By WALTER PRICHARD EATON

The director of Odéon in Paris has asked the Drama League of America to select an American play for production at his theatre.  The selection has not yet been made, but the League could not do better than to recommend Eugene O’Neill’s latest drama, “The Hairy Ape,” which is now being exhibited by the Provincetown Players in their dingy little playhouse on Macdougal Street.  “The Hairy Ape” is without question not only the most interesting American play of this season, but the most striking play of many seasons.  It belongs, furthermore, to the future rather than the past; it is forward-facing, suggestive, untraditional.  One’s only fear is that it might prove too strong meat for Paris, where the drama still lingers in the bonds of traditionalism.

“The Hairy Ape” is written in eight short, abrupt scenes, and might almost be called and expressionistic tragic-comedy of modern industrial unrest.  The hero, if so conventional a word can be applied to the leading figure of his play, is mighty stoker called “Yank,” and we see him first, stripped to the waist, with the rest of his half-naked shift, in their fo’e’sle bunk-room.  He can outcurse, outfight, outfeel them all, and he is proud of his powers, proud of his job as a stoker at the heart of the ship, glories to think that he is steel and coal and motion.  “Twenty-five knots an hour! – that’s me!”  We next see the ultra-sophisticated daughter of the owner of the liner, lolling on the deck and pining for the sensation of going down into the stokehole to see how the other half lives.  Another change; the curtains part, and out of the darkness gleam the rims of the boiler-doors.  A bell clangs, the doors swing open, a terrific red glare leaps out at the audience, and Yank and his mates heave in the coal.  The bell clangs again, too soon, and Yank is cursing the engineer with terrific violence, when he turns to see the girl beside him.  She almost faints at the sight of him, cries out that his is a beat, and is dragged away, as he hurls his shovel after her with a horrid oath.  Another change; we are back in the fo’e’sle to see Yank completely upset by the incident, brooding over the depths of social difference revealed to him, burning with hatred, rage, revenge.  He is no longer steel, coal, speed, because he no longer is sure of himself.  To make sure of himself, he is going forth on a mission of revenge.

We see him next on Fifth Avenue. The passers-by are strange, unreal automata, wearing masks all alike.  He makes no more impression on them than if they were dreams; all that happens is that a policeman beats him up and arrests him.  Then we see him in a cell on the Island.  Out of the darkness come the snarls and oaths and horrid howls of other prisoners.  One prisoner reads from the New York Times an attack on the I.W.W., as a menace to civilization.  The Hairy Ape resolves to join the Wobblies.  When we next observe him, he is trying to joint, that he, too, may plant dynamite beneath the steel-magnate’s home.  But the Wobblies throw him out as an agent-provocateur.  Finally, in his puzzled despair, he reaches the gorilla’s cage in the Zoo.  Ah! A brother, the real hairy ape!  He lets the gorilla loose, to go with him on a pilgrimage of destruction.  But the gorilla silently seized him in a deadly embrace and tosses him into the cage, where he dies behind the bars.

Such, in brief, is the story; and there is really no more to it than that – eight flashes of scene which burn on the brain of the beholder the picture of a naked soul in torment, using realistic symbols or fantastic ones, according as each may best serve the purpose.  This, certainly, is not drama as we have known it; it is neither drama of realism nor of poetic suggestion.  It is something new, something strange (though provisioned in “Liliom”) and something so profoundly theatrical that it can not be expressed or even intimated in a printed test.  The text, to be sure, could give a suggestion of Mr. O’Neill’s strange power over language, his ability to make a stream of foul oaths and stoker’s slang imprecations roll in a kind of wild organ-music; but it would only confuse one, perhaps, regarding the “meaning” of the play, simply because it would send one looking for a meaning, as printed words always do, when, in that intellectual sense, the play has no meaning at all.  The puzzled critics who have decided that Mr. O’Neill is preaching class=consciousness and red revolution, and the equally puzzled critics who have decided that he is illustrating how brute force defeats itself, are alike beside the mark; or, perhaps, they are both quite right – what of it?  Here is a soul profoundly shaken in respect of its fundamental faith in itself, and swirled into contest with forces beyond its ken.  How can that abstract struggle be given a concrete, visual, theatrical shape?  To this question “The Hairy Ape” as it appears on stage, is the answer.

Greatly aided by the stage-designs and lighting by Messrs. Cleon Throckmorton and Robert Edmond Jones (indeed, impotent without them), Mr. O’Neill has been able to use the harshest realism as a springboard into startling imaginative effects.  When the Hairy Ape’s soul has been stung with doubt and hatred, the loud laughter of his mates suddenly becomes rhythmic, like the fearful tattoo of a drum.  When the boiler-doors are open, six red, searing searchlight-glares strike into the eyeballs of the audience like flashes from the Inferno.  Amid the masked manikins on Fifth Avenue, the Hairy Ape moves as in a dream, in worlds unrealized.  Most marvelous is the scene in jail.  Only Yank’s cell-door shows in a beam of pallid light; the rest is darkness.  But out of the dark comes the husky voice of the prisoner quoting from the New York Times, and then rises a score of other voices, howling, jeering, cursing, groaning – the terrific strophe of the caged.  The last scene shows the gigantic form of the gorilla behind his bars, dimly silhouetted against /160/ a window just flushed with dawn.  He rises up; one lurching stride and he is out; one crushing embrace, a strangled cry, and Yank is done for; which would be sheer horror and nothing more, if Yank were a realistic character, but which actually is the last theatric symbol which carries to the mind, through ear and eye, the tragedy not of a person, but of a state of soul.

There will be those, no doubt, who will be revolted as Mr. O’Neill’s choice of subject for his expressionistic treatment.  That he takes a soul from out the lowest bowels of a plunging liner, out of grime and heat and sweat and ignorance, out of an atmosphere of foul oaths and obscenity, will offend the delicate, the squeamish, and certainly the pious.  Mr. O’Neill’s language smites as swiftly as the red glare from the boiler-doors.  Yet it is somehow tonic in its stark sincerity, and though it may quite truly play no small part in the startling quality of the play, the quality which brings you up in our seat like a slap in the face, it also is curiously devoid of mean suggestion, rousing instead, a profound pity in all spectators who have imagination enough tot grasp the significant of the drama.

Certainly, never on our stage has such use been made of the rank realism of vulgar speech, a use beside which such attempts at poetry as John Weaver’s “In American” become trivial pipings.  We may say also quite as certainly, I think, no such fusion of dialogue and scenery, of the intellectual, the emotional, the spiritual, and the pictorial, into a single thing which is only to be described by the word theatrical, has ever before been accomplished by and American playwright.  One may call “The Hairy Ape” bizarre; one may call it tragic, or ironic, or gloomy, or terrible, or puzzling, or morbid, or sordid, or beautiful, or moving, or whatever else one’s views and tendencies dictate; but one can not get away from it.  Once in its grip, one’s attention is as helpless to wander as was Yank to escaped from the gorilla.  In Eugene O’Neill the new art of the theatre in America has found the new playwright at last.  To see “The Hairy Ape” is to see the bright promise of what is to come, not the pale reflection of what has been.