The Tragic Roots of Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms
If this Backstory was a round of Jeopardy, the “question” to all those “answers” would be, “Who is Eugene O’Neill?” And there lies the problem: How to summarize the career of a man who inspired one biographer to turn out 1,300 pages on his tumultuous life? As Broadway prepares to welcome a rare revival of O’Neill’s 1924 romantic tragedy Desire Under the Elms, let’s touch on the high and low points in the story of a theatrical genius.
Dysfunctional Family Ties
A small plaque outside Starbucks at 43rd Street and Broadway marks the birthplace of Eugene Gladstone O’Neill on October 16, 1888, at what was then the Barrett Hotel. His father, James O’Neill, was a touring actor best known for playing the title role in The Count of Monte Cristo more than 4,000 times. His genteel mother, Ella, was worshipped by Eugene and especially by his older bother, Jamie. Given morphine at the time of Eugene’s birth, she spent the rest of her life as an addict. For more on the unhealthy family dynamics of the O’Neills, see Long Day’s Journey Into Night, written in 1941 and then inexplicably locked away until after the playwright’s death.
O’Neill himself supplied a terse but revealing paragraph about his dissolute youth in an autobiographical sketch when he won the Nobel Prize in 1936:
“From the age of seven to thirteen attended Catholic schools. Then four years at a non-sectarian preparatory school, followed by one year 1906-1907 at Princeton University. After expulsion from Princeton I led a restless, wandering life for several years, working at various occupations. Was secretary of a small mail order house in New York for a while, then went on a gold prospecting expedition in the wilds of Spanish Honduras. Found no gold but contracted malarial fever. Returned to the United States and worked for a time as assistant manager of a theatrical company on tour. After this, a period in which I went to sea, and also worked in Buenos Aires for the Westinghouse Electrical Co., Swift Packing Co., and Singer Sewing Machine Co. Never held a job long. Was either fired quickly or left quickly. Finished my experience as a sailor as able-bodied seaman on the American Line of transatlantic liners. After this, was an actor in vaudeville for a short time, and a reporter on a small town newspaper. At the end of 1912, my health broke down and I spent six months in a tuberculosis sanitorium.”
And that’s just the man’s first 24 years—which included alcohol abuse so severe he was near death a couple of times, plus a brief first marriage between visits to brothels and the birth of his first child, Eugene Jr.
Up from the Gutter
While hospitalized with TB, O’Neill decided to straighten up and devote himself to writing plays. Having watched his father’s long and unsatisfying run in a typical turn-of-the-century melodrama, he aimed from the beginning at creating works both realistic and experimental, treating theater with a seriousness it hadn’t achieved in America at that point. As critic George Jean Nathan later put it, O’Neill “singlehandedly waded through the dismal swamplands of American drama, bleak, squashy and oozing with sticky goo, and alone and singlehandedly bore out the water lily that no American had found there before him.”
In the summer of 1916, O’Neill followed his friends John Reed and Louise Bryant to the seaside town of Provincetown, Massachusetts. For more on his relationship with these famous Communists, see Warren Beatty’s Reds, with Jack Nicholson as a rakish O’Neill. Arriving with a trunk of unproduced plays, he fell in with the fledgling Provincetown Players, and by summer’s end, they had produced his one-act Bound East for Cardiff at a ramshackle theater on the wharf. In the fall, O’Neill and his group returned to New York and established the Provincetown Playhouse on Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village. Finally, this restless soul had found an artistic home.
“For them, the first requirement of any play was that it should be ‘different,’” critic Joseph Wood Krutch said of the Provincetown Players in his introduction to a 1932 collection of O’Neill’s work. “They wanted to present life as it is, even if that meant a good deal that was shocking and unpleasant, and they wanted also to expose the injustices, hypocrisies and cruelties of society.”
In O’Neill’s case, that meant tragedy, tragedy and more tragedy. He won the first of four Pulitzer Prizes then an obscure award in 1920 for his Broadway debut, Beyond the Horizon, a grim look at farm life that combined the real and poetic in a way theatergoers had never experienced. A second Pulitzer came two years later for Anna Christie, inspired by O’Neill’s life at sea. Experimental dramas like The Hairy Ape, The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings gave O’Neill the chance to address what Krutch called “the Negro problem.” Paul Robeson performed in the latter two plays in 1924, just before the production of a tragedy that took O’Neill’s writing to a new level.
Object of Desire
By 1924, O’Neill had married his second wife, Agnes, the mother of his other children, Shane and Oona. He had also become the last surviving member of his own family. In a three-year period, his father and mother died, followed by brother Jamie’s excruciating death from alcohol-related causes at age 45 in the fall of 1923. The playwright’s own drinking continued in cycles: Typically he consumed a quart of liquor a day, but he could wean himself off, one drink at a time, to remain sober for a few months of concentrated work before resuming his love affair with the bottle.
Surrounded by death, including the suicide of his best friend from Princeton at around the same time, O’Neill immersed himself in reading Freud, Jung and Nietzsche, as well as classical Greek myths and his favorite standby, August Strindberg. From this seriously depressing stew, he outlined the concept for a new play in his work diary:
“Play of New England – locate on a farm in 1850, time of California gold rush – make N.E. farmhouse and elm trees almost characters in play – elms overhanging house – father, hard iron type, killed off wives 2 with work, 3 sons – all hate him – his possessive pride in farm – loves earth to be as hard – in old age in a moment of unusual weakness & longing marries young woman, brings her back to farm, her arrival brings on drama, youngest son falls for her.”
There, in a nutshell, is the plot of Desire Under the Elms, a play he later claimed came to him in a dream. Seventy-five-year-old Ephraim Cabot, described in O’Neill’s extensive stage directions as having a face “as hard as if it were hewn out of a boulder,” arrives home from a period of wandering with his bride, Abbie, a “buxom” 35-year-old with a face that’s “pretty but marred by its rather gross sensuality.” Still on the farm is Ephraim’s “tall and sinewy” 25-year-old son Eben, whose face is “well-formed, good-looking, but its expression is resentful and defensive,” writes O’Neill. “His defiant, dark eyes remind one of a wild animal’s in captivity.”
This was hot stuff back in 1924, and O’Neill took full advantage of the dramatic possibilities arising from this particular threesome being thrown together in a remote farmhouse. Adding to the Oedipal overtones: Eben’s belief that his father worked his beloved mother to death before seizing the farm, which was rightfully hers. O’Neill builds the sexual tension between Eben and Abbie to a fever pitch, including a scene in which they seem to read each other’s minds from adjoining rooms. The playwright gives acting instructions before almost every line, describing the characters’ climactic in more ways than one romantic exchange as being delivered “harshly,” “helplessly,” “viciously,” “wildly,” “resentfully,” “torturedly,” “sneeringly” and “threateningly,” among other adverbs.
Critics were divided about O’Neill’s tragic romance, which ends with a shocking crime we won’t discuss here. But in spite of the uproar about obscenity, the original production, which starred Walter Huston as Ephraim, was a hit, moving uptown from the Provincetown Playhouse to Broadway in January 1925 and running for a total of 420 performances. The subject matter caused the play to be banned in Boston and England it finally made it to London in 1940, and the cast was arrested in Los Angeles.
Those looking for titillation misunderstood O’Neill’s serious intention of using what he called a “poetical vision” to touch on themes of bereavement, love of the land and the tragedy of family relationships.
A 21st Century Desire, Hold the Elms
Since our Backstory is about an early O’Neill play, we won’t belabor the downhill trajectory of his later years: He disowned daughter Oona when, at 18, she married 54-year-old Charlie Chaplin; both sons committed suicide. His co-dependent third marriage to keeper-of-the-flame Carlotta Monterey endured until his death in 1953.
Professionally speaking, things went south for O’Neill after he won the Nobel Prize. A crippling illness that made him unable to hold a pencil put a stop to a planned cycle of plays tracing the history of an American family. He stopped writing 10 years before his death, and most of his greatest plays—including The Iceman Cometh, A Moon for the Misbegotten, A Touch of the Poet and, of course, Long Day’s Journey Into Night—were not produced during his lifetime.
In the last half century, however, thanks to directors like Jose Quintero and Robert Falls and actors like Jason Robards, Colleen Dewhurst, Brian Dennehy and Kevin Spacey, O’Neill has cemented his position at the tippy-top of American drama. “He created modern theater,” says Falls, director of the current Broadway revival of Desire Under the Elms. “He demands an enormous amount from his directors, his designers, his actors and his audience because he’s trying to touch the gods. In these plays from the 1920s, he’s creating American tragedy.”
Falls readily admits that Desire Under the Elms is not an easy play to revive in 2009. For a taste of the difficulties inherent in the storyline, check out on YouTube the fevered trailer for the 1958 film version that starred Burl Ives, Sophia Loren and Anthony Perkins. The script itself is written in a convoluted dialect that seems impossible to deliver with a straight face. Abbie to Eben: “Waal, I kissed ye anyways—an’ ye kissed back—yer lips was burnin’—ye can’t lie ‘bout that!”
“It has these melodramatic leanings,” notes Falls, “but when you figure out how to get through that, as I think we’ve done, it’s a potent, powerful, brilliant American play. We’ve made some cuts and eliminated the intermissions so it flows like a Greek tragedy, 100 minutes from start to finish.”
Falls cast his frequent collaborator, two-time Tony winner Brian Dennehy, as Ephraim and waited for two years to synchronize schedules so that Carla Gugino could play Abbie. She’s already tackled Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams in New York with After the Fall and Suddenly Last Summer, so why not O’Neill? As Eben, Falls tapped Pablo Schreiber, calling him “one of the most exciting young actors in New York; he’s got a great transformational quality.” After the production received glowing reviews at the director's home theater, the Goodman in Chicago, in February, plans quickly gelled for a Broadway mounting, opening April 27 at the St. James Theatre.
But what of the elms, which are nowhere to be seen in Walt Spangler’s striking set design? Click here for Broadway.com’s exclusive video preview. “I don’t think you need elm trees in a play called Desire Under the Elms,” Falls declares. “The elms are the maternal aspect of the play, and the paternal aspect is more of the focus to me. The Cabots’ world is a hard one of rocks and of work, of slavery to the land and slavery to each other. We’re unleashing this play from realism into poetry and tragedy.”