As O’Neill Saw the Theatre

The views of America’s most famous playwright on the Broadway of his time seem more pertinent today

Although Eugene O’Neill died eight years ago this Nov. 27, he continues to be a life force in the theatre.

The only American dramatist to win the Nobel Prize for literature, he is more widely translated and produced today than any playwright except Shakespeare and possibly Shaw. Among the countries where his plays are currently being performed are Japan,
England, Poland, Italy, Brazil, Yugoslavia, the Union of South Africa and Germany—both East and West.

Not a season goes by without an O’Neill production either on or off Broadway, in the movies or on television. His 1920 tragedy, “Diff’rent,” was revived here last month, a revival of ‘‘Mourning Becomes Electra” is planned for Broadway later this season, and the motion-picture version of one of his last—and greatest—plays, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” is now being filmed.

Disgusted with the claptrap that passed for theatrical entertainment in the early Nineteen Hundreds, O’Neill devoted his life to forging a native dramatic literature. He was the first American playwright to succeed in writing tragedies for Broadway and to achieve international stature.

During his thirty years of furious creative effort, O’Neill gave a good deal of thought to the theatre in general—sometimes expressing cosmic theories of drama, sometimes merely carping at conditions that hampered his own vision of what drama could be. He kept up a running commentary, both public and private, until in 1946, ill health forced him into brooding, gloomy silence.

Today, when the serious play shows signs of being elbowed off Broadway by the profit-earning musical, O’Neill’s observations about the theatre have a contemporary significance and sting. The ensuing comments were made by him in letters and interviews between 1920 and 1946:

* * * * *

ON THE STUFF OF PLAYS

“I have an innate feeling of exultance about tragedy, which comes from a great reverence for the Greek feeling for tragedy. The tragedy of Man is perhaps the only significant thing about him.”

* * * * *

“I’ll write about happiness if I ever happen to meet up with that luxury and find it sufficiently dramatic and in harmony with any deep rhythm of life. But happiness is a word. What does it mean? Exaltation; an intensified feeling of the significant worth of man’s being and becoming? Well, if it means that—and not a mere smirking contentment with one’s lot—I know there is more of it in one real tragedy than in all the happy-ending plays ever written.”

* * * * *

“What you say about the slightness of even the best modern plays is exactly the way I feel. To me they are all totally lacking in all true power and imagination—and to me the reason for it is too apparent, in that they make no attempt at that poetic conception and interpretation of life without which drama is not an art form at all, but simply tricky journalism arranged in dialogue.”

* * * * *

“I see life as a gorgeously-ironical, beautifully-indifferent, splendidly-suffering bit of chaos, the tragedy of which gives Man a tremendous significance, while without his losing fight with fate he would be a tepid, silly animal. I say ‘losing fight’ only symbolically, for the brave individual always wins. Fate can never conquer his—or her—spirit. * * * I’m tickled to death with life! I wouldn’t ‘go out’ and miss the rest of the play for anything!”

* * * * *

“I don’t think any real dramatic stuff is created out of the top of your head. That is, the roots of a drama have to be in life, however fine and delicate or symbolic or fanciful the development. I have never written anything which did not come directly or indirectly from some event or impression of my own, but these things often develop very differently from what you expect.”

* * * * *

“I shall never 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 wee they may.”

* * * * *

“Art and politics don’t mix. When a playwright starts writing propaganda, he ceases to be an artist and becomes, instead, a politician.”

* * * * *

“I am never the advocate of anything in any play—except humanity toward humanity.”

* * * * *

“* * * When an artist starts saving the world, he starts losing himself. I know, having been bitten by the salvationist bug myself at tines. But only momentarily, so to speak, my true conviction being that the one reform worth cheering for is the Second Flood, and that the interesting thing about people is the obvious fact that they don’t really want to be saved—the tragic idiotic ambition for self-destruction in them.”

* * * * *

“I love human beings as individuals (as any kind of a crowd, from a club to a nation, they are detestable), but whether I like them or not, I can always understand and not judge them. I have tried to keep my work free from all moral attitudinizing. To me there are no good people or bad people, just people. The same with deeds. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ are stupidities, as misleading and outworn fetishes as Brutus Jones’ silver bullet.”

* * * * *

ON THE WRITING OF PLAYS

“I know what you [a young writer] are up against and how you feel. The only thing is, keep up your confidence that sooner or later you’ll come through, and when you do, it will make everything you have to bear now worth while. And keep on writing, no matter what! That’s the most important thing. As long as you have a job on hand that absorbs all your mental energy, you haven’t much worry to spare over other things. It serves as a suit of armor. At least, that has been my experience.”

* * * * *

“I think my experience ought to be encouraging to those who are trying to write something besides commercial plays. As a matter of fact, there are a great many persons who are trying to write for money, people who have no other motive, and very few who are getting the money. There are fewer writers who are following their own creative instincts, and their chances of making money are much better for that very reason.”

* * * * *

“Believe me, I speak not only from my own experience but from that of every good author I’ve known, when I say these tough breaks in the beginning are the rule, not the exception. They’re a test you have to pass through to prove yourself to yourself. They challenge your determination to write. They try to make you hopeless. They tempt you to quit. The only answer is to fool them by getting mad instead of dejected. Call the publishers all the names in the book—and then go on with your work! Because you have to, because you demand that of yourself, no matter what it costs you. Because to write is the imperative thing. Publication is important but it can wait because it is outside you. What’s inside you can’t wait on the whim or luck of externals.”

* * * * *

“A man’s work is in danger of deteriorating when he thinks he has found the one best formula for doing it. If he thinks that, he is likely to feel that all he needs is merely to go on repeating himself. I certainly haven’t any such delusion. And so long as a person is searching for better ways of doing his work he is fairly safe.”

* * * * *

“* * * I want to do what gives me pleasure and worth in my own eyes, and don’t care to do what doesn’t. I don’t deserve any credit for this ‘noble’ stand because there is no temptation for me to compromise. My ‘happy’ plays have done very well, considering—quite well enough for a person to whom Rolls-Royces and similar titillations mean less than nothing, and who desires no greater extravagance than food, and lots of it.”

* * * * *

“‘The dramatist does not present life, but interprets it within the limitations of his vision. Rise he’s no better than a camera, plus a dictograph. The dramatist works just as Beethoven did, employing every sound in existence, molding tones, giving them new color, new meaning, thus creating music. Well, when a dramatist interprets the world, and thus creates his own world, he uses the human soul, all his life, if you like, as a keyboard. He is the creator of this world and like all creators absolute boss. If he isn’t a sound creative architect his structure crumbles * * * I don’t think it is the aim of the dramatist to be ‘true to life,’ but to be true to himself, to his vision, which may be of life treated as a fairy tale or as a dream.”

* * * * *

“Playwrights are either intuitively keen analytical psychologists—or they aren’t good playwrights. I’m trying to be one. To me, Freud only means uncertain conjecture and explanations about truths of the emotional past of mankind that every dramatist has clearly sensed since real drama began * * * I respect Freud’s work tremendously—but I’m not an addict!”

* * * * *

“My personal interest in the theatre is to see just how much can be done with it—not only for my sake, but for everybody’s sake. The more it is pushed out, the more that can be done with it.”

* * * * *

“Plays should never be written with actors or Hollywood in mind. This is a terrific handicap to an author, although few of them seem to realize it. The theatre should be their sole thought. If this were only true, you would find sound development underneath the plays of today. Unfortunately, just the opposite is true. You cannot write a play with Greta Garbo and Darryl F. Zanuck in mind and be honest with yourself.”

* * * * *

ON CRITICS

“The critics in the world to whom I pay any attention I can count on my fingers—well, I’ll be charitable and throw in my toes by way of an optimistic gesture! Generally speaking the critic of any kind of art is simply a defeated, envious, inferior type who knows nothing whatever about his subject.”

* * * * *

“I hate every bone in their heads!”

* * * * *

`’Critics can be divided into three classes: Play Reporters, Professional Funny Men and the men with the proper background or real knowledge of the theatre of all time to entitle them to be critics. The play reporters just happen to be people who have the job of reporting what happens during the evening, the story of the play and who played the parts. I have always found that these people reported the stories of my plays fairly accurately. The professional funny men are beneath contempt. What they say is only of importance to their own strutting vanities. From the real critics I have always had the feeling that they saw what I was trying to do and whether they praised or blamed, they caught the point”

* * * * *

ON THE THEATRE AS BUSINESS

“Bad plays are failing every day, and the foxy businessmen have made some mighty bad guesses as to what the public wants.”

* * * * *

“If the United States Steel Corporation were run on the basis of a theatre for one week, Judge Cary would be out in front of Trinity with a tin cup.”

* * * * *

“We cannot afford to experiment in an era of the theatre primarily a realtor’s speculation. One mistake and there comes the landlord with a notice of eviction. He is usually not an artist in the theatre, this landlord. He could see Shakespeare boiled alive in Socony gasoline and have qualm only as to our diminishing natural Standard Oil reserves.”

* * * * *

“* * * The landlord system virtually rules out plays which could pay a small profit to all concerned but whiff because of the extortionate rents and guarantees demanded by the real estate theatre sharks, it’s virtual suicide to offer for production.”

* * * * *

“* * * The public is always about ten years ahead of the managers, very likely because the latter have to put up about $20,000 to take a chance on something new.”

* * * * *

“I am afraid I shall soon have to go on a search for an insane—therefore truly generous—millionaire and start my own theatre * * * I honestly am getting awfully fed up with the eternal show-shop from which nothing ever seems to emerge except more show-shop. It’s a most humiliating game for an artist.”

* * * * *

ON THE THEATRE’S FUTURE

“The theatre of the present must be destroyed. Let us then first—oh sweet and lovely thought!—poison all the actors, then guillotine the managers, hang the playwrights—with one omission—feed the critics to the lions—except you, of course [Oliver M Sayler]—and as a final act of purification, call upon a good God to send a second flood to wipe out the audience, root and branch. Being a just God and a Great Producer, He will no doubt spare the two of us; and we can then rehearse this dialogue on Mount Ararat as a first step toward the Theatre of the Future.”

* * * * *

“The art theatre cannot exist without subsidy and assistance. Heretofore the American idea of the theatre has been dictated by business considerations. Millionaires gave money for art museums, grand opera and archaeological expeditions, but the theatre budget had to balance. Relatively little of their money went to the theatre. The paying of union wages to stagehands, the high cost of traveling units and similar expenses make it almost impossible for the art theatre to exist without financial aid.”

* * * * *

“I believe we have the best directors, the best writers, the best actors and the best scenic artists in the world right in this country, but all of them are going along each in his own way. If all this talent could be collected and made to work together I am certain that productions could be given here that would be unequaled.”

* * * * *

“The hope of developing a real spirituality, a real understanding and cooperation between all concerned in the production of plays in this country lies in the development of a repertory theatre where actors may be assured of experience and permanency. If actors are to work for a play in the same spirit that animates the Moscow Art Players, where the same player will give the biggest or the least part the same amount of study and enthusiasm, they must be retained throughout the year; they must feel that they are part of the whole group. The American theatre today finds itself in a blind alley. Everything is set to go on but the actor. He wants to go on but the system blocks the way. He cannot get the experience he needs and wants because there is no place to get it.”

* * * * *

“Almost the first words I remember my father [the famous actor, James O’Neill] saying, are ‘The theatre is dying.’ And those words seem to me as true today as when he said them. But the theatre must be a hardy wench, for although she is still ailing, she will never die as long as she offers an escape”