Dynamo and Lazarus Laughed: Some Limitations

DYNAMO AND LAZARUS LAUGHED SOME LIMITATIONS READERS OF O'NEILL eventually develop an awareness of the dramatist's limitations. Lazarus Laughed and Dynamo are two plays that contribute to such awareness, for one reads and rereads them with a feeling of growing dissatisfaction. In both works O'Neill seems to have grasped raw materials which are of great importance, concerned as he is. with religion, science, sex, man's fear of death, and the human incapacity for a life of good will. In neither play, however, is he able to give artistic body to the potentials of the raw materials he has selected. In Lazarus Laughed the vehicle for O'Neill's presentation of the human situation is the story of Lazarus after he has been restored to life by Jesus. The dramatist places particular stress on the haunting fear of death that is responsible for the fear of life and hence also for man's inability to translate meanings and values into social practices. The resurrected man proclaims the death of death. There is no death, he says; God's laughter alone prevails in the universe. The followers of Lazarus therefore dance and sing and laugh their way through life; that is, they so respond as long as their leader is with them. Regardless of circumstances, Lazarus himself remains controlled and unswerving in his affirmation of being: "YesI Yes!! Yes!!! Men die! Even a Son of Man must die to show men that Man may livel But there is no deathl" After the execution, his second death, Lazarus calls back reassuringly, "There is no death!" While Lazarus Laughed is called "A Play for an Imaginative Theatre," Dynamo is apparently intended for the realistic stage. The human enterprises of religion and science are represented by two men, the Reverend Hutchins Light and Ramsay Fife, superintendent of a hydroelectric plant. The clergyman and the practical engineer are petty men wholly lacking intellectual and spiritual insights. Fife is cheap and brutal in his humor; Light is superstitious and patently unchristian in his anger. Each man happens to be the parent of one child. Reuben, the son of the Reverend Light, and Ada, the daughter Ramsay Fife, are adolescents who have just begun to be attracted to each other. The engineer, greatly disliking the developing relations of the young people, uses his daughter in an intrigue by means of which he exposes Reuben's weak character and also places the clergyman in a most embarrassing position. The drama concentrates attention on Reuben. As he is torn by mother love, sexual desire, a struggle for independence, a guilt complex, 224 1960 DYNAMO AND LAZARUS LAUGHED 225 and superstitions regarding both religion and science, the emotional disturbance common to adolescence is transformed into an active insanity. Frustrated in his efforts to experience a miracle with the dynamo, a miracle which he said would change the world into a paradise , Reuben shoots his sweetheart and then commits suicide. In our search for flaws which reveal O'Neill's limitations, we shall be able to give but brief consideration to a few phases of the cultural atmosphere which dominated the entire body of the artist's work. When we think of human enterprises like religion and science, we recall that from the Renaissance to the present the dicta of religion have steadily been yielding authority to the pronouncements of science. This has occurred despite frequent reinterpretations of scriptures and restatement of position. Since men almost invariably identify religion and the practices of the religious organizations, and also identify science and technological applications, they have rarely been able to think clearly about either phase of the cultural complex. The consequence has been that religion and science have been placed in an either-or situation or else they have been treated as essentially identical. Men supposedly cannot respond to both as distinct enterprises; so they are required to surrender the one in favor of the other or else to equate the two. The views are, of course, wholly untenable when we think of religion as an enterprise devoted to human meanings and values, and science as an enterprise devoted to the factual understanding of the continuum of occurrence. When...