Dark Insights

"WHATEVER PUSHES MAN along a tragic path of suffering and loss cannot be explained, remains secret, Life contains its own mysterious determinism." In the latest of the Grove Press's series on influential dramatists, Norman Berlin approaches Eugene O'Neill not simply as a playwright but as a thinker and philosopher, an anchor in early twentieth-century thought. Through detailed analysis of O'Neill's most important plays, rather than elaborate biography, Berlin skillfully presents the themes and doctrines of O'Neill's works and those he shares with Freud, Marx, Ibsen and other contemporaries.

Short sketches of O'Neill's era set the stage for O'Neill's entrance into the theater world. Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov and Synge were dead. In America, travelling companies that repeated Shakespeare or other European imports were very popular. Yet, says Berlin, these were only "escapist, money-making entertainment," yet to be considered art. Making that leap to original art was the accomplishment of O'Neill and his amateur theater group, the Provincetown Players. Also credited with bringing vemacular to the American stage, he set many of his plays in backgrounds that demanded specific U.S. regional dialects. His ease with language, his imaginative use of sound, light and gesture, his bold experimentation with expressionism and realism and his personal, emotional appeal made American theater a serious endeavor.

Placing the plays in chronological order. Berlin outlines O'Neill's innovative style. In The Emperor Jones O'Neill overwhelmingly used symbolism and created the first major part for a Black man. He used The Hairy Ape as a vehicle for a condemnation of the capitalistic, mechanistic materialism of American society. In comparing Yank, the protagonist, to Oedipus and Hamlet. O'Neill is addressing the oldest theme in history--man's struggle with his own fate. The play, Berlin notes, "is more existential than political, more metaphysical and spiritual than social, Man's desire to belong, his quest for belonging. is the measure of his humanity, even though he tails to belong."

The main value of Berlin's study is his combination of dramatic with literary criticism Beginning with a chapter that jumps headlong into a straightforward analysis of what he calls O'Neill's finest tragedy. Long Day's Journey Into Night. Berlin goes a long way towards evoking the elements of the play which give it such emotional impact Long Day's Journey ...is a play in four acts that traces the development of the Tyrone family through agonizing dialogues between the four characters during one day Events of the past are highlighted through solitary confessions from the drug-addict mother, the Irish actor father, the tubercular younger son and the bitter and cynical older son

Berlin's attention to O'Neill the dramatist leads to his insights into the plays excessive stage directions, scanty use of stage props. and reliance on repetitive sounds. Most of the characters. Berlin notes, reveal themselves through their stage manners and habits: Mary, the mother, is noted for her "extreme nervousness. Her hands are never still."

Berlin shows how the lack of props gives the few objects O'Neill does use--a bottle of whiskey, a wedding dress--more prominence. He also clarifies the meaning of O'Neill masterly use of sounds (the first discussion of the play concerns the father's snoring). For example, the coughing of the tubercular son, the footsteps upstairs, the interfering foghorn add ominous dimensions to the play's atmosphere.

BERLIN DOES NOT NEGLECT the literary analysis necessary for a complete review of the dramatist. He devotes worthwhile space to examining the relationships between the characters in Long Day's Journey, presenting the two "parties" of the family, the two without illnesses who debate blame back and forth, and the Ill pair constantly trying to escape reality. He takes a more scholarly view as well, comparing O'Neill's use--and modern drama's--of alcohol and drugs for truth telling to the Elizabethans' similar use of madness. He emphasizes O'Neill's Beckettian use of time; the play progresses and regresses, time has stopped, night and day have converged throughout. The maneuver demonstrates what Berlin calls one of O'Neill's most cardinal beliefs--"The past is the present"

This thorough synthesis makes up for the most superficial treatments of some other plays later in the book. Tidbits from studies of Desire Under the Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra and The Iceman Cometh provide occasional flashes of insight, so do a few of the details from Berlin's otherwise sketchy treatment of O'Neill's life--for instance, the young playwright was kicked out of Princeton for throwing a rock through the window of then-president Woodrow Wilson. And describing the disease' which made O'Neill's hands shake for the last decade of his life--effectively cutting off his ability to write--Berlin contends that O'Neill actually "died" with the onset of the tremor--when he was not writing he was nothing. Berlin's details add up to illumine the sense of hopelessness that powers O'Neill's tragic vision, since, Berlin notes, "the tragic alone has that significant beauty which is truth."

That element is Berlin's major strength. He does not only give us a narrow, well-defined text about O'Neill. Rather, he sacrifices a small amount of detail and scope to share with us the cardinal doctrines of O'Neill's philosophy, With this purpose in mind. Berlin is able to use evidence from Greek tragedy. Nietzsche's Dionysian philosophy and Freudian psychology to touch that fog that surrounded O'Neill. Though, as Berlin himself admits, his subject "wrote with a burning intensity that eludes description or analysis," that broadened picture makes the book worthwhile. O'Neill gazed into places where others were forbidden to look, but at least the reader can hear the hellish reports.