ROBERT A. RICHTER. EUGENE O’NEILL AND “DAT OLE DAVIL SEA”: MARITIME INFLUENCES IN THE LIFE AND WORKS OF EUGENE O’NEILL. Mystic, CT: Mystic Seaport, 2004. 215 pp. ISBN 0-939510-97-9.

This is a book that had to be written, and it is surprising only that no one had written it before. O’Neill’s obsession with the sea has been explored over the years by many biographers and scholars, and it certainly figures conspicuously in the several plays examined closely in this volume. Still, Robert A. Richter’s well researched, richly illustrated, and often fascinating study may best serve as a port of entry, rather than a final harbor, in the quest for understanding how the sea as symbol and as way of life served to shape O’Neill’s imagination.

Richter devotes the first two-thirds of the book to the playwright’s documented experiences on or near the sea, most notably his two years as a young man aboard seagoing ships and his early years as a playwright on the sea’s edge in Provincetown. Growing out of his work while on staff at Mystic Seaport Museum during its 1988 commemoration of O’Neill’s centennial, Richter’s research draws heavily on the Sheaffer-O’Neill Collection at Connecticut College (where he is now director of arts programming), the Beinecke Library at Yale, the New London Maritime Society, the Provincetown Museum, and other archival resources. The photographs alone—some already familiar but many new to published O’Neill scholarship—make this a valuable contribution.

Richter is especially good at laying out the maritime backdrop of New London and Provincetown in the late 1800s and early 1900s as O’Neill was coming of age as an individual and an artist. The book’s biographical accounts by themselves offer little new information, but the contexts that Richter explores lend a new and highly specific feel for the seagoing culture that O’Neill grew up around, and which he eventually participated in directly. Richter focuses usefully on certain key figures, including Gustav Waage, captain of the Charles Racine, the sailing ship on which O’Neill first shipped out as a fare-paying passenger in 1910; the Irish stoker named Driscoll whom the young O’Neill idolized and later memorialized in the Glencairn plays; and Chris Christopherson, originally the title character of the 1919 play that would be revised in 1921 as “Anna Christie.”

Perhaps the fullest and most absorbing such profile is that of Captain John A. Cook and his wife Viola, the couple whose lives provided O’Neill with the basis of his early short play Ile. Through them O’Neill became aware of the strange mix of danger and domesticity obtained at sea when captains’ wives accompanied them on their voyages into arctic waters. The image of several such ships, locked in ice awaiting the seasonal thaw and the resumption of their business of hunting whales for oil and ambergris, forming a tiny, temporary community at the edge of civilization—even putting on plays to help while away the frozen weeks—is one of the most indelible in the book, a perfect emblem of the life at sea as a world apart that nonetheless reflects the more familiar world on land.

Richter also describes the waterfront life of Buenos Aires and other ports where O’Neill’s wanderings led him. Richter covers such notorious practices as “crimping,” the kidnapping of sailors for understaffed vessels as portrayed in The Long Voyage Home, and the dubious venues where sailors sought out cheap liquor, prostitutes, and hardcore pornography. Details of O’Neill’s stints at Jimmy-the-Priest’s saloon and flophouse in New York are revisited as a crucially formative episode in the future playwright’s life. Richter also makes some shrewd judgments about O’Neill’s status aboard the Charles Racine, the Ikala, and the American Line ships on which he worked as a young man, differentiating between his experiences as passenger and sailor but presenting them all as leaving a deep imprint on his imagination.

In the final one-third of the book, Richter traces this imprint in plays that either take place at sea or deal directly with maritime settings and themes, including Thirst, Warnings, Fog, the Glencairn plays, The Personal Equation, Ile, Beyond the Horizon, The Rope, Where the Cross is Made, Gold, Chris Christophersen, “Anna Christie,” The Hairy Ape, Mourning Becomes Electra, and the unfinished cycle play, The Calms of Capricorn, as well as the 1917 short story based on life at Jimmy-the-Priest’s, “Tomorrow.”

Although this approach is very useful in illuminating the lesser-known plays of O’Neill’s early career, it does not fulfill the promise that a reader may justly expect to understand better the force of more oblique or symbolic maritime references in such major works as Long Day ’s Journey into Night and The Iceman Cometh. One searches in vain for new insight, or indeed a passing glance, into such tropes as the “Bottom of the Sea Rathskeller” or the “last harbor” from Iceman, or even more notably, Edmund Tyrone’s transcendent monologue in act 4 of Long Day’s Journey about his experiences aboard ship and on the beach.

A different sort of problem arises when Richter comes to discuss Ile having already provided such a compelling account of John and Viola Cook in the chapter on the Provincetown seagoing community. His reading of the play seems anticlimactic compared to his earlier discussion of its real-life sources. The problem is that Richter, who is a cultural historian by temperament, is out of his element as a literary critic. He refers to O’Neill as a “writer of fiction” in his portrait of the Cooks in Ile, not an apt term for a playwright who made it a point to avoid writing prose fiction almost altogether. Perhaps a more successful structure, one more suited to Richter’s strengths, would have been to integrate these play analyses more seamlessly into the discussions of historical and cultural contexts at which Richter excels.

Even with its limitations, Eugene O’Neill and “Dat Ole Davil Sea” is a valuable work that gathers and enhances the published record of O’Neill’s obsession with the sea, a work that will greatly help scholars who venture farther into O’Neill’s imagination than Richter chooses to here.

Kurt Eisen
Tennessee Tech University

 

EDNA KENTON. THE PROVINCETOWN PLAYERS AND THE PLAYWRIGHTS’ THEATRE, 1915-1922. ED. TRAVIS BOGARD AND JACKSON R. BRYER. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004. 224 pp. ISBN 0­7864-1778-1.

The late Travis Bogard wrote, “Who Edna Kenton was and where she  came from is not easy to determine,” in his preface to this edition of her history of the Provincetown Players. As his essay tells us, she was a midwesterner like most of the Players, born in Springfield, Missouri, and educated at the University of Michigan. Like the group’s president and later director, George Cram “Jig” Cook, his wife and the group’s second most important playwright, Susan Glaspell, and another founding member, Floyd Dell, she had been part of the literary scene in Chicago before she made the move to New York’s Greenwich Village. In many ways a typical Village intellectual of the Little Renaissance period (1908-1919), she wrote articles for middle-brow magazines defining and defending feminism and the New Woman, as well as two novels, some historical volumes, and literary criticism, notably of Henry James.

Bogard observes also that “it is difficult to determine exactly what services she rendered the Players,” noting that although she did write some brochures and the occasional newspaper article for the group, “she did not act, write plays, design or work in a managerial, or even roustabout’s capacity.” None of the Players, he adds, “has remembered her with fondness” in any of innumerable memoirs. Despite her apparent failure to contribute artistically to its work, Kenton held positions of power in the company almost from her first acquaintance with it in the fall of 1916. That year she met Cook, heard his pitch about forming a theater that would become a “blessed community of life givers” and a well-spring of Dionysian creativity, and, Bogard says, “responded like a flower to the sun.”

From the beginning Kenton was an ardent supporter of Cook and, by extension, his wife Glaspell. She made herself useful, and then seemingly indispensable, to the Players by her willingness to read the many plays submitted to them. She writes in her history that “Susan Glaspell and I were the only members of the group who really read every play that came into us during those six years. . . .once established before a comfortable fire with a great stack of unread plays between us and with the door firmly locked to intruders, it was fun” (44). How this came about tells a good deal about Kenton’s role in, and perspective on, the Provincetown Players. An artistic collective modeled on the Masses magazine and the early Washington Square Players, the group at first chose its playbills democratically, reading the submitted plays aloud and voting on the selections. As submissions multiplied and this process became unworkable, the decision-making was entrusted first to a play-reading committee, of which Kenton was a willing member, and then to the Executive Committee, to which Kenton was appointed. Eventually, the selection of plays was decided primarily by Cook, Glaspell, and Kenton. In 1921, Cook saw to it that Kenton was installed in the paid position of play reader.

When Cook and Glaspell left the group to live in Greece in the spring of 1922, Kenton had authority in Cook’s place to cosign the group’s checks along with the treasurer, Eleanor Fitzgerald. As Kenton reports, the group had “decided on the pilot for the rest of the disastrous voyage; I would take Jig’s place and do what I could to hold the wheel more or less steady to the end” (155). Many in the group did not share this view of Kenton’s role, however, and her attempts to serve what she saw as the interests of Cook and Glaspell were met with resistance. When the Experimental Theatre, Inc., run by the famous “Triumvirate” of Eugene O’Neill, Robert Edmond Jones, and Kenneth Macgowan, succeeded the Players at the Provincetown Playhouse, Macgowan, who saw Kenton as a “thorn in his side,” asked her to resign her post, which she did in June of 1924.

With the new group in control of the Playhouse, Kenton saw it as her duty to Cook to write a history of the Players. Indeed she refers to herself as their “long-since chosen historian” in her dedication to the history. Taking possession of the group’s minute book and scrapbooks, now in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, she also collected the programs and circulars for the six years between 1916 and 1922 to write her account. More memoir than history, and exhibiting Kenton’s own unabashed biases, it is the only insider account of the Provincetown Players and thus invaluable to anyone studying the group’s history. It has been available to scholarly historians such as Robert Sarlós and Cheryl Black, who have made use of Kenton’s account within their own histories, but until Jackson Bryer and Travis Bogard provided a scholarly edition of the text, first in the Eugene O’Neill Review in 1997, and now, with printing errors corrected, in this excellent volume, it was not readily available to students and scholars of O’Neill.

The present volume includes not only Bryer’s authoritative text, but also numerous reproductions of the original playbills and photographs of people and productions. Appendices include contemporary articles about the Provincetown Players by Kenton, Djuna Barnes, and Marsden Hartley, among others, and a bibliography by Brian Rogers, who also did a good deal of the archival work in locating original documents. In short, this is a treasure trove for O’Neill scholars, theater historians, and anyone interested in the cultural history of the World War I era. With firsthand accounts of original productions of fifteen of his plays—Bound East for Cardiff, Thirst, Before Breakfast, Fog, The Sniper, The Long Voyage Home, Ile, The Rope, Where the Cross Is Made, The Moon of the Caribbees, The Dreamy Kid, Exorcism, The Emperor Jones, Diff’rent, and The Hairy Ape—it is essential to the study of O’Neill’s early work.

Brenda Murphy
University of Connecticut

 

ARTHUR GELB. CITY ROOM. New York: Putnam, 2003. 664 pp. ISBN 0­399-15075-7.

This evocative memoir is required reading for anyone seeking to  understand how Eugene O’Neill’s reputation made its famous comeback in the 1950s. It is also a breviary of mid-twentieth-century American theatrical taste making. While Arthur Gelb’s work at the Times’s drama desk and his epochal work as O’Neill’s biographer (in collaboration with wife Barbara) speak for themselves in terms of making City Room of pivotal interest for readers of this journal, there is much more here. Gelb’s first-hand account enables us to understand better the “why” and “how” of O’Neill’s renaissance, the cultural phenomena surrounding the restoration of his reputation as the greatest American playwright.

To Gelb, a young newspaperman, it was a given that O’Neill was an historic figure, a great playwright of Broadway past. Nonetheless, in 1956 the Quintero-directed production of The Iceman Cometh rescued O’Neill from that niche and showed Gelb an O’Neill who was energizing the new off­Broadway theater, a playwright who remained an avant-garde artist. Six months later, Long Day ’s Journey into Night made O’Neill the most important American playwright on Broadway proper—and in the world—all over again.

Gelb begins his story of life at the New York Times describing how he happened to meet screen siren Madeleine Carroll in a Times building elevator. It was 1944, his first week as a copyboy. Within a few paragraphs Gelb transports us to a vanished world when New York City was the capital of the world. He takes us to Bleek’s (pronounced “Blake’s”), the famous hangout of the New York press corps. These opening pages set the tone for the entire book. Gelb explains candidly and breathlessly how the Times is a unique institution, revealing its paradox: an institution of rigidly enforced reserve, yet beneath the surface of pressure to put out the world’s greatest newspaper, an atmosphere of caffeinated adrenaline.

Since Gelb’s perspective is so encompassing it is all the more rewarding that his tone is anything but Olympian. In many ways, the august, retired managing editor still seems to have the stars in his eyes about the Times that he had when he was a copyboy in 1944. Gelb is not for a moment a man who lives in the past. Thus his recollections of earlier decades are all the more precious and all the more useful for theater historians. Yes, he “was there,” but he writes in such a way that his presence is both obvious and understated. Whether or not one agrees with them, Gelb’s conclusions about the American theater are not dated. Nor does his commentary have any of the superficiality of the “eyewitness to history” variety. Gelb’s analysis of his own era could only be written in this way because he was a man of the Times.

What is more, Gelb’s portrait of Brooks Atkinson, the drama desk, and the mechanics of theatrical reportage is crucial for understanding how the Times determined its theater coverage in the 1940s and 1950s—when Gelb was a second-string reviewer and theater reporter. (He later declined an opportunity to replace the venerable Atkinson as drama critic.) Gelb’s portrait of the redoubtable Maurice Zolotow, the leading Broadway reporter of the day, is funny and telling. Little known today, Zolotow represents a vanished cadre of Broadway reporters who brought Broadway home to metropolitan and suburban readers alike. They depended on press agents for their copy and Gelb also recalls the legendary press agent Richard Maney (who inspired the tippling press agent Owen O’Malley in Hecht and MacArthur’s play Twentieth Century). This was an era of daily theater news columns with three reporters assigned to the beat.

It is proof of how things have changed that neither the Sunday nor daily Times review of Gelb’s autobiography even mention his years of work on the paper’s drama desk. Gelb assiduously and zealously recounts the post-war efflorescence of the American theater, not only the opening nights of the great O’Neill revivals and American premier of Long Day’s Journey into Night, but also the emergence of Off-Broadway Theater and the Theater of the Absurd.

To understand precisely how Gelb appreciated O’Neill is to learn how the Times and thereby the American consciousness came to appreciate the playwright. He argues that O’Neill touched a raw nerve in the American psyche, recounting a time when the liberal faith was an abiding American one. This was an age when it could be taken for granted that men of good will could get together and solve social problems. How intriguing it is to relive the days when John Lindsay was mayor of New York and to experience again the Times’s disillusionment with him. This is something that Gelb reports and remembers ruefully. Lindsay was a mayor who took it as an article of faith that the theater was crucial to the city. Gelb shares that creed.

Why the Times? Why O’Neill? Gelb’s devotion to the newspaper and the playwright should not be so astounding to anyone who understands Gelb’s milieu. Gelb describes his upbringing in the Bronx and thus elucidates how the Times represented everything significant and worthwhile to him. For O’Neillians this is also directly related to why Gelb takes O’Neill to be the greatest American dramatist. Gelb sees O’Neill as a profoundly American artist who is also part of the immigrant mix of New York City. As the Times distills the naked city’s million stories into “all the news that’s fit to print,” so does O’Neill ascend to high seriousness, making American tragedy from his own family’s terror and pity.