Directing O'Neill: Strange Interlude; Long Day's Journey Into Night; Ah, Wilderness!; Dynamo

Nina Leeds and Strange Interlude: Imperfect Harbinger

Eugene O'Neill International Festival of Theatre, St. Michael's Theatre,

New Ross, County Wexford, Ireland, October 12, 2019

Ben Barnes

On October 12, 2019, I directed a staged reading of Eugene O'Neill's 1928 Pulitzer Prize–winning nine-act, six-hour drama, Strange Interlude, for the second Eugene O'Neill International Festival of Theatre in New Ross, County Wexford, Ireland. Like the forbears of the assassinated president John F. Kennedy, the family of the playwright embarked from the quays of New Ross in desperate times for a better life in the land of the free. Now, in a country where festivals spring up like mushrooms in every village, the New Ross Kennedy connection has spawned a summer school and the O'Neill association has generated a theatre festival.

I was intrigued to take on this assignment as most of what I knew about the play was not encouraging. I remembered that in recent times the American actor David Greenspan had famously taken the trouble to memorize all 200 pages and perform all eight roles of this play himself. Why I wondered would a serious artist of wit, intelligence, and sophistication give himself to such an undertaking? The play, in spite of its original success, did not fare well in revivals. In 1963, reviewing one of the three Broadway productions it has had, Richard Gilman called this drama "very likely the worst play that has ever been written by a dramatist with a reputation."

These revivals, including a 2013 British National Theatre production, never succeeded in putting the play back into the repertoire of frequently produced drama in the way, say, the revival/reclamation of J. B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls was to do or my own reclamations of the John B. Keane trilogy at the Abbey in the 1980s did in bringing Sive, The Field, and Big Maggie back to the national repertoire. Strange Interlude's unwieldy length was undoubtedly a contributory factor but these revivals, beyond their value as curiosities, only seemed to confirm the critical verdict on a play widely regarded as a psychologically far-fetched, bloated, and melodramatic story of a woman unmoored by the early loss of her fiancé in the dying days of the First World War.

One can only speculate that the play's early admirers in 1928, including the judging panel of the Pulitzer Prize, were swept along by the innovation of stream-of-consciousness monologues and soliloquies interlaced with regular dialogue in laying bare the scandalous and unfettered inner thoughts and unconscious impulses of characters who maintain a veneer of civilized surface conversation throughout. The 1920s were, after all, the apogee of the psychoanalysis craze with Freud as the star turn. Audiences flocked to Strange Interlude, and its run was extended, but even in its time it was not immune to mockery. In Animal Crackers, Groucho Marks famously remarks, "Pardon me while I have a strange interlude. …"

What struck me in working on the play, and subsequently directing the reading, is that O'Neill makes no apologies for the obvious dramatic contrivances he engineers in order to explore the themes that interest him. Nina Leeds, traumatically losing her fiancé to the Great War, displaces her grief and guilt (at the nonconsummation of the relationship) by throwing herself into mercy work at an army hospital and in a fever of misplaced expiation grants sexual favors to damaged young men eager to re-enter life even on compromised terms. Her doctor, Ned Darrell, and her father-figure friend, Charles Marsden, urge her to marry the young and eager Sam Evans; and although she does not love him, she believes that a loveless marriage is the sacrifice that she must make in order to remain faithful to her dead lover. Evans, conveniently, has a modest opinion of himself, regards Nina as way out of his league, and is grateful for whatever crumbs fall from her table. When Nina becomes pregnant, the child will be...