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140 Book Reviews NORMAND BERLIN. Eugene O'Neill. New York: Grove Press 1982. Pp. Xlll, 178, illustrated. $9.95 (PB). Nonnand Berlin opens his study of the dramatic achievement of Eugene O'Neill with a detailed discussion of Long Day's Journey Into Night. This strategy makes sense not only because this play is so closely associated with the author's earlier life, but because it is (by general agreement today) his greatest play and quite probably the play upon which his future reputation will chiefly rest. Putting aside the well-known autobiographical dimensions of the play, Berlin enters immediately upon its masterful dramaturgy: its clarity and simplicity of structure; its profound use ofthe dramatic unities; its remarkable buildup of emotional intensity; its minute exploration of the relationship between past and present; its resonant use of scenery, props, and lighting; and its identification of the closeness of "the four haunted Tyrones" with the sharply alternating emotional rhythms which make the play so universally immediate and affecting. On this last subject, Berlin says: "What we witness in this one day represents endless days of family togetherness and familyseparation; the rhythmic patterns persist" (p. 8). "That the Tyrones try to understand the past, that they listen to one another, that they endure together, as a family," Berlin concludes, "is the measure of their heroism" (p. 20). If Berlin's claim that "no analysis can take us very close to the emotional experience of the play" is correct, his own analysis has certainly taken us close. Having dealt so effectively with Long Day's Journey while making no allusion to O'Neill's life, Berlin then deals briefly with that fascinating subject. The O'Neill biographies (by Louis Sheaffer and the Gelbs) are long and detailed. Berlin packs an amazing amount from them into the space of a dozen pages. He concentrates on O'Neill's relations with his immediate family (the central personae, of course, of Long Day's Journey) and on his marriages to Agnes Boulton and Carlotta Monterey. A separate, more extensive chapter is reserved for O'Neill's theatrical "beginnings": the commencement of the playwright's journey down the parallel tracks of naturalism and expressionism established by his European predecessors. Berlin reviews 0 'Neill's early work with the Provincetown Players both on Cape Cod and in New York, concentrating first on the great promise of the SS Glencairn plays. Bound East for Cardiff and The Moon ofthe Caribbees represent for Berlin the first real breakthroughs in the emergence of a serious American drama. These plays, he says, begin that process of converting "Theatre into Drama" which would be the "hallmark of O'Neill's potent art" (p. 46). Berlin rightly divides O'Neill's massive canon into four periods - the early twenties, the late twenties, the thirties, and the later thirties/early forties - devoting a chapter to each. The early 1920'S constituted the period, Berlin feels, when O'Neill tinkered most effectively with dramatic expressionism. The critic sees The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape as the playwright's most successful efforts of the period, treating the fonner not "merely [~s] a theatrical tour de force," but as a probing examination, using expressionistic means, of an "archetypal idea." "Jones's long night's journey," he says, "is physical and psychological and racial and universal" (p. 59). And The Hairy Ape, continuing in the same mode, deals with modem man's cosmic loneliness. As Jones deals with man's past, claims Berlin, Ape deals with his present. Only a little less successful for Berlin are the realistic plays of this period - Beyond the Horizon, Anna Christie and Desire Under the Elms - all ofwhich show man's heroism measured by his Sophoclean struggle against a predetermined fate. O'Neill is less effective for Berlin Book Reviews 141 when he tries to combine realism, expressionism, and a social message in All God's Chillun Got Wings - courageous as that play's treatment of miscegenation was in the early 1920'S. Berlin's determination not to use biographical information in assessing the plays fails to serve him well when he turns to the plays of the late 1920'S. Despite the...

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