By EUGENE BURR

Mourning Becomes Electra (or, if you care for subtitles, Down the Centuries with Eugene O’Neill) is the long-awaited trilogy by American’s First Dramatist, which the Theater Guild raptly presented at 4 O’clock Monday afternoon and kept on presenting until late Monday night.  As everyone – including the Scandinavian – must know by this time, it is composed of three plays concerning the same characters, each play a separate dramatic entity or at least intended to be so by the author, but if anyone tells you you can enjoy the evening’s entertainment without having been present at the afternoon’s, leave him quickly.  The three parts are intertwined in theme, treatment, ploy and everything else.

The plays are an adaptation and modernization of the Electra theme which the ancient Greeks handled more briefly and (may curses be upon the head of the blasphemer!) a great deal better.  In O’Neill’s hands the locale is shifted to New England, the time is shifted to the period immediately following the Civil War, and the audience is shifted out to supper and back to the theater again during the almost unending course of action.  The Guild is presenting the show (a three-ring circus it is, with a few extra rings to go under the eyes of the customers) as both the second and third productions of its 14^th subscription season.  It could present it as an entire season in itself and this corner would certainly not argue about it.

It might be overrash to state that Mr. O’Neill’s Mourning is a good one-acter stretched into 14 acts, but it is definitely a good three-act melodrama pulled out to a marathon by an author who takes himself too seriously, by an author who wastes his own and his audiences’ time by delving into morbid psychology that is just as unreal, just as fundamentally unimportant – and certainly as unentertaining – as the sentimentality that is verboten by his devotees.  It is this taking of himself too seriously which is, at bottom, the cause of all the unnecessary turmoil at the Guild.  When in brief intervals, such as the grandly effective scene that is laid on the deck of a clipper, O’Neill forgets his self-seriousness and writes straight meller, he is splendidly effective and moving, bringing back the day s of those fine earlier pieces which were done before he was saddled with the realization of being America’s First Dramatist.

For Mourning Becomes Electra is really just meller, meller like, say, Payment Deferred, only far less ably written and with far less real ability to move the emotions of an audience.  The magnificent acting makes it occasionally stirring, but for long, long, stretches one merely watches the twisted puppets of Maestro O’Neill going thru their prescribed paces without feeling much more than a perfunctory interest in what they are going to do. 

Your reporter realizes that all of this is going to be set down as rank heresy and also as rankly untrue.  Intelligent faces will bob out of the dark at him to exclaim that they were profoundly moved.  But those intelligent faces will be talking thru their probably just-as-intelligent hats.  O’Neill, digging and searching thru the muck and scum of the human soul, emerges with his mud /17/ dy monstrosities, proudly exhibiting them to a breathless worlds as something real and fundamental and profound.  They are actually none of those things.  They are far from ordinary human experience; profound, possibly, if we mistake abstruse unearthing for profundity, but certainly ordinary human reaction in a theater –at least as O’Neill present them.  They utterly fail to plumb the depths of emotion and experience; they are merely very special cases of abnormal psychology placed upon a stage and given pretentious platitudes to mouth, platitudes that reach profundity in the popular mind merely because they have been written by O’Neill.

These same characters, treated as the melodramatic figures that they are, might have been powerfully effective.  But, smothered in the author’s voluminous spadings from the back of the human mind, they lose their true and original values, assuming false ones that are never borne out by fact.

It is the seriousness with which O’Neill takes himself and with which he is taken by almost everybody else that indirectly imparts those false meanings.  The trilogy, written as an unknown’s first attempt, would be considered the arresting but misguided outpourings of a playwright who had still to realize the comparative importance of his various values.  But, coming from O’Neill, it is all-sacrosanct.  Audiences going to the show are self-consciously intelligent, and the whole affair assumes the aspect of an event.  The customers did everything but stand up and sing a hymn yesterday afternoon before the curtain rose on the first play.

Getting belatedly to the plot, it details (and how it details!) the story of Lavinia Mannon, who seeks to keep her father’s honor while her mother galavants about with a sea captain.  Father is away fighting the Civil War, and things are further complicated by the fact that Vinnie wouldn’t mind having the captain for herself.  She forces her mother to throw over the lover, and the older woman, wild with the only that has reached her life since the bleak dawn of her honeymoon, plans to murder the father on his return.  She manages to do it, undetected by any but Lavinia, and the first act ends with Pa Mannon dead in bed, Ma Mannon in a faint on the floor and Vinnie prostrate upon her knees.  And the audience can go out for supper, leaving a body-strewn stage.

The second play features the return from war of Orin, Vinnie’s brother, between whom his mother there was always a powerful bond.  Vinnie tells him of the liaison and the murder, and proves her statements when she takes him to follow Ma Mannon on a visit to the captain’s ship.  Orin waits until his mother has gone, shoots the sailor to avenge family honor and then goes back home with the news.  His mother seen the stark and horrible passing of the love to which her starved life has clung, goes quietly into the house and shoots herself.

The third play shows Orin going mad with remorse for having indirectly murdered his beloved mother, and Vinnie, her stern duty to the family code completed, out to live, live, live!  She engages herself to a good-looking young swain, but Orin follows his mother along the suicide route, the ghosts of the dead rise up to confound Vinnie’s stern sense of justice, and she breaks her engagement, shutting herself up forever with the evil past in the grim and moldering house of Mannon.

That’s all there is to it, but O’Neill tells it with minute attention to every emotional detail and with his usual complete incompetence in even the fundamentals of recent play-making.  As an example, his “planting” in the first scene is the most obvious since the days when butlers would talk to telephones in order to let the audience in on the plot.  And the play, so long that its genuine emotional values are lost and foundered in the surging and disordered sea of distracting detail, is padded unconscionably.  It is complicated with overtones, such as the captain’s relation to the Mannons, that have no bearing on the fundamental plot.  Its outlines are buried deep, and the whole thing is far too long and too diffuse – too minutely occupied with abstruse psychological states – to leave a single, lasting impression.

All of this, however, doesn’t mean that it won’t be popular.  The splendid cast alone should make it so, with Alice Brady turning in a grand performance as Lavinia; Earle Larimore doing well by Orin, the minor parts all being capable hands and Nazimova rising to almost unscalable heights as the mother.  Nazimova, in fact, turned in so sustained an emotional performance that it must be seen to be believed.

Mourning Becomes Electra will, unless the $6 price and the early opening work against it, be popular in spite of all.  Audiences bored stiff will probably stay to the bitter end and go home to tell their friends how magnificently stirring, how classically inevitable, how superhumanly splendid it all is – merely because it happens to be by America’s First Dramatist, he might again turn out a good play, a stirring play, a play that would create a single lasting impression instead of going beyond all possible human endurance thru its diffuseness and the self-conscious iconoclasm of its author.