While the playing of Brutus Jones in blackface could be read as a “bad form” in “bad taste,” the sordid history often associated with blackface minstrelsy could short-circuit, in the audience, potential collective feelings of nostalgia for the past. Ironically, however, Valk’s brand of blackface performance—played with impressive artistry by a woman in a strange-looking robe, speaking into a microphone on a stand—helps to distance and thus make palatable, and even enjoyable, O’Neill’s seemingly unpresentable dialogue. Moreover, the virtuoso, Obie Award-winning actor Valk—who understands O’Neill’s writing sensuously, as an artist who performs it night after night in front of an audience—strongly believes that the dialogue possesses powerful aesthetic value. And her assertion seems to be supported by the numerous laudatory reviews of both the show and her remarkable performance.

Additionally, the foregrounding of the unpresentable, combined with Valk’s/Jones’ complicated theatrical presence (a white women in blackface and Kabuki attire playing a black man written by a white dramatist), makes it difficult, if not impossible, to judge the play in conventional ways. According to Lyotard, such resistance to judgment is common within the work of the postmodern artist:

the text he [or she] writes, the work he [or she] produces [or performs] are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work.30

The antithesis of dramatic realism and its apparently stable, ideologically secure referents, postmodern performance resists simple categorization.

A primary means of destabilizing categories, which brings us back to Brecht, is the use of quotation that interrupts and short-circuits conventional, taken-for-granted processes of signification. As Walter Benjamin observes in “What Is Epic Theater?”: “interruption…is the basis of quotation. To quote a text involves the interruption of its context.”31 Through Valk’s highly stylized, blackface-Kabuki presentation that undermines the play’s normally stable referents, her performance acts as a continual quotation device which interrupts the conventional context(s) of O’Neill’s play, including its presumed claims to “authenticity,” as well as other conventional/constructed contexts, such as gender, race, and even blackface minstrelsy itself.

Thus, unlike the written script of O’Neill’s drama, or even a new-yet-conventional production of The Emperor Jones, the Wooster Group’s performative deployment of quotation is able to set aside, in a way (within quotation marks, but without erasing), the play’s and the production’s more negative aspects while enabling spectators to appreciate other elements of the work, including, especially, Valk’s performance. At the same time, the production’s numerous ironies and its undercutting of empathy strongly encourage the spectator to think, actively, although perhaps in less directed ways than Brecht’s epic theater, in order to find meaning within a performance whose carnivalesque excess upends and complicates so many familiar rules and categories. In fact, “those rules and categories are what the work of art itself [and thus the audience] is looking for.”32

Characters Adrift: Drama of the Inarticulate

While the expressionistic bookends of The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape remain the best known of O’Neill’s early experimental plays, his dramatic innovations that will forever alter American drama begin with his earlier, one-act “sea plays” of the nineteen-tens, often referred to as the S.S. Glencairn Plays (and presented by the Wooster Group/New York City Players as Early Plays). Eschewing the prevalent exclamatory language of the stage of the period, O’Neill achieves a breakthrough for American drama—which had long been considered derivative of European drama and decidedly second-rate—by creating characters whose language is, unlike his own, “low colloquial.” Up until that time, low “vernacular language [on the stage] was used entirely for comic purposes.”33 But with Bound East for Cardiff (written 1914; produced 1916)—the piece which first excited the Provincetown Players about working with the then-unknown dramatist—O’Neill begins to utilize low-colloquial language in ways that will reinvigorate American playwriting. As Jean Chothia observes,

O’Neill finds in the speech of the uneducated man a model through which he can show unaccommodated man locked in to himself but unsure, because of the limitations of the communicative faculty, of what the self is… He uses an individual’s inarticulacy to explore the wider inarticulacies of the human condition.34

O’Neill’s motley, international crew of sailors forever adrift at sea, as well as his searching protagonists of The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape, embody, through their fragmented, slang-filled language, inarticulate ways of being, as well as the difficulty of making sense of an increasingly complex, modern world. Thanks, in large part, to his early plays populated by stammering, inarticulate, lumpen-proletarian anti-heroes, O’Neill is largely responsible for creating, by the mid-ninteen-twenties, an American stage that is “changed beyond recognition.”35

Although O’Neill’s dramatic dialogue would utilize more standard forms of American English after The Hairy Ape, the playwright remained aware that he could never quite master such language, in spite of his efforts. In a frequently cited passage, Edmund, young O’Neill’s stand-in in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, laments to his father in the drawing room of their New London, Connnecticut home that he lacks facility with poetic language:

The makings of a poet. No, I’m afraid I’m like the guy who is always panhandling for a smoke. He hasn’t even got the makings. He’s got only the habit. I couldn’t touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That’s the best I’ll ever do.36

Unsurprisingly, and in spite of the dramatic power of O’Neill’s more inarticulate characters, critics often view this passage as a confession by the playwright which, in turn, supports their assertions that O’Neill can’t write effective dialogue. Yet the playwright, unlike Edmond, believed that a writer’s limitations with language were more related to the historical moment than to personal shortcomings. O’Neill wrote in a letter to Arthur Hobson Quinn, for example, that his play Mourning Becomes Electra would have been stronger if he had been able to provide it with “a great language.” Such language eluded him, he informed Quinn ten years after The Hairy Ape, because

I haven’t got that. And, by way of self-consolation, I don’t think from the evidence of all that’s being written today, that great language is possible for anyone living in the discordant, broken, faithless rhythm of our time. The best one can do is be pathetically eloquent by one’s moving dramatic inarticulations.37

Today, the legacy of O’Neill’s dramaturgy of the inarticulate—especially pronounced in his early works of the nineteen-tens and up through The Hairy Ape—can be found in innovative plays by more recent generations of American dramatists. Since O’Neill is now so fully identified, however, with the relatively articulate dialogue of his late realistic plays, especially Long Day’s Journey Into Night, few theater scholars or artists readily recognize the connections between the low-colloquial dialogue of O’Neill’s early plays that transformed American playwriting “beyond recognition” and later dramas-of-the-inarticulate such as (to name only a few) Mamet’s American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, Shepard’s True West, Parks’ Topdog/Underdog, or Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, whose Stanley Kowalski has much in common with (the more theatrical) Yank, the brutish protagonist of The Hairy Ape.

Epilogue

Although O’Neill is still a major figure of modern drama, the immense diversity of his extensive body of work has been given short shrift. Admittedly, not all of the dramatist’s numerous plays were successful, and some are even—especially by today’s standards—somewhat plodding. Yet O’Neill’s wide-ranging oeuvre—throughout which the dramatist experiments with a myriad of aesthetic strategies, in works from twenty minutes to four-plus hours long that include historical epics, dramas with masks, plays based on myths, Freudian theory, expressionism, philosophy, Greek tragedies, the Bible, and his own life—is, if nothing else, worthy of further exploration, both artistically and scholarly. Unfortunately, however, his great, later works of realism too often overshadow the formal innovations of his early, experimental plays, which—when performatively re-invented by companies such as the Wooster Group—possess the potential to hold the stage effectively, even today.