The Ecological O’Neill: Nature’s Veiled Purpose in the Plays by Robert Baker-White (review)

Robert Baker-White’s The Ecological O’Neill: Nature’s Veiled Purpose in the Plays provides a comprehensive overview of what is one of the more significant themes running through O’Neill’s works, from his earliest to his final plays: the presence of nature and its essential role within the lives of his characters, from the tragic to the comic. Baker-White contends that it is this centrality of nature—an ecological reciprocity, or lack thereof—that more than any other concern dominates the playwright’s life and work. Identifying four major tropes (“the lure of the sea, the dilemma of rural land, the search for a divine nature, and the appeal to exotic ecologies”) that help elucidate nature’s multifaceted presence in O’Neill’s works, Baker-White takes readers on a journey at once chronological, metaphysical, and presciently ecological, drawing on the seminal works of scholars of eco-theater and O’Neill, and bringing the most thorough ecocritical reading of O’Neill’s oeuvre to date.

In the first chapter, Baker-White provides a succinct reading of the interwoven history of theater and “the natural,” from a discussion of American literature and its contentious frames of reference to an exploration of the enclosure and reopening of the Western theater experience: the Greek and Hellenistic theaters to the medieval pageant wagons to the gas-lit modern theaters O’Neill helped reinvent. Following this history is a chapter dedicated to O’Neill’s early sea plays that mirror the playwright’s own lived experience and demonstrate the centrality of ecological connectedness to the human condition (chapter 2). Next comes an exploration of O’Neill’s and America’s complex relationship with the pastoral (chapter 3), highlighting O’Neill’s distinctly American discomfort with both city and country. Throughout the early chapters, Baker-White argues that in the plays “the drive to possess nature infects human interactions with decidedly deleterious consequences,” and as the text continues, Baker-White explores human-nature reciprocity in O’Neill’s works more thoroughly than any text has done to date.

The most significant portion of Baker-White’s argument comes in the final chapters of the book, wherein he brings a twenty-first-century eco-critical reading to the playwright’s lifelong trajectory. Chapter 4 delves into the realm of the spiritual, exploring the “etiological mythology” of the playwright’s youth, in combination with the Nietzschean influence, which permeates much of O’Neill’s mid-life work and influences his and his characters’ quests to reconcile the human, the natural, and the divine. Exploring plays like The Hairy Ape, The Great God Brown, Lazarus Laughed, and Strange Interlude, Baker-White articulates the improbability of true human-nature reciprocity and the unworkability—despite the playwright’s consistent, earnest attempts at conjoining god and nature—of genuinely staging the deity. As Baker-White suggests, “as O’Neill wrote about gods, he did so almost invariably in the context of humanity’s emplacement in the natural world,” as in The Hairy Ape, wherein Yank’s furtive struggles to find spiritual belonging are crushed alongside his dreams of immersion in the nonhuman, or the arguably more fraught attempt, Lazarus Laughed wherein the playwright uses masks to dramatize the eternal.

Chapter 5, similarly, provides an overview of O’Neill’s continual fascination with exotic nature, as opposed to the local, cultivated American landscape. Interpreting some of the less-celebrated early, mid-career, and late plays of O’Neill, Baker-White explores the presence, absence, and persistent influence of “ecological exotica,” while the closing chapter 6 discusses what the author refers to as “O’Neill’s Extended Epilogue.” Focusing on Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Ah, Wilderness!, and A Moon for the Misbegotten, Baker-White proclaims these final plays “a meaningful culmination of O’Neill’s artistic output,” in their bringing him full-circle back to his origins, literally and figuratively. In his...