We know that in writing his trilogy, O’Neill meant to offer his contemporaries a modern play that gave them something like the experience of one who attended the spring dramatic festivals of Dionysos in Athens or Delphi 2,500 years ago. The ancient practice was to offer in a single day three serious plays and one farce. Sometimes all the plays were by the same author, more often by several authors.

O’Neill struggled with the challenge he had set himself. First conceived in 1926, shortly after he had stopped drinking, O’Neill read Hofmannsthal’s remarkable play Electra which Hofmannsthal had adapted, a few years after its original composition, to serve as libretto for Strauss’s equally remarkable opera. As I have described recently in these pages, O’Neill, in the late 1920s, immersed himself in writings about tragedy and about the ancient Greek sense of the world, a spirit which looms in three interesting plays written in the next few years, Strange Interlude, Lazarus Laughed and Dynamo. O’Neill’s interest in the Greeks led him to project a play about the life of Aeschylus, and then to the idea of writing a modern version of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. O’Neill wrote six complete drafts of the Electra material, changing many aspects of a play which, much of the time, he believed himself inadequate to write, so intensely did he feel the example of Aeschylus.¹

In some of his six drafts of the Electra story, O’Neill tried to write in verse (which he rejected as poor) and experimented with masks (which he rejected on the grounds that masks would lead his audience to compare his prose to the verse of poetic dramatists and be distracted by poetry which was unsatisfactory to him). He must have decided that the three plays of Electra would demand no more of an audience than the three tragedies plus satyr play that the Greek playwrights presented daily to huge audiences during each spring’s Dionysiad.

Judging by the initial reception, it seems that O’Neill did not misjudge. Joseph Wood Krutch wrote in the Nation that Electra “may turn out to be the only permanent contribution yet made by the twentieth century to dramatic literature. [. . .] Once more, we have a great play which does not ‘mean’ anything in the sense that the plays of Ibsen or Shaw or Galsworthy usually mean something; but one which does, on the contrary, mean the same thing that Oedipus and Hamlet and Macbeth mean—namely, that human beings are great and terrible creatures when they are in the grip of great passions, and that the spectacle of them is not only absorbing but also at once horrible and cleansing [. . .] ” (qtd. in Sheaffer 389).

The O’Neill “revival” of the 1950s is usually said to have begun with the Quintero-Robards Iceman of 1956, which was soon followed by the premier of Long Day’s Journey. But in fact, a highly successful Electra in London preceded both in 1955. The production convinced at least some British critics that O’Neill could, somehow, create great drama. Kenneth Tynan wrote: “despite the grandeur of its architecture, it remains no more than the greatest unwritten play of its century, by which I mean that O’Neill could not find words commensurate in dignity with his theme. Even so, he manages to create a stuffy sepulchral world in which the fearful events he describes might conceivably happen; and that in itself is a mark of genius” (qtd. in Sheaffer 390). It is a fair and a powerful compliment.

As we know, Mourning Becomes Electra enjoyed high success in its initial production winning almost universal praise from the New York press. When O’Neill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936, Mourning Becomes Electra was frequently mentioned in the press as a reason for the choice, and the trilogy was praised as the culmination to a remarkable career. Despite running five and a half hours (including a one hour dinner intermission after Part One, “Homecoming”), the press preview ended with wild applause and calls for the author. In regular performances, the plays ran somewhat longer, about six hours including the intermission. Despite the length, Electra ran for 150 performances, and when the Theatre Guild production ended, it was almost immediately followed by a revival at the Alvin Theatre.

The writing of Electra came in the midst of a period of great change in O’Neill’s view of drama and his way of developing his own work. The next play O’Neill took up, Days Without End, caused him no end of trouble. The play is only a little longer than one part of Electra, but where O’Neill had written six complete drafts of the trilogy in about three and a half years, he struggled with the six drafts of Days for nearly two years. O’Neill first conceived Days in 1927 when he had the notion of a trilogy, “Myth Plays for the God-Forsaken.” It was to begin with Dynamo and Days and conclude with “It Cannot Be Mad” which never got beyond the stage of notes. While struggling with Days he interrupted himself in September 1932, when he awoke with the idea for a nostalgic comedy, Ah, Wilderness! He finished the comedy in less than a month, and then returned to the intransigent Days. The struggle with Days and the miraculous birth of Wilderness are further evidence of the change going on in O’Neill’s creative process, the change that would eventually lead to the five magnificent plays we call the late plays.

But my present subject is Mourning Becomes Electra. After the successful first production, Electra’s history has been erratic. Besides a few successful productions like that in England, the trilogy was not often revived in the years between its premier and the recent past. Back files of the Eugene O’Neill Review, its predecessor, the Eugene O’Neill Newsletter, and other sources, show the play going through a long period of partial eclipse.

A few American revivals and some European productions occurred in the 1930s and after. There was a 1937 production in Budapest and in 1938 the Gate Theatre in Dublin produced an admired performance. After World War II, there was a production in Montparnasse, Paris. A Polish production at Krakow, which opened 30 June 1962, was so unpopular that the play has apparently not been attempted since in Poland, possibly because of translation problems. On the other hand, the play has been popular in Hungary, with revivals in 1963, ’64, ’68, and ’70. In 1989 a Dutch language production toured Belgium and the Netherlands.

In England Electra played at the Old Vic in 1961-62, and was praised by Irving Wardle as “a giant in more ways than one; one may resist it and dismiss it as a dated stunt, but in the end one gives in and admits to membership of the family in the darkened room” (qtd. in Black 61-62).

In America there probably were some college or other local productions in between the 1930s and 1980s, but information is scant. A 1947 film with Katina Paxinou, Rosalind Russell as Lavinia and Michael Redgrave as Orin, was considered successful. A 1978 PBS-TV production was well-acted by a strong cast but (I recall) suffered from having the play divided into five parts, with a week passing between the broadcast of each part.² The Caedmon LP recording of 1980, directed by Michael Kahn, with Jane Alexander as Lavinia, is strong and affecting despite being deeply cut. But there is no doubt that the play was not particularly prominent in the minds of even O’Neillians. A person turning the pages slowly of the Newsletter and Review seldom sees even the name of the play or its characters’ names mentioned in articles, and finds few revivals since 1977 (when the Newsletter was born).

Probably the main reason for the benign neglect was the discovery of the “late plays,” that is, after the 1956 Iceman, and the premier of Long Day’s Journey later that year. We had a “new” O’Neill to discover which had the initial effect of reducing attention to many of the earlier plays. The judgment that Mourning Becomes Electra was the culmination of O’Neill’s remarkable career, as was often said after the Nobel, was clearly premature, but there was no general consensus on a hierarchy of his work. Nor is there now. Since the mid-1980s there has been a general interest in all of O’Neill’s work including his earliest attempts at playwriting, and a renewed interest in plays that were at first considered failures (like The Straw, Marco Millions, Dynamo and The Fountain).

And, beginning in the 1980s, there have been a few stage revivals of Electra. These productions include one by the American Conservatory Theatre of San Francisco (1982), one by Harvard-Radcliffe undergraduates (1983), one by the Indiana Repertory Theatre (1986), and one by the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence (1987). Reviewing the latter, Frederick Wilkins complained that he had never seen a production of the trilogy that was not so severely cut as to convert tragedy to melodrama. In fact, he wrote, other reviewers compared the Providence production “not at all unfavorably to [. . .] Dallas and Dynasty” (Wilkins 1987). Then, as if in answer to Wilkins’s complaint, and in celebration of the O’Neill centenary, the PlayMakers Repertory Theatre of Chapel Hill, NC, performed the complete play.

The PlayMakers’ production won high praise from Wilkins, not only for maing the whole play accessible to the audience. The result was, in Wilkins’s opinion, that “the true note of tragedy is struck” (Wilkins 1988). The PlayMakers’ production seems to be worth studying since, in Wilkins’s opinion, it was highly successful.

The PlayMakers divided the trilogy into two parts instead of three, Part One ending after act 3 of “The Hunted,” when Lavinia had persuaded Orin to go with her to Boston to follow their mother to her assignation. A two-hour dinner break followed with food catered and eaten in the theater as part of the price of admission. Part Two began in Boston on Brant’s ship. There was an intermission in each part. Set changes were quick and fluid.

Wilkins praised all the cast. His remarks about David Whalen as Orin are especially interesting. Going against O’Neill’s stage directions, Whalen epitomized “youthful vitality and health, despite the bandage around his head. He picked his mother up, twirled her around, and lovingly berated his sister as an old “fuss buzzer”—suggesting both his friendly distance from Lavinia at the beginning and, in retrospect later, the psychic distance he would travel toward incest and suicide. The change began before he and Lavinia went to Boston. “Despite an excess of feverish hands to temple gestures,” Wilkins wrote, the disintegration that began in the scene before Boston “was subtle and moving.” Of the Lavinia and Christine, Wilkins wrote: “Tandy Cronin succeeded in the difficult task of making plausible the wild swings in Lavinia’s behavior and appearance—from stiff and humorless avenger to near­reincarnation of her voluptuous mother, to stoical self-immolator as she climbed the steps for the last time. And she held her own in her verbal duels with her mother, which is saying a lot because Ira Thomas’s Christine was a sensational achievement” (Wilkins 1988, 66-68).³

A 1991 production at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, won high praise in the Manchester Guardian of 21 April where Michael Billingsly wrote that O’Neill “links private pain to public experience and has that quality of emotional intensity that is the very stuff of dramatic poetry” (qtd. in Black 62).

At least one other Electra has been given at approximately full length. It was presented by the Chained Lightning Theatre of New York at the National Shakespeare Conservatory Theatre in September 1993, and was witnessed by no less a critic than the noted Shakespeare scholar Margaret Loftus Ranald, who is also author of the indispensable Eugene O’Neill Companion, and a former president of the Eugene O’Neill Society. Like the PlayMakers’ production it was performed in two sections, each with a brief intermission, and with a dinner break in the theater between acts 3 and 4 of “The Hunted.” Professor Ranald expressed reservations about O’Neill’s unpoetic rhetoric and sometimes “creaky” dramaturgy, and about occasional interpretations by an actor, but on the whole gave high praise to the play and the production, calling it overall, an occasion “which left the audience emotionally drained, almost silent, spellbound by the power of an admittedly flawed but extraordinarily visceral experience. Mourning Becomes Electra surely remains the towering achievement of the American Stage to date in its probing of mythic memories, collective unconscious, deviance, and hidden sin.” It is high praise indeed from an excellent critic who knew well the late plays, and implicitly placed Electra beside them.

It is interesting to speculate about the 50 year long near-eclipse of Mourning Becomes Electra. It may have begun simply because of the exceptional demands the trilogy makes on theater companies and audiences. During the Great Depression, when art became more generally politicized than it had been since the time of the first world war, Electra must have seemed arty, middle-class and irrelevant to the large issues of the day. O’Neill, ill and depressed from 1934 on, retreated from the public eye and before long was nearly forgotten. During this time, of course, he continued to write and, as we know, he evolved into a very different playwright than he had been. But almost nothing of his life and work after Electa was known at the time of his death in 1953. Then, in 1956, O’Neill’s work began to excite new interest, especially after the Ted Mann–José Quintero–Jason Robards production of The Iceman Cometh at the Circle in the Square, and the American premier of Long Day’s Journey that soon followed. The phenomenon of “late O’Neill” was born and for the next twenty-some years most attention to O’Neill went to exploring the great plays newly discovered.

With attention going to the unprecedented, very demanding late plays, it is understandable that there were not many revivals of Mourning Becomes Electra for some considerable time. In fact, Mourning Becomes Electra does not fit very comfortably either with the plays of the 1920s or the later plays.

It may also be the case that of O’Neill’s major plays Electra is likely to excite from an audience respect rather than deep engagement and that given a choice between sitting for more than five hours at Electra or Strange Interlude more theatergoers of today would choose the latter than the former. I am not sure that O’Neill’s struggle to find poetic language is almost entirely the cause. Successful as Electra was in its initial production, it was far less popular than Interlude (which earned O’Neill nearly a quarter million dollars in royalties, about one third of his life income).

It seems to me likely that the interest both plays enjoyed at the beginning of their stage histories may lie with the connections of both plays to psychoanalysis, that is, to the intense popular interest in psychoanalysis that had risen during the 1920s and that continued more than a half-century. In Electra, as in Interlude, O’Neill presents in precise detail the processes of what Freud called “the psychopathology of everyday life” in the behavior of his characters. The earlier play, very different in tone from the later, is often funny, and does not necessarily encourage an audience to take its characters entirely seriously. At the end Nina, Charlie, Ned and the others have called a truce in their war with psychological destiny and seem ready to live out their days in some degree of peace. The Mannons, and particularly Lavinia, allow themselves no such relief. Orin tries compulsively to understand his family history by writing his chronicle, a choice that leads him to death rather than acceptance and accommodation. Lavinia chooses a course that seems even sterner than suicide. Interlude shows people deceiving themselves even as they explain it all. Somehow, at the end, they have survived the fire. It makes sense psychologically. Lavinia’s course is psychologically true to the course of a psychotherapy, which, after years, may take one to a trailhead rather than a destination. Freud himself began his psychoanalytic inquiries in the belief that understanding unconscious processes would reveal to consciousness a world previously hidden and so bring an end to neurotic illness. It gradually became clear to Freud that no single model of the mind would suffice, and that there would be no such thing as “knowing” one’s unconscious world because it is dynamic and therefore constantly changing. Forty years after Freud began his psychological inquiries, he acknowledged that psychoanalytic insight might only allow people to understand with greater clarity than ever before much that they could not change.⁴ In its pessimism Freud’s later view is perhaps analogous to the implication of certain discoveries in microbiology and genetics, for example, that treatment by antibiotics may lead to the evolution of superbugs, or that viruses can and do mutate in response to efforts to destroy them.

A gradual change in psychoanalysis’s view of itself was eventually followed by a gradual decline in public interest in analysis and other forms of psychotherapy that require long and expensive courses of treatment. These trends are analogous, I suspect, to the public’s response to Mourning Becomes Electra. The end of the play shows forcefully the power unconscious thoughts and feelings have over Lavinia’s previous attempts and insistence that she can ignore guilt and conscience. When the play was newer it must have led many people in its audience to feel, not only the tragedy but also that they understood better than before the claims of the new psychologies to have created a new topography of humanity’s mental world, and to sense the magnitude of the claims. Several decades later, psychoanalysis no longer seems new, and its claims sometimes seem relegated to the same remote intellectual pinnacle where ideas of a space-time continuum and of evolution linger, either in splendid isolation as achievements now superseded, or most obviously useful to authors of popular fiction.

Perhaps thinking of the characters as exemplifying Freudian or Jungian patterns was never a good reason for admiring Mourning Becomes Electra, but instead, a way to intellectualize the unpleasantly puritanical claim of inevitable self-punishment for a person with a conscience who does evil. It seems that whatever greatness inheres in Mourning Becomes Electra can be accessible only when theaters and audiences can muster enough patience and fortitude to expose themselves to the whole play that O’Neill created. It is worth recalling that King Lear was considered too long and too unpleasant to be performed except occasionally, and drastically altered (so that, e.g., Cordelia survives).

Such thoughts have passed through my mind during two performances of Electra that I have recently seen, both in Seattle. First I saw at ACT the 2002­03 production that moved to the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven and starred Jane Alexander. When I saw it, the play ran about two hours and forty minutes first to last lines, including intermissions (which coincided with the timing given on the theater’s web site). I had just reread the play and was constantly aware of how very much was missing. I thought the set was effective and efficient allowing very rapid transition from scene to scene. But no matter how well acted or staged, a five hour trilogy of plays reduced to far less than half of its verbal substance cannot seem to be whole. Despite actors of high competence, none of the characters seemed interesting or credible; all seemed to be going through the motions of a pageant the fable of which they considered too well known to require a full retelling. Several reviewers of heavily cut performances have commented that the cuts reduce tragedy to melodrama and I think this is true of the Seattle ACT production. One needs to watch the subtle development of understanding in Vinnie and Orin of the things they witness and do. It is their development from moment to moment in the trilogy with which we identify, and which ultimately makes us know that it is no soap opera that we are watching. During the Seattle performance my mind had wandered frequently, musing about whether O’Neill had consciously intended Orin to be aware of incestuous desires for his sister and mother, or half­conscious, or sometimes conscious and sometimes not; and I had similar but not identical questions about Lavinia. After, it occurred to me that my musings might be prompted by indecision on the parts of the actors or director. I don’t feel certain that I know how best the play might be performed, but I do think I should have been experiencing the play more directly than I was, wondering less about the cuts and their effects upon the actors’ development of their characters, and so on.

The production’s failure (as I saw it) led me to muse extensively about the play. On New Years Day 2003, several friends, most with theatrical experience, came to our home and we read the play aloud. From time to time it was apparent that the play could evoke quite good vocal acting, and most of the participants, though tired at the end of the day, said they were glad to have had the chance to travel the road together.

Then, in October 2003, I saw the opera Mourning Becomes Electra, also in Seattle. We are season subscribers, but I must say that I did not particularly look forward to the performance, partly because I had read reviews and other accounts of earlier versions of the opera. Before commenting more specifically on the opera I will say that my apprehension was unfounded and that I found it deeply satisfying and profoundly tragic. As I recently wrote in another essay about Electra, I consider that, in the long run, the most useful way of knowing one has been in the presence of the tragic is a subjective sense, deeply felt, and perhaps largely incapable of articulation.⁵ I left the opera with this sense, feeling as I have when I have felt I have seen a performance of a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy so wonderful that I seemed to know the world as I had not known it before. I will discuss the opera at a little length.

The opera, by Marvin David Levy, with libretto attributed to Henry Butler, was originally commissioned by the Met in 1961 and performed in Lincoln Center in1967, the Met’s first season there. The production won praise from several critics, and it was performed again the next season. Reviews were mixed and, for whatever reasons, the opera simply disappeared after the season ended. It had no further production until 1998 when Chicago Lyric Opera mounted a considerably revised version. Writing for Seattle Opera Magazine, Mr. Levy confessed his dissatisfaction with both his music and the libretto. During the Met production, the libretto was considerably changed by the director, Michael Cacoyannis.

Mr. Levy’s music reminds me a little of Webern or Bartok: that is, it did not often seem to me melodic enough, on one hearing at least, to hum its airs while leaving the theater. (I seldom felt that I could have hummed a passage immediately after hearing it.) On the other hand, it never seemed to me pretentious, and the sounds of the orchestra were often beautiful, as was the blend of singers with each other and with the orchestra. Speight Jenkins, general director of Seattle Opera, who commissioned the third version (a co-commission with the New York City Opera), wrote of leitmotifs and themes that I failed to notice on a first hearing. But it didn’t seem to matter. The acting of the singers seemed to me superb in each instance, and so well blended that I had no sense of any member of the cast standing out, either for good or for bad. I thought the production achieved what O’Neill had set out to reach in writing the play. Somehow the music gave the opera the “poetic” quality that had eluded O’Neill while writing the play.

Speight Jenkins spoke about the opera, and Seattle Opera published articles by him and others describing its history. Jenkins said that he had not liked the opera in its 1967 production, and Levy himself has criticized the music he originally wrote. There were also problems in the original libretto. Jenkins writes, “The late Henry Butler [. . .] took Eugene O’Neill’s sprawling masterpiece and reduced it drastically [. . .]. In so doing, the text became on the surface far more melodramatic than the original discursive, thought­provoking play.” Speaking to a group of operagoers, Jenkins said that Michael Cacoyannis, the director of the original production, changed the libretto so extensively that it became virtually his work. (Many will know of Mr. Cacoyannis as an important film and theater director, who made worthy films of the Electra of Sophocles, and Euripides’s Iphigeneia in Aulis and Trojan Women; and he also directed in the annual Greek dramatic festivals in Epidavros and elsewhere.)

Apparently after the first production’s disappearance from the stage, Mr. Levy went back to the score and libretto and continued to work off and on. In the late 1990s, Chicago Lyric Opera commissioned a new version of the opera that led to further revision. Speight Jenkins attended the 1998 Chicago production where he met Mr. Levy. The two talked about further changes. Eventually, Jenkins arranged for the third version of the opera.⁶ The latest production permitted the outcome that seems to me essential and inherent in the play to occur. One knows at the end of the opera, as one should know from a good performance of the play, that when Lavinia enters the Mannon house at the end she will have to learn much about herself before she can consider leaving the presence of the dead Mannons. The decision to have herself locked in the old house makes one know the magnitude of her determination to confront herself and her life, and it should earn her the respect of the audience. O’Neill dramatized the achievement that had begun with his psychotherapy in the 1920s, and with the plays of those years, and that later allowed him to examine directly his own ghosts in the autobiographical late plays that began to come a decade after Mourning Becomes Electra.