Eugene O'neill and the Reinvention of Theatre Aesthetics by Thierry Dubost (review)

Eugene O'Neill and the Reinvention of Theatre Aesthetics is a worthy sequel to Thierry Dubost's first book on O'Neill, published more than twenty years ago, Struggle, Defeat or Rebirth: Eugene O'Neill's Vision of Humanity (1997). This new book emerged from five of Dubost's more recent articles on individual O'Neill plays, beginning with a 2008 article on Thirst, and continues Dubost's insightful exploration of how O'Neill's approach to drama developed and is grounded in his understanding of the human condition. The book's thirtyone chapters, each generally focused on a single play, are valuable for their astute discussions of individual works, but Dubost's most illuminating ideas are about the thematic interrelationships among the plays as O'Neill developed a new vision of tragedy in American drama based on a sophisticated understanding of the causes of human suffering.

In his title, Dubost asks us to consider a reinvention of theatre aesthetics in O'Neill's works. "Aesthetics" comes from the Greek word meaning to feel or sense, and Dubost's claim is that O'Neill was among the founders of a new kind of American drama because he redirected what audiences should be attending to in dramatic productions, had new goals for the sensations and insights he wanted audiences to have, and developed new ways of using the stage to create those feelings and ideas. Throughout the book there are references to Ibsen, Strindberg, Synge, and Shaw as dramatists whose visions for a new aesthetic and purpose for theatre provided a groundwork on which O'Neill was building, as well as references to the influence on O'Neill of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud.

Some of the book's most interesting insights concern O'Neill's stagecraft: his depiction of movement rather than speech to convey emotion, for example, in Mourning Becomes Electra (173); his use of soliloquy to convey a character's current emotions and thoughts in Strange Interlude rather than its more traditional use as a device for characters to reveal secret future plans to the audience, as for example Iago does in Othello (166); his use of masks (149–53); and his experiments with expressionism (101–4). There are fine discussions of O'Neill's view, much like Ibsen's and Shaw's, that drama could be used to explore and advance political issues. But it is in his discussion of the development of O'Neill's new vision of tragedy that Dubost is at his best. This is the thread that ties the book together, taking it beyond interesting discussions of individual plays and making it a significant contribution to our understanding of O'Neill's broad role in the development of American theatre.

Often commentators mention O'Neill's rejection of melodrama, understood as drama that depicts characters' struggles against external forces that oppress them, and they point out that O'Neill psychologized tragedy, making the characters' struggles internal. As a result, as Dubost says, tragedy becomes something that needs to be felt by the audience, as they empathize with the character's personal experience, rather than observed voyeuristically (13). It also is broadly recognized that O'Neill sought to give Greek tragedy and its conception of fate an expression in modern American terms. Putting these two ideas together, it is said that O'Neill replaced the Greek idea of fate as an external force with depictions of psychological struggle as the source of human suffering. Dubost's insight is to refine this idea, giving greater precision to O'Neill's views about the nature of the human condition.

Dubost begins with a discussion of Thirst, an early O'Neill play from 1913 about three people dying on a life raft and the extremes to which their agony drives them. Dubost calls this a "theatrical appetizer" (14): it begins O'Neill's career-long exploration of people imprisoned in insatiable longing for goals they may not clearly...