From our office vantage point we enjoy a spectacular view of the vertical smile that cleaves the buttocks of Le penseur (The Thinker) in the adjacent courtyard. Hunched over and heavily muscled, he could as well be sitting on a commode as pondering the mysteries of the universe. Or both. Yet no one seems to notice or take offence at this potential blasphemy. Indeed, he sits outside Philosophy Hall, perched on his pedestal, cordoned off by wrought iron, a monument to the arts and sciences, divorced, ironically enough, from his originally intended position atop The Gates of Hell. Ah, college life! This hairy ape at last does belong.

 

 

Erika Rundle's brilliant essay that anchors the current volume of this journal, "The Hairy Ape's Humanist Hell," traces the history of Rodin's famous sculpture and makes it clear that it was not always welcomed by polite society. She reveals that original audiences were shocked by the graphic image of the beastly man in the pose of an intellectual. They were appalled by his size, his nakedness, his brute physicality cut in stone, his primitiveness. Over time, the seeming primitive cast assumed evolutionary dimensions in a Darwinian appeal to human development. Today, the image has become iconic in the da Vinci way: mankind as da measure of all things. As such, the filthy beast has been thoroughly domesticated and we walk past it with no fear of retribution, safe within our own intellectual zoo.

 

We often fear that we make a statue of our beloved O'Neill. Lost in admiration, gazing at the stars, we hope that our praise will save and preserve him from the hostile critics among today's rabble. The search for sanctuary too often leads to sanctity. We gesture to the late and great plays and follow the arc to perfection from early youth to final genius. We blanch like Mildred

in the face of O'Neill's nakedness, his flexed muscles, his bald experiment-ation, his overt sensuality and sexuality, his adolescent naiveté. We avert our eyes from that which embarrasses us, refusing to recognize the elements that make O'Neill truly great. With the very best of intentions, we often suck the life right out of O'Neill and render him helpless in the mausoleum of theater history, Exhibit A as the Father of American Drama. Step right up, folks! But, really . . . who wants to see a stiff?

 

Fortunately, there are still a lot of people bent on discovering O'Neill for themselves. We have watched two productions recently that celebrated an early, wild and untamed O'Neill. The first, aptly called The Pioneer, took place at the Metropolitan Playhouse in the East Village and combined four one-acts (Before Breakfast, Ile, The Movie Man, and The Web) and the will and testament of O'Neill's dog into a thoroughly engaging and harmonious event (read review on page 173). We were impressed by the director's vision and choices to stitch the disparate group together, overlapping one play with the next, squeezing each one equally for humor and pathos, and coaxing an energetic cast of young actors to commit fully to the vulnerability of the characters. When the artistic director of the Playhouse, Alex Roe, ended the evening by performing "The Last Will and Testament of Silverdene Emblem O'Neill" as a monologue, pausing to scratch over the dead body of the kind crook from The Web, we caught the thrill of a creative force running with O'Neill to tap the ironies of life and death, tragedy and comedy, in the world shared by human and animal life.

 

More recently, we saw The Great God Brown as a directing thesis production at the School of the Arts at Columbia University. Mentored by the revered Anne Bogart, the graduate student chose to reinvent the 1926 play for a modern audience. Trimming the play to just about 90 minutes, the director dispensed with masks altogether and showed Brown's transformation by having the actor don Dion's shirt. The piece of clothing was a problem (why not a leather jacket?), but the moment when Margaret embraced Brown as Anthony played beautifully and was, appropriately, the high point of the production. We feel that ultimately the director did not go far enough in reimagining this play and got sidetracked with some unfortunate concepts (e.g., the audience moves from the theater to the stage and sees the performance from the rear of the stage [behind the mask of artifice as it were]), but we applaud the decision to tackle a difficult play and to produce it honestly. How often do we get a chance to see The Great God Brown?

 

Just as praiseworthy productions of O'Neill must reinvent the play and the playwright with fresh discoveries and insights, scholarship must very much do the same things, building upon past work of previous scholars to stand out with something new to say. Check out the book review section and, beginning with Patrick Chura's article, the five essays in this volume. Writing on Strange Interlude, Chura cites the recent work of the late Paul Roazen, whose newly discovered letters of O'Neill to Louise Bryant appeared in Volume 28 (2006) of the journal, as well as the great biographer Louis Sheaffer, to develop a thesis that O'Neill wrote Strange Interlude in response to and with reading knowledge of Bryant's husband's novel. After reading the article it is hard not to agree with Sheaffer that Bryant was the model for Nina Leeds. And it makes us want to get a copy of Bullitt's juicy novel! Two essays on Long Day's Journey into Night complement each other in unsuspecting ways. J. Chris Westgate invokes Doris Alexander's most recent book in order to talk about the innovative tragic form of O'Neill's masterpiece apart from any autobiographical resemblance. From a feminist perspective, Laurin Porter cites works by Jean Chothia, Normand Berlin, and Michael Manheim, among others, to advance Mary Tyrone as the true subject and focal point, in spite of her marginalization in the play, of O'Neill's family tragedy. Uncovering a parody of Days Without End, Robert M. Dowling advances themes put forth by Felicia Hardison Londré a few years ago (2004), and reminds us why we do not remember Benjamin De Casseres today. Finally, heroically, Professor Rundle frees the hairy ape and roams the intellectual field from classic dramaturgy to primate drama, art history, evolution, Tarzan, Travis Bogard, and much, much more. We feel as if we're encountering a new play.

 

We long to be innocent again and to recapture the illusion of the first time. Go back! Read on!