O'Neill and the Comic Spirit

O'NEILL AND THE COMIC SPIRIT THE REACTION OF BROADWAY CRITICS to Take Me Along when it was produced in October, 1959, gives an interesting insight into an attitude toward Eugene O'Neill's plays that has developed in recent years. Take Me Along, of course, is the musical version of Ah, Wilderness! which in New York has featured Jackie Gleason. Critical comment, however, stressed not the comedy or satire, but O'Neill's compassion. The critics revelled in the warmth and tenderness of the play. John Chapman praised Gleason for playing Sid "straight and with engaging sweetness." And though Brooks Atkinson complained that the comedian clowned too much in the first act, he felt that O'Neill's "innocence and sweetness" triumphed over the "razzle-dazzle of a Broadway musical show." He recalled nostalgically how the original Sid had been played by Gene Lockhart as a "tender portrait of an obscure failure who will never escape from his own weak nature."1 O'Neill's concern with compassion for obscure failures has been more noticed with his last plays, produced since the second world war. But several of these plays have shown another side of O'Neill that has been neglected. They have in them a good deal of rowdy comedy, involving tricks, invective, and a militantly disrespectful mocking of the pretentious .2 While this sort of writing may seem new, it should draw attention to the fact that there has been a good deal of comedy in O'Neill's work from the beginning. Many people tend to relegate his efforts in this direction to Ah, Wilderness! and perhaps Anna Christie (especially since it became New Girl in Town).3 The overwhelming concern has been with his tragic tensions. Too often when one suggests that comedy also is an important aspect of O'Neill's work, he is met with, at best, bewilderment. Yet the comic and humorous play an organic part in what O'Neill is attempting. O'Neil!'s writing of this nature seems to be of two kinds: there is the kind of satire that Bergson talks about, the traditional mocking of the mechanical, of the self-deluded, of the man with a fixation who cannot bend to adjust to humanity. This is the type of comedy O'Neill first attempted and did at intervals throughout his life. It might include his comic presentation of the "earthy," the normal and human, as contrasted 1. See New York Theatre Critics' Reviews, XX (1959), 244-47. Walter Kerr spoke of the gentleness of the work, and exclaimed concerning the sentimental songs, "these things are lovely, just lovely." Of course, critics stressed the tenderness of O'Neill's play upon its pre-war productions . But use of such terms in discussing his viewpoint in general seems to have increased more recently. 2. See my "O'Neill's A Touch at the Poet and his Other Last Plays," Arizona Quarterly, XIII (Winter, 1957),308-19. 3. Opened in New York May 14, 1957. While the critics were enthusiastic over Gwen Verdon, their general opinion was that little of the atmosphere of O'Neill's play was left in the musical. 273 274 MODERN DRAMA December to the pretentious or warped. Roughly, it is social ridicule. Then there is another kind of humor in his plays, a more important, organic one. It involves the grin that arises from agony; it is the humor that is used to divert pain. It is a means of facing despair. The first kind of satire is an intellectual commentary; the other arises out of a very personal involvement in man's plight. Wylie Sypher lumps these types together, but I shall distinguish between them here for reasons of utility.4 O'Neill's earliest published plays are marked solely by comedy in the Bergsonian sense of viewing people satirically from the outside. Many of his subjects for ridicule throughout his life seem very similar, from Roylston to Melody. But the manner in which he developed such comedy took on different qualities as he progressed. His satire seems to have changed along with the fashions in comedy in the American theater . Much comedy soon dates...