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New York Post, October 27, 1931 "Mourning Becomes Electra," Eugene O'Neill's Exciting Trilogy, Is Given an Excellent Production at the GuildBy JOHN MASON BROWNFor exciting proof that the theatre is still
very much alive, that it still has grandeur and ecstasy to offer to
its patrons, that fine acting has not disappeared from behind the
footlights’ glare, that productions which thrill with memorability
are still being made, that scenic design and stage direction can
belong among the fine arts, and that the Theatre Guild, in spite of
any causes for discouragement it may have given in the past, is
still the most accomplished as well as the most intrepid producing
organization in America, you have only to journey to Guild Theatre
these nights and days, and sit before Eugene O’Neill’s new
trilogy. “Mourning
Becomes Electra.” It is a play which
towers above the scrubby output of our present-day theatre as the
Empire State Building soars above the skyline of Manhattan.
Most of its fourteen acts, and particularly its earlier and
middle sections, are too, the kind of radiant austerity which was
part of the glory that was Greece. It is one of the
most distinguished, if not the most distinguished, achievements of
Mr. O’Neill’s career. It
is – as the dull word has it – uneven, but so – as the no less
dull retort phrases it – are the Himalayas.
It has blemishes which are obvious, especially as it reaches
its third section. But
it remains to the end a magnum opus beside which “Strange
Interlude” and most of the earlier, simpler plays sink into
unimportance. For it is an experiment in sheer, shuddering, straightforward
story-telling which widens the theatre’s limited horizons at the
same time that it is exalting and horrifying its patrons. It finds Mr.
O’Neill forgetting the pseudo-scientific jargon of Mother Dynamo
and the mystic laugh of Lazarus, dispensing with such special
technical devices as masks and asides, and writing without any
hindrances of form as an emotionalist. And as an emotionalist, who knows how to dramatize the
curdling rancors of hate, the surging of thwarted passion, and the
taut demands of murder, he has no equal in the contemporary theatre. As his title makes
very clear, Mr. O’Neill’s concern is with one of the grandest,
most spine-twisting tales of murder that the theatre’s history
knows. It is, in short,
the Electra story that he is retelling in more or less modern terms,
substituting the white pillars of a country house in Civil War New
England for the Doric columns of ancient Argos. Mr. O’Neill’s
play, in other words, is a testing of his strength with that fable
of the luckless house of Atreus which Æschylus first treated in the
“Oresteia,” which Sophocles and Euripides both dealt with in
their respective “Electras,” and which such a modern as the late
Hugo von Hofmannsthal vulgarized into a Reinhardtian guignol of
lights and leers and snakelike gestures. It is, as every one
knows, a story of revenge, a saga of the way in which fate calls
upon Electra and her brother Orestes to avenge the murder of their
father, Agamemnon, by slaying their wicked mother, Clytemnestra, and
her no less wicked lover, Ægisthus.
It is a myth which all three of the great tragic dramatists
of Greece have told in their own way, taking their own liberties
with its details, distributing the emphasis according to their own
sensing of its moral and dramatic values, and managing to make a
decidedly their own in each of their independent retellings. Mr. O’Neill,
needles to say, has taken even greater liberties with this classic
myth than any of his ancient predecessors dared to do.
But by taking them, he has made the story very much his own,
without robbing its terrible sequence of catastrophes of either
their force or their essential outlines. Unlike Sophocles and
Euripides, who contented themselves with the writing of a single
play about the “recognition” of the long-separated Electra and
Orestes, and the murder of Clytemnestra and Æschylus for the model
of “Mourning Becomes Electra.”
Like that earliest of Greek tragic writers, Mr. O’Neill has
chosen to give the story in full, to prepare for its coming, to
catch it at the height of its action, and to follow his avengers (he
follows both Electra and Orestes) past the awful deed fate has
demanded of them to the time when the Erinyes (of Furies) are
pursuing them. Accordingly, just as
Æschylus divided his “Oresteia” into the “Agamemnon,”
“The Chœphorore, or Libation Pourers” and “The Eumenides,”
so Mr. O’Neill has divided his “Mourning Becomes Electra” into
three parts that bear such Bulwer-Lytton titles as “Homecoming,”
“The Hunted” and “The Haunted.”
Contrary to the example of Æschylus, and much more according
to the practice of Sophocles and Euripides, Mr. O’Neill gives his
trilogy to Electra. It
is she who dominates its action and fuses it, even as Orestes fused
the Æschylean original into one long play – with pauses –
rather than three separate dramas. Mr. O’Neill’s
Agamemnon (Lee Baker) is Ezra Mannon, a hard unbending New
Englander, who has been off to the Mexican War in his youth, who has
studied law, been a skipper, achieved great success in business and
served as Mayor of the small town in which his family is
outstanding. His
Clytemnestra (Alla Nazimova) is Christine, a foreigner who has long
been out of love with her husband and who has now come to hate him. Their children,
Lavinia (Alice Brady) and Orin (Earle Larimore), are, of course, the
Electra and the Orestes of Mr. O’Neill’s piece.
While old Ezra Mannon has been away from home, winning the
praise of General Grant for the military abilities he has shown as a
brigadier general in the Civil War, his wife has had an affair with
a Captain Adam Brant (Thomas Chalmers), the Ægisthus of “Mourning
Becomes Electra,” who in this case is the illegitimate son of a
wayward Mannon who has brought shame on his family. Lavinia, who has
also been in love with Captain Brant, follows her mother to New
York, learns of her infidelity to her father, and resolves to break
off the affair. She
confronts her mother, makes her promise to see no more of Brant, and
prepares to welcome her father and brother home from the war.
Meanwhile Christine has already confided in Brant that their
one way to happiness lies in the death of Ezra, who stands between
them. She is prepared to
murder him, and murder him she does by taking advantage of the heart
trouble from which he suffers.
Not only does she bring on one of his attacks by naming her
lover to him but she offers him as a medicine the poison Brant has
sent her. Lavinia comes
into her father’s room just before he dies, hears him accuse her
mother, sees the powder she has administered, and resolves to take
justice into her own hands in avenging his death. Both Lavinia and her
mother fight for the love of Orin, but he, like the spineless
Orestes of Sophocles and Euripides, soon falls under the domination
of Lavinia. She proves
her point to him by leading him to the clipper ship Brant commands
and there shows him their mother in Brant’s arms.
Thereupon Orin kills Brant when his mother has left him; she
commits suicide when she learns of her lover’s death (thus sparing
us the mother-murder of the Greeks); the ghosts of the dead who
refuse to die haunt Orin and Lavinia; Orin shoots himself and
Lavinia forswears the happiness her impending marriage might have
brought her, has the shutters nailed down on the Mannon house and
locks herself inside it to atone during the rest of her life for the
sins of her family. As Mr. O’Neill
rehandles this venerable story it preserves its awesome fascination. It emerges, as it has always emerged, as one of the most
gripping melodramatic plots in the world.
It also comes through its present restatement as a tragic
melodrama of heroic propositions.
The poetic beauty the Greeks gave it is lacking in Mr.
O’Neill’s prose modernization.
But the dilemma remains, and so does much of the agony and
exhaltation that belong to it. Mr. O’Neill’s
treatment o fit is vigorous with the kind of vigor our theatre
rarely sees. It is
stark, unadorned and strong. It
has dignity and majesty. And
nearly the whole of it is possessed of such and all-commanding
interest that one is totally unconscious of the hours its
performance so freely consumes. That is longer than
it need be seems fairly obvious, as does the fact that, like so many
of O’Neill’s plays, it stands n need of editing.
It is at its best in its first two sections, and most
particularly in its fine middle portion.
But its last part seems overlong and lacks the interest of
its predecessors. It marks the same falling off from what has preceded it as
the “Eumenides” does from the “Chœphoroe.”
Deprived of plotting that sweeps forward to a climax and
dealing with the conscience-stricken course of its avengers, it goes
a tamer, more uncertain way. Nor
is it helped by the incest motive Mr. O’Neill has added to it.
It rises to the very last act of all, however, to a final
curtain that is Greek in its whole feeling and flavor. The production the
Guild has given “Mourning Becomes Electra” is one of the most
successful feats in the Guild’s long career.
It has been superlatively well directed by Philip Moeller,
with a fine eye for pictorial values and a shrewd sense of pace.
Robert Edmond Jones has done his best work in recent years in
his settings for the trilogy. They
have the sort of luminous beauty at which he, more than any of our
designers, excels. They
are simple in details, rich in their atmosphere, and strong in their
lines. They are, in fact, the ideal backgrounds for a tragedy that
is touched with greatness. The
white columns Mr. Jones has given the Mannons’ country home, and
the steps below them on which Lavinia and Christine sit, are
constant and exciting reminders of the fact that the house of Mannon,
of which Mr. O’Neill writes, is vitally connected with the house
of Atreus. Mme. Nazimova’s
Christine is superbly sinister, possessed of an insidious and
electric malevolence, and brilliant with an incandescent fire.
As Lavinia Miss Brady gives the kind of performance her
admirers have log been waiting to see her give.
It is controlled. It
has the force of the true Electra.
And it is sustained throughout as log and sever an actor’s
test as any player has been called upon to meet.
The moments when she stands dressed in black before the black
depths of Mr. Jones’s doorways are moments that no one can forget
who has felt their thrill. Mr. Larimore’s Orin is a vivid picture of frenzy and
weakness. There were flaws her and there in last night’s performance, details which were not quite right, and a few scenes which were slightly muffed. But the lack of flaws was far more remarkable than their presence. Be that as it may, “Mourning Becomes Electra” is an achievement which restores the theater to its high estate. It is an adventure in playgoing that no wise lover of the theatre will be so foolish as to deny himself. |
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