The Brothel in O'Neill's Mansions

THE BROTHEL IN O'NEILL'S MANSIONS THE SUCCESSFUL STAGING IN 1968 in both Los Angeles and New York of a major production of the Eugene O'Neill drama, More Stately Mansions ~ demands that some detailed critical analysis other than newspaper reviews at last be paid .this play, the opinion of Mr. Robert Brustein and others notwithstanding. In his discussion of O'Neill's play in The Theatre of Revolt~ Brustein, at that time theater critic of New Republic~ dismissed More Stately Mansions with a footnote. The play was, he wrote, "sadly marred and incomplete." It was, in his views, "a regression, a throwback to an earlier stage of O'Neill's development." Had the play been destroyed as O'Neill specifically directed before his death, its loss would have been negligible.1 In general, Mr. Brustein's appraisal is accurate; but the play has hovered about like a spectre of O'Neill's that would not go away. It was produced first by the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theatre. A greatly revised text was published in 1964; and now a major production employing the talents of Ingrid Bergman, Arthur Hill, and Colleen Dewhurst has been mounted in the United States. Detailed analysis, incomplete·and marred as the play well may be, seems justified. Although More Stately Mansions was the last full-length O'Neill drama to be published, it actually was written before the great introspective plays, Long Day's Journey Into Night and The Iceman Cometh} that were the masterful achievement of the playwright's final productive years. The writing of More Stately Mansions occupied part of O'Neill's writing schedule from 1935 to 1938. The play was to have been fourth2 in O'Neill's massive nine-play cycle, A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed} an historical saga of several generations of an American family who are corrupted by their material success. The revised typescript of the play inadvertently escaped burning by O'Neill and his wife, Carlotta, when the first two plays in the cycle were so destroyed. That script, in a collection of O'Neill papers at Yale University, was revised into an acting version by Karl Ragnar Gierow for the first production of the play in Sweden. In their defini1 Robert Brustein, The Theatre of Revolt (Boston: Little, Brown Be Company, 1962), p: 359. 2 In the nine-play cycle envisioned by O'Neill, More Stately Mansions was to be the fourth play following A Touch of the Poet. Later O'Neill decided that the first two, plays of the cycle were too long and should be divided into two plays each. Such a division would have made A Touch of the Poet the fifth play ,and More Stately Mansions the sixth play in an eleven-play cycle. Some critics use the later numbering system in referring to the sequence of the cycle plays. 383 384 MODERN DRAMA February tive biography of .O'Neill, Arthur and Barbara Gelb describe More Stately Mansions as "five times the length of a conventional play."3 Both the Gierow version used by the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theatre4 and the recent New York stage version adapted by Jose Quintero were substantially abbreviated versions of the play. In plot, the drama continues the story of several characters introduced by O'Neill in A. Touch of the Poet, the third play in his cycle, and relates the continuing conflict between two women, Sara Melody Harford and Deborah Harford, who try to .dominate Deborah's poetically-inclined son, Simon. Simon, at the conclusion of A Touch of the Poet) was to marry Sara; and following the marriage, he has abandoned gradually his artistic ambitions and assumed the aggressive mercantile attitude he previously despised in his father. His mother is frustrated both in her marriage and in her loss of Simon. She borders on insanity at the opening of the fourth play and lapses periodically into fantasy, envisioning herself as mistress to a French king at Versailles. Temporarily, she is jarred back to reality when herhusband 's death leaves her in a financial crisis. To survive, she seeks rapprochement with Simon and his wife, Sara. Simon agrees to assume control of the family...