Eugene O'Neill's Aesthetic of the Drama

Eugene O'Neill's Aesthetic of the Drama* PAUL VOELKER IT IS PROBABLY GOING TOO FAR to say, as James Milton Highsmith did several years ago, that Eugene O'Neill "never allowed himself to formulate theories of drama."l As a matter of fact, throughout most of his active play-writing career, O'Neill was continually formulating such theories and expressing them, but his expressions seldom found their way into print in a rigorous form such as the expository essay. O'Neill himself believed that it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, for him to express himself clearly and correctly "in such a manner. As he told Kenneth Macgowan on one occasion, "I've never written a review or article of any kind in my life. . .. My mind can't seem to concentrate along those lines.... "2 Similarly, O'Neill told his friend Benjamin De Casseres that "when it comes to anything like articles, introductions , etc. I simply don't function right."3 About the closest he ever came to such a formalized presentation was the series of three pieces he produced in 1932 for George Jean Nathan's The American Spectator ; but as the title in the first of the series, "Memoranda on Masks," suggests, none of these items constitutes a coherent essay.4 Characteristically , it took O'Neill at least four drafts to complete what he called "the damned article."5 Despite the paucity of such formal presentations, however, O'Neill did quite frequently express his theories of the drama in letters and interviews. Unfortunately, his statements were seldom directly concerned with what might be termed an aesthetic of dramaturgy or the drama as an aesthetic form. Instead, most of O'Neill's observations 87 88 PAUL VOELKER tended to focus on four different topics: realism and/or expressionism, tragedy, the affective aspects of a given play or plays, and production notes and techniques. "Memoranda on Masks," for example, is primarily a justification for the technique of masked actors; the second installment, "Second Thoughts," is a list of production notes for the use of masks in several of his plays. Nevertheless, it is possible, from an examination of a great many of O'Neill's letters and interviews produced over several years, to discover a number of statements and observations which, when brought together, seem to outline a coherent aesthetic of the drama; and while it is true that in different years O'Neill was wont to emphasize different facets of his aesthetic, the fundamentals do not seem to change. The first and, for the critic, the most fundamental of O'Neill's aesthetic principles is concerned with the relationship between the text or the script of a play and a performance or production based on the same. O'Neill explained this relationship in another letter to Benjamin De Casseres: "Production may help to bring the values of a play out or it may blur them into meaninglessness but the playas written remains a thing in itself which no good or bad acting or directing can touch."6 The implication is that the written script has an integrity of its own. It contains artistic values which are discoverable within the text itself. "Production may help to bring the values ... out or it may blur them into meaninglessness," but the values are there nevertheless, regardless of the quality of any given production. It is this principle which warrants the examination of an O'Neill play without regard to its production history or its lack of one-"the playas written remains a thing in itself." On the other hand, a play is written so that it may be produced and, as the production history of most of O'Neill's work suggests, he was not by and large interested in the creation of plays solely for a reading audience. His bias in this regard is evident from the following (contained in the letter just cited): "You know as well as I do that every play that reads well ought to act well, unless it's a purely literary play and therefore not a real play." Thus, a "real play" both "reads well" and "act[s] well"; a play that cannot...