James Light: Notes on Staging Eugene O'neill's The Hairy Ape / Cover Letter to H. M. Harwood (1926)

In the autumn of 1917, Ohio State University graduate James "Jimmy" Light entered a master's program in English at Columbia University. His first residence in New York City was an apartment above the Provincetown Playhouse at 139 Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village—lodgings he shared with the Provincetown Players actor Charles Ellis. As Robert M. Dowling explains, Light's incorporation into the theatre company's activities was almost instantaneous upon his arrival in New York:

As Light began to unpack, he heard hammering below and went downstairs. There he discovered three men shooting craps while a fourth hammered away at a shoddily built set of wood benches. One of the players was [Eugene] O'Neill, his dark eyes following the dice as they jounced across the floor. When Light criticized the workmanship of the benches, a saw was thrust into his hand. "I started sawing immediately," he said.¹

Soon, Light was not only helping to build props and sets; he was also enlisted as an actor, a director (frequently of O'Neill's plays), and—during George Cram "Jig" Cook's sabbaticals—theatre manager of the Playhouse. After the Provincetown Players disbanded in 1922, Light continued his close association with O'Neill: he was centrally involved with the Experimental Theatre, Inc. (ETI), formed in 1924 by O'Neill and others previously associated with the Players and based in the Provincetowners' old (but now revamped) Greenwich Village space.

As various critics and biographers have pointed out, Light played a crucial role in O'Neill's early career and, indeed, in his personal life. Dowling notes that, when Light temporarily took over the Provincetown Playhouse from Cook in 1919, "the Players doubled down on their revolutionary methods by flouting the longstanding tradition of white companies using white actors in blackface and instead hired an all-black cast" for the first production of O'Neill's The Dreamy Kid.² The Players and later ETI would famously use black actors for two subsequent O'Neill productions in which Light was heavily involved: the premieres of The Emperor Jones (1920), starring James Gilpin as the title character, and All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924), directed by Light and starring Paul Robeson as Jim Harris. Light stood shoulder to shoulder with O'Neill against the Ku Klux Klan and other racists who protested against the use of black actors in these productions.³ According to Light and O'Neill, the hate mail that they received focused on O'Neill's Irish Catholic background (he was, for example, called a "dirty Irish mick"), and both were accused of being Jews hiding under Christian names.⁴

Light's role in helping O'Neill to push theatrical boundaries also relates to O'Neill's use of masks. Light designed the masks for the ETI's first production in 1924: August Strindberg's The Spook Sonata (1907). O'Neill chose this play, and Light later suggested that the playwright was inspired by the production's "demonstration of the possibilities of the mask."⁵ O'Neill—who had used masks previously in The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape (1922)—would go on to use them in more risky and powerful ways in several of his epic middle-period works, from The Great God Brown (1925) through Days Without End (1933).

On a more personal level, Stephen A. Black informs us that Light was one of the trusted people with whom O'Neill discussed private matters. O'Neill asked Light about his time in therapy. This—together with the testimonies of other friends such as Robert Edmond Jones and Kenneth Macgowan—encouraged O'Neill during the mid-1920s to seek out help from three psychoanalysts: Dr. Louis Bisch, a Dr. Wilkinson, and Dr. Gilbert Hamilton. O'Neill's mid-1920s engagement with psychotherapy helped him to get his drinking much more under control (though there would be occasional lapses in the future). It also had a significant effect on his playwriting: from 1925, O'Neill began reading the works of Freud and...