By PATTERSON JAMES

The stark “realism” of “The Hairy Ape” justifies the elevation of Eugene O’Neill to the official position of Archpriest of the Unwashed Drama and pet divinity of its Unsoaped Patrons.  But, like all “realists”, Mr. O’Neill mistakes sensationalism for reality.  The Provincetown Playhouse idea of naturalism in the drama is to make all the characters criminals or mental defectives, the scenes of the play the interior of a loaded garbage scow, the language that of a waterfront bawdy house.  In order to be “strong” enough to attract the sensitive nostrils of the insurgent playgoers above and below Fourteenth Street the meat offered them must be “high”.  “The Hairy Ape” smells like the monkey house in the Zoo, where the last act takes place and where the play should have been produced.  The stage presentation of the Neanderthal “man” is accompanied by outbursts of profanity which quite out-fetor all and any of Mr. O’Neill’s previous efforts.  “Christ!” seems to be h is favorite expletive, while his conversation is lightened every other word by “Wot de hell!”  He “God damns” the lady visitor from the promenade deck when she enters the stoke hole, throws his coal shovel at her with an airy “You lousy tart”, and calls the engineer, whose whistle is constantly calling for more steam, a “Belfast son of a Catholic bastard”.  “All of which is to be expected in a character like ‘Yank’, and its use is courageous and strong and natural,” chant the idolators.  So are the obscenities exchanged between draymen caught in a traffic jam.  So are hundreds of other things which happen in everyday life.  So are the digestive processes of human beings.  The latrine is not only a feature of organized sanitation, but it is made imperative by law.

What right or place has it in the theater on the stage?  None, but we may expect its stage reproduction any night now.

A play by Mr. O’Neill, with the mise-en-scene in the entrails cleaning department of a stockyards slaughter house, would not surprise me in the least.  I once saw a little girl, the daughter of the driver, sitting, while her father was making his house –to house- collections, atop a swill-gathering wagon (on) a hot day in August calmly eating an ice cream cone what time the neighborhood reeked and the passers-by held their noses to avoid strangulation.  That is the picture I have made of Mr. O’Neill in the daily throes of dramatic composition.  No matter how vicious the stink he raises around himself and others he munches his ice cream cone undisturbed.

If we are to be annoyed with stage dialog like that with which “The Hairy Ape” is polluted to satisfy the demands of a Mr. O’Neill’s “realistic” conscience, let us go the whole hog and not merely the hind quarters.  Surely there should be no half-way measures in the Greenwich Village brand of realism.  Cowardice should have no place in the makeup of the writers of drama for the insurrectos.  If Mr. O’Neill wished to give us real view of the firemen’s forecastle, why did he not have the drunken inmates vomiting all over the place?  Unless I have been badly misinformed, that is one of the painfully actual concomitants of too much tidewater liker and just as common as the language used by “Yank” Smith.  Why strain at a gnat and swallow a cuspidor?  Let’s have is all – or not of it.

In the eagerness to shock the native Mr. O’Neill (or the stage director) totally neglected some bits of real realism which should have been put in, and the neglect sticks out like a sore thumb.

The big scene of the play is the boiler room of the steamer.  Before the fire doors stand the stokers stripped to the waist, the hairy ape, Smith, towering like a giant in their midst.  As the curtain rises the roar of the engines sells, the doors are swung open and the coal passers shovel in furious unison until the gang boss yells, “Enough”.  From the front there is a fine view of the fireboxes, with their red coals and the grimy figures standing in the foreground.  But the illusion is smashed like a clinker under a slice bar.  The stokers shovel AIR into the blazing fires.  What should be more foolish than the picture of firemen seating the racing to the command of the engineer’s whistle scooping up heaping lumps of nothing and feeding that into the hungry gullet of the boilers?  The bunkers should be filled with piles of papier mache coal or black cotton balls.  When the call for more steam sounds from the engine room “Yank” and his mates then can have something to pass into the fire.  The fires, like any other fire, would be blackened for an instant by the fresh coal, but as the doors are closed long enough between times the black lumps could be raked out of sight and the fiery glow seen when they are opened again.  But the necessity for thinking up unpleasant dialog was too great, doubtless, to permit of a little thought being given to perfecting a good idea.

Another bit of incongruity is the scene in which “Yank” encounters a Fifth Avenue Sunday morning parade.  One might suppose that he figures which roused his rage would be extravagantly dressed men and women.  Instead of that they are manikins, with faces encased in masks, and all mincing upstage-downstage-upstage-downstage while the stoker empties the slop pail of his vocabulary over them.  Even the cause of his arrest is an unworthy and unmanly attack on a clothing window dummy.  How come such symbolism in our “realist”?

The last touch of irrationality is the taking off of the hairy ape by the gorilla in the Zoo.  According to all well-regulated monkey house rules, visitors are not allowed to poke the animals, nor are the animals permitted to scalp the visitors as they pass by the cages.  Also, the cages are bolted, barred and double locked.  Mr. O’Neill has changed all that.  In his zoo the gorilla’s cage is left unlocked so that he can receive callers at all hours.  All “Yank” Smith ahs to do is open the door, the gorilla walks out and crushes him to death.  Just as easy!!  Where the gorilla went after he cracked “Yank’s” ribs is no business of Mr. O’Neill’s.  His responsibility ended when he left the cage unlocked.

Another bit of symbolism might have been introduced by showing the gorilla taking tea at one of the cellar dumps with which the immediate vicinage of the Provincetown Playhouse is broken out.

But “The Hairy Ape” is doing business.  It is packing ‘em in – literally – at the Palace of Macdougal Street.  The night I saw the show the ventilation of any ship’s forecastle could have been sweet heaven over what had to be suffered.  The audience at best was not alluringly savory – It never seems to be – and the standees in the rear of the building made the entrance of a solitary breath of fresh air an impossibility.  Any suggestions that the doors be opened were sweetly but firmly vetoed.  I heard one woman, who looked as if she was about to swoon, inquire of the doortender whey the ban on clean air was so rigid.

“The people from uptown come down here to see our naked actors and you don’t want ‘em to take cold?” was the explanation given with an oleaginous grin.

That – in a mouthful – is the complete philosophy of the O’Neil school of playmaking.  Give ‘em something they don’t see every trip to the theater, make it rough, and the gullible will make a path to your box-office.  Mr. O’Neill has successfully capitalized the stoke hole.  The gorilla of Broadway in its unlocked cage waits for “The Hairy Ape” to come uptown.  I wonder whether it will kill with one ugly crunch or whether is twill fall on the neck of “Yank” Smith and – kiss him?