NOTES

 

This essay was made possible by a Beinecke Graduate Research Fellowship at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which provided support for uninterrupted work at a critical phase of the project. My thinking about the play is deeply indebted to Aoife Monks, Lecturer in Theatre Studies in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London, whose 2002 conference paper, "`The Monster From the Black Lagoon': The Wooster Group's The Hairy Ape," was delivered at "The Wooster Group and Its Traditions," sponsored by the Free University of Brussels. I have chosen to focus on the historical context of the 1922 premiere, but have found Monks's writing on O'Neill's play and the Wooster Group's production (which premiered in 1995 and toured internationally) indispensable. Monks explores related themes in her essay "`Genuine Negroes and Real Bloodhounds'": Cross-Dressing, Eugene O'Neill, the Wooster Group, and The Emperor Jones," which appeared in Modern Drama 48.3 (Fall 2005): 540-564.

 

1 A great deal has been written on the similarities between O'Neill's The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape and Georg Kaiser's From Morn to Midnight (1916) and The Coral (1917), not to mention O'Neill's general indebtedness to Strindberg and Wedekind. For a discussion of these associations, among others, see Mardi Valgemae, "O'Neill and German Expressionism," Modern Drama 10.2 (September 1967): 111-123.

 

2 Bogard recognizes similar themes in plays written just before and after The Hairy Ape, such as The First Man (1921), where the mechanisms of inheritance are familial and well as evolutionary, and The Fountain (1922), which is set in the contact zone of the New World. For O'Neill's notes on the abandoned play The Homo Sapiens, which he began in 1922, see Floyd 38-40. Characters include an organ grinder and monkey (see note 16) and the proprietor of an animal store.

 

3 Just months after O'Neill's play closed, Broadway audiences encountered another ape-man of sorts in a pulp melodrama entitled The Monster. The play featured a "mute, giant servant" named Caliban, who was performed in blackface. In a masterful scene of reversal and recognition, the suspect Caliban rebels against his master, a (white) scientist bent on vivisecting human beings, by exposing the subjects of his experiments as humans, rather than animals, a move that parallels the audience's own revelation that Caliban is indeed a human being rather than the subspecies indicated by his theatrical markings. This reversal not only reorganizes the plot but reveals the true referent of the play's ghastly title—the scientist ("`The Monster'" 227).

 

4 A year before the "Monkey Man" essay was published, Bird addressed ethnic stereotypes in her monthly column with an article entitled "The Jew as a Human Being." She interviewed the actor George Sidney about his debut as Isidore Solomon in the new play Welcome Stranger, where "the leading character was a Jew—not a Jew comedian, but a regular, ordinary, every-day human being" (146). "No one ever dreamed," wrote Bird, "that a day would come when a stage Hebrew would be cast as anything but a comedian—a grotesque, a burlesquer of his race, a magnifier of racial characteristics" (146).

 

5 For a discussion of nineteenth-century "monkey-man" dramas, see Goodall 50-62.

 

6 O'Neill himself seems to have understood the movement of history through an evolutionary timeframe: "The Hairy Ape [. . .] faces the simple truth that, being what we are, and with any significant [. . .] change for the better in us probably 10,000 years away, there is just no answer" (Bogard and Bryer 484-485).

 

7 See Richard Dawkins, "Progress," in Keywords in Evolutionary Biology, ed. Evelyn Fox Keller and Elisabeth A. Lloyd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 263-272.

 

8 This misunderstanding persists in more recent critiques, as well: "Yank is the apotheosis of Neanderthal man physically and psychologically as he attempts to scale the modern evolutionary ladder from machine to animal to human" (Floyd 127) and "Our human dilemma, as symbolized by Yank's, is how to move upward on the evolutionary scale, how to grow, without destroying the joyous or animal part of the self" (Abbott 53).

 

9 For a discussion of the connections among these works, and others, see Margaret Gump, "From Ape to Man and from Man to Ape," Kentucky Foreign Language Quarterly 4.4 (1957): 177-185. For an even broader range of literary associations, see Patrick Bowles, "The Hairy Ape as Existential Allegory," Eugene O'Neill Newsletter 3.1 (May 1979): 2-3.

 

10 See Joseph Jurich, "Jack London and The Hairy Ape," Eugene O'Neill Newsletter 3.3 (January 1980): 6-8, and R. Viswanathan, "The Jungle Book and O'Neill," Eugene O'Neill Review 11.2 (Summer/Fall 1987): 3-7.

 

11 See Marilyn Jurich, "Men of Iron, Beasts of Clay: The Confluence of Folk-Tale and Drama in `Joe Magarac' and The Hairy Ape," Eugene O'Neill Review 12.2 (Summer/Fall 1988): 38-45.

 

12 In this perspective, which extends the field of influence to include film while narrowing it to a particularly American focus, Tarzan is Yank's closest relation, and King Kong his legacy. The primate drama's locus classicus is, of course, Shakespeare's The Tempest. Not surprisingly, one critic described Yank as "a modern Caliban, produced by our industrial society, disowned by it, and rebellious" (Woodbridge 315) recapitulating the themes of imperialism, slavery, and theatricality that have characterized the primate drama since its inception. For an essay interrelating Yank and Caliban as literary figures, see Bernard Baum, "The Tempest and The Hairy Ape: The Literary Incarnation of Mythos," Modern Language Quarterly 14.3 (September 1953): 258-273.

 

13 O'Neill himself hinted at a posthumanist vision of sorts behind the scenes: "If the human race is so damned stupid that in two-thousand years it hasn't had brains enough [. . .] then it's time we dumped it down the nearest drain and let the ants have a chance" (B. Clark 153).

 

14 The Hairy Ape has been interpreted, alternately, as a response to "the late nineteenth century [. . .] crisis in masculinity" that placed "the Primitive Masculine model [. . .] in the broader cultural contexts of culture and gender" (Robinson 97, 102); a critique of the "argument for black racial degeneration [that] was part of larger negrophobic scientific discourses in the early twentieth century" (Nickel 33); and a "fable narrating man's war with a capitalistic society" (Bogard 249). These are just a few of the play's various politically-inflected readings, all of which present well-argued, humanist insights that by definition neglect the ways in which O'Neill positions performance itself as the central determinant in a drama whose rhetorical target is the myth of the humanist subject.

 

15 Try as he might, Paddy cannot fully deflect his animal identity onto Yank. When he is first introduced in The Hairy Ape, O'Neill's stage directions tell us his "face is extremely monkey-like, with all the sad, patient pathos of that animal in his small eyes" (123).

 

16 Organ grinders' monkeys were common entertainers in nineteenth-century New York, where they were trained (often using extremely violent methods) to perform a number of tricks that revolved around their impersonation of human beings. The organ grinders were usually recent Italian immigrants, who were already marginalized themselves. See Rudolf Ising's 1933 animated film The Organ Grinder, whose title refers not to a human being, but to the monkey who is the film's protagonist. (Ising was also the co-creator of the popular animated character Bosko, which was based on comic blackface stereotypes.)

 

17 There have, however, been productions of The Hairy Ape in which Yank was played by an African-American actor, the first of which occurred in London in 1931 with Paul Robeson in the lead role. See Joel Pfister, Staging Depth: Eugene O'Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 260, n48.

 

18 For a case study of this phenomenon, see Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume, Ota Benga, The Pygmy in the Zoo: One Man's Degradation in Turn-of-the-Century America (New York: St. Martin's, 1992). For a discussion of how this story intersects with The Hairy Ape, see Chaudhuri 144.

 

19 A "ghoul" lives off the flesh of corpses, robbing graves in order to survive.

 

20 Viz., "My great-grandmother smoked a pipe—a clay pipe. [. . .] She was too distant a relative to be vulgar. Time mellows pipes" (130, 131).

 

21 "The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible," writes Foucault. "If we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time given over to the infinity of the sea [. . .] you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development [. . .] but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence" (25, 27).

 

22 The neologism "damed," which appears in the original version of the play published in New York by Boni and Liveright in 1922, adds power to Mildred's continued and purposeful confusion of financial and genetic inheritance as well as her obsession with breeding. Conventionally, racehorses are said to be "sired," but the mare to whom they are born is called a "dam"; Mildred coins the verb "to dam," which introduces matriarchal descent into a decidedly patriarchal ritual practice and sets up her self-mocking pun with the homonym "damned." The pun also gains from its association with the cognate noun "dame," which melds an aristocratic, continental title with the streetwise, American slang for a woman. In the authoritative edition of The Hairy Ape included in the Complete Plays, Volume 2, "damed" has been changed (inexplicably!) to "damned," which is then simply repeated at the end of the line. I have retained the earlier, more meaningful, wording.

 

23 Compare Mildred's line ("I inherit the acquired trait of [. . .] wealth, but none of the energy, none of the strength of the steel that made it" [132]) with one of Yank's from the previous scene: "I'm de ting in gold dat makes it money! And I'm what makes iron into steel!" (129).

 

24 Whether or not O'Neill had read Franz Kafka's 1917 short story "Ein Bericht für eine Akademie" ["A Report to an Academy"] is unknown, but the similarities with The Hairy Ape are more than striking. Norris claims that Kafka's story "directly links animal mimicry and theatrical performance as evolutionary strategies in the struggle for survival" (54), and exposes "the power differential between humans and apes" (67). Kafka expresses this dynamic through his own architecture of captivity, in which "apes are consigned to boxes and cages unless they can convince their captors that they are human" (Norris 67). Norris's book, along with Paul Sheehan's Modernism, Narrative and Humanism, tracks the critique of humanism in literary fiction from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, a time period the former calls "biocentric" (1) and the latter "anthropometric" (x).

 

25 Mildred's aunt anticipates the economy of this look earlier in the preceding scene, when she remarks, in reference to her niece's recent experience as a social worker: "how they must have hated you, by the way, the poor that you made so much poorer in their own eyes!" (131).

 

26 Demarcated by the foreman's authoritative whistle at its beginning and end, this scene uncannily dramatizes Louis Althusser's concept of "interpellation" (enacted in "rituals of ideological recognition" or "misrecognition"), in which "concrete individuals" are constituted as "concrete subjects" by the prevailing ideology—in this case, humanism. See "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)" in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 172-174.

 

27 For an argument linking the fields of postcolonial theory and critical animal studies, see Philip Armstrong, "The Postcolonial Animal," Society & Animals: A Journal of Human-Animal Studies 10.4 (2002): 413-419.

 

28 azingly, Skinner never explicitly mentions the connection with Rodin. He has apparently come to this conclusion through a structural and thematic comparison to Dante's work, and refers to O'Neill himself when he invokes "the poet." It is worth remembering that O'Neill attempted suicide (the fate of the sailor Driscoll, upon which Yank's character is based) at a place called the "Hell Hole," a stoker's bar in the seedy downtown docks of New York that O'Neill frequented.

 

29 Dante's Divine Comedy may have been on O'Neill's mind while he was writing The Hairy Ape: "In 1921, upon the six hundredth year of the death of Dante, [Norman Bel] Geddes [. . .] the young and brilliant designer [. . .] set to work upon [. . .] the presentation of The Divine Comedy as a great drama of light and words in Madison Square Garden. Here he schemed to build a gigantic and adroitly curving pit of many levels, surrounded on three sides by the audience, and rising on the fourth against a gauze background which would finally be brilliantly stained by the light of paradise. Upon each side of the pit next to the gauze would stand two gigantic plinths upon which, in mysterious lights and silhouettes, men would pose in great demoniacal wings or angelic pinions appropriate to the progress of Dante through the infernal and celestial regions" (Macgowan 204-207). The production, with its monumental tableaux vivants, was never realized.

 

30 The phrase "tragic masks" was used by both Octave Mirbeau, La France (18 February 1885), and Félicien Champsaur, "He Who Returns from Hell: August Rodin," Supplément du Figaro (16 January 1886).

 

31 The fact that the work was read as a tragedy is not surprising. It was, after all, inspired by the Inferno, rather than the Purgatorio and Paradiso, that transformed Dante's dark vision into comedy.

 

32 The Thinker also appeared as a drawing in Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (1887), which Rodin had been commissioned to illustrate. See Elsen, Thinker 54-56.

 

33 Just as O'Neill came to see himself in Yank, and referred to himself as the "hairy ape" in his letters and journals (see note 43), by the end of his life Rodin had adopted The Thinker as a self-portrait. As his gravestone, the work stands in for its departed creator.

 

34 The quotation is from Henri Perrin, "Under the Hatchet," Le Chroniquer de Paris (19 January 1905).

 

35 For a short history of these parodies in print media, see Elsen, Thinker 145-161. He describes some of the caricatures using the verb "to ape," and links women together with animals in the same category of degraded imitation: The Thinker's "pose has been aped by a woman (`The Thinkher'), a teddy bear, a donkey, and an elephant" (147). Strangely, Elsen does not mention the many instances in which a nonhuman primate has taken on the pose, or the implications of the statue's history in regard to this. O'Neill's play is not cited.

 

36 O'Neill's repeated use of the term "attitude" is pointed, for, among other things, it can mean "a position of the body" or "a state of mind." In Yank's case, it is both simultaneously, which bolsters O'Neill's critique of mind/body dualism.

 

37 In scene 4, the chorus of robot-apes also mocks the words "Love," "Law," "Governments," and "God" (139, 140), just as later, in scene 6, the prisoner-apes mount a scornful jeer for "Liberty! Justice! Honor! Opportunity! Brotherhood!" (153).

 

38 For an engaging description of these inventions, see Gaby Wood, Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 3-110. The confluence of these inventions with Enlightenment theories of acting is described by Roach in Player's Passion 65-68.

 

39 In Carpenter's "Introduction" to this compendium of fundamentalist tracts, he notes "in the years just prior to 1920, a group of conservative evangelicals grew more militant in its response to the liberalization of Protestant theology and the growth of secular trends in the rest of American life" (n.p.). Darwinism, according to Riley, was foundational to modernism itself and had, in effect, defined it.

 

40 Ingersoll manufactured wristwatches as well as an early version of the typewriter.

 

41 The dynamic of human "belonging" so central to Yank's identity is broken down by Paul Sheehan into the following formulation: "Biology forces us to belong; consciousness keeps us separate. The sense of `belonging' comes from naturalism, biocentrism, and ecological radicalism. Its converse, the sense of separateness, has been passed down first through Western theology then through philosophical humanism. Any attempt at mapping the human-animal relationship, it would seem, is forced to comply with this intractable dualism. [. . .] The terms [. . .] seem inevitably reducible to either continuity (immanence, belonging, animalism) or discontinuity (transcendence, separation, humanism)" (26). For a further discussion of "belonging" and its relation to narrative production, which could also include the acts of posing discussed above, see Sheehan 26-28.

 

42 Walker combines insights from her 2001 article "Bodies, Voices, Words: Modern Drama and the Problem of the Literary" and its 2004 revision "`De New Dat's Moiderin' de Old': Oedipal Struggle as Class Conflict in Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape," in a chapter entitled "The `Unconscious Autobiography' of Eugene O'Neill" from her book Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

 

43 In his letters, O'Neill fils frequently refers to himself as Yank ("Quite like the Hairy Ape, that long-drowned self of mine, who comes back to haunt my loneliest bitterest hours" [Bogard and Bryer 220-221]) and reports on his own struggles to "think" (see note 48). He quotes various lines from the play over and over in reference to himself and his personal relationships (see, for example, Bogard and Bryer 258, 560; Bryer 121; and King 229, 306). See also Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, "Eugene O'Neill," in Fire Under the Andes: A Group of North American Portraits (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), 97, and Doris Alexander, "O'Neill as Social Critic," American Quarterly (Winter 1954), rpt. in O'Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism, ed. Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher (New York: New York University Press, 1961), 391ff, for well-researched arguments connecting Eugene O'Neill with Yank.

 

44 Elsen writes: "no other sculpture has so preempted a natural pose" (Thinker 3). While we might question his authoritative claim, as well as his use of the term "natural" as a modifier for "pose," the assertion seems to make sense in relation to O'Neill's dramaturgy, where the very act of preemption Elsen identifies becomes a subject of the drama.

 

45 The cross-disciplinary influence was reciprocal: Rodin, whom Elsen calls "a dramatist of the body" (Thinker, 24), "believed that sculpture and painting could rival theatre" (The Gates 130). For a broader discussion of the theoretical relations between the plastic and performing arts see Roach, Player's Passion 58-92 passim.

 

46 The original production of The Hairy Ape inspired similar lines of inquiry in its reviews. Writing in the New Republic, Stark Young concludes that "we have not decided yet what acting is exactly; how much it can be directly imitative, how much stylized, or how much the actual visible presence of the human beings that convey it interrupts and complicates this art as compared to others" (42-43).

 

47 In "Enter the Monkey Man," Bird goes backstage to the dressing rooms at the Plymouth Theatre to interview the actor (and former boxer) Louis Wolheim, who played Yank. Her description of this "monkey-man in the making" highlights the contrast between the smooth, shining bronze of the Rodin sculpture and Yank's animal-like appearance: "His hands were dirty, his nails were dirty, and his face was all smeared up with streaks of black, a sickly, streaked pink, and a verdigris green. His hair was ruffled and upstanding and shaggy. The black hair on his powerful chest and arms was much in evidence" (102).

 

48 Note this excerpt from a letter O'Neill wrote to Carlotta Monterey on 23 January 1927: "As for thinking, it always came hard for me [. . .] when I was a boy, my Mother [. . .] would ask suspiciously, "What are you doing, Eugene?" "Thinking," I would say portentously. "What is the matter with you—do you feel sick?" she would ask. [. . .] She guessed the truth. Only sick people think. Well people live. Thinking is a quack medicine invented by the first ape who felt too sick to climb trees. He thought of a reason why all apes should give up climbing to the heights" (Bogard and Bryer 232).

 

49 Bettyann Kevles's aptly-titled Thinking Gorillas: Testing and Teaching the Greatest Ape (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1980) relates the history of western interaction with gorillas, beginning with the first "proof" of their existence as a distinct species in the 1840s and ending with Dr. Penny Patterson's successful sign language experiments with Koko, begun in the 1970s. The curious image of the thinking ape reappears on the cover of Kevles's book, which features a close-up photo of the captive gorilla Jambo in a contemplative pose reminiscent of Rodin's Thinker, chin in hand and eyes seemingly focused inward. Koko herself takes on the explicitly named pose in a photograph from Patterson's Koko-Love! Conversations with a Signing Gorilla (New York: Dutton, 1999), 25.

 

50 In his "Memoranda on Masks," O'Neill proclaims masking to be the mark of "the new modern play, as yet only dimly foreshadowed in a few groping specimens, but which must inevitably be written in the future" (406). While the use of masks in the 1922 production of The Hairy Ape was successful, O'Neill called for "a much more extensive use of masks" in order to "emphasiz[e] the theme of the play" (408). Of particular interest is the idea that "from the opening of the fourth scene, where Yank begins to think, he enters into a masked world" (408). "The faces of everyone he encounters thereafter, including the symbolic gorilla's," writes O'Neill, "should be masked" (408). If the act of "thinking" (represented by the Thinker pose) inaugurates masking into the drama, when the gorilla himself (usually played by an actor in an ape suit, although O'Neill suggests a face mask—or, perhaps, both) appears as The Thinker in the final scene, we encounter a layered embodiment of masking such that perceived essences (species, for example) disappear in a sublime movement among recursive constructs.

 

51 For a concurrent account of the "gorilla hunting" tradition, see R. M. Ballantyne, Gorilla Hunters: A Tale of the Wilds of Africa (London: T. Nelson & Sons, 1861).

 

52 See Bogard and Bryer 318-319; "Perhaps because of his temperamental resistance to subjugation and his inability to become reconciled to lonesomeness, [the gorilla] has perished where the orang-utan and the chimpanzee flourish. Where the captive life of the latter has been measured in months, that of the gorilla has been measured in days. Until within a few years there was no record of a gorilla having been kept in captivity, outside of Africa, in a reasonably healthy and contented condition for more than a few weeks" (Yerkes 223).

 

53 Dian Fossey, "Making Friends With Mountain Gorillas," National Geographic 137 (1970): 48-67. See also Fossey's celebrated memoir, Gorillas in the Mist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983).

 

54 For an elaboration of the "camera/gun trope," see Sontag 14-15 and Haraway 33-35 and 42-46. For a variety of titles that participate in this tradition, see A. Radclyffe Dugmore, Wild Life and the Camera (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1912); Martin Johnson, Camera Trails in Africa (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1924); F. Ratcliffe Holmes, Interviewing Wild Animals: An Account of Travel and Adventure Incidental to the Pursuit of African Fauna with a Cine-camera (London: Stanley Martin & Co., Ltd., 1929); C.T. Stoneham, Hunting Wild Beasts With Rifle and Camera (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd., 1933); Stirling Gillespie, Celluloid Safari: Filming Big Game from Cape to Cairo (London: Blackie & Son, Ltd., 1939); Sir James L. Sleeman, From Rifle to Camera: The Reformation of a Big Game Hunter (London: Jarrolds, 1947); and Karel Hájek, Hunting with Camera and Gun, trans. Jean Layton (Prague: Artia, n.d.).

 

55 Starting out as a psychology professor at Yale, Yerkes would go on to become director of the Florida-based Yale Laboratories of Primate Biology from 1930 to 1941. The facility was later called the Yerkes Laboratory of Primate Biology and eventually moved to Emory University in Atlanta, where it is now known as the Yerkes National Primate Research Center ("History"). For a searing critique of the research center, see Frederick Wiseman's documentary film Primate. For a history of Yerkes's work at Yale, see Haraway 59-83.

 

56 See Schechner (236, 246) for an illuminating discussion of the mountain gorilla's chest-beating sequence. (The only species Yank/O'Neill could have seen in the New York Zoo at that date was a lowland gorilla.)

 

57 One imagines a staging of the scene in which this question could be directed out to the audience, rather than posed to the gorilla, forcing the spectators to acknowledge their own position in the "primate distance matrix" (recall Fig. 2).

 

58 Because of the "absence of presence" that characterizes photographic representation, argues Musser, early films of human boxing matches were legal even though their live counterparts were banned (36-38).

 

59 In the first half of the twentieth century, live boxing matches between chimpanzees, gorillas, or other nonhuman primates and human volunteers were staged at traveling sideshows, circuses, and roadside zoos across the American South, often appearing alongside blackface minstrels, medicine shows, and vaudeville magic acts. For one example of such a show, see Noell.

 

60 These continuing associations were dramatically demonstrated in 1974, when Muhammad Ali successfully challenged George Foreman for the heavyweight world boxing title in Kinshasa, Zaire. Commonly known as the "Rumble in the Jungle," the event was advertised with posters featuring the slogan "From Slaveship to Championship." Included were images of chained slaves superimposed on a map of Africa, accompanied by drawings of Ali and Foreman sharing the spotlight with Sojourner Truth and boxing promoter Don King. Slave, athlete, activist, and agent shared the spotlight as performers in an event that capitalized on theatrical stereotypes of Africans (though none of the personalities involved were actual citizens of any African country), as well as a social Darwinist outlook that positioned Africa as the mythic site of "primitive" performance.

 

61 For a comprehensive review of Johnson`s life and career, see the official website for Ken Burns' 2005 PBS documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. Particularly useful is Gerald Early's essay "Rebel of the Progressive Era," which describes Johnson's place in the cultural context of boxing and its roots in racism, slavery, and Social Darwinism.

 

62 This information appeared in the caption of a photograph of Adair published in Theatre Magazine 34.6 (December 1921): 392.

 

63 See also Black 276. According to Wolheim's Moviefone biography, "The mashed nose, dog-ugly countenance and brutish manners of Louis Wolheim suggested that he'd spent most of his life as a prizefighter, stevedore, or mob henchman" ("Louis Wolheim Biography").

 

64 The costume designer for the original production, Blanche Hays, first suggested using masks for the Fifth Avenue scene, an idea "O'Neill took up [. . .] with enthusiasm" (Styan 104-5).

 

65 The misspelling of Zbyszko in this excerpt is ambiguous; it may be read as O'Neill's error or Yank's mispronunciation. In the first publication of this scene in Theatre Magazine in August 1922, the name appears as "Zybscyo" (122).

 

66 O'Neill was in the US on that date—though he departed a little more than a week later from New York on the sailing ship Charles Racine, not to return until April 1911. See Black 106-111.

 

67 This last, crucially ambiguous stage direction, which indicates metaphysical transformation rather than physical action, is missing from the script excerpts published in Theatre Magazine in 1922, while the play was still on Broadway.

 

68 See V. Y. Mudimbe, ed., The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947-1987 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). The phrase "présence Africaine" was strategically reappropriated in post-war France, when it became the name of the first journal of African studies in that country. See <http://www. presenceafricaine.com/>.

 

69 Other criticism concentrating specifically on tragedy includes Marden J. Clark, "Tragic Effect in The Hairy Ape," Modern Drama 10.4 (February 1968): 372-382 and Andrea A. Gomez, "Modern Tragedies," Research Journal 19.1 (June 1988): 35-84.

 

70 This important indicator is left out of the authoritative edition of The Hairy Ape included in the Complete Plays, Volume 2. It does appear in the original version published by Boni and Liveright in 1922.

 

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Edgren, Robert. "There Was No Faking When Zbyszko Wrestled for His Life." Chicago Daily Tribune 1 January 1922, A3.

 

Elsen, Albert E. The Gates of Hell by Auguste Rodin. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1985.

 

———. Rodin's Thinker and the Dilemmas of Modern Public Sculpture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

 

Engel, Edwin A. The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O'Neill. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953.

 

Essoe, Gabe. Tarzan of the Movies: A Pictorial History of More Than Fifty Years of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Legendary Hero. New York: The Citadel Press, 1968.

 

"Eugene O'Neill Talks of His Own and the Plays of Others." New York Herald Tribune 16 March 1924, rpt. in Conversations with Eugene O'Neill. Ed. Mark W. Estrin. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. 60-63.

 

Floyd, Virginia, ed. Eugene O'Neill at Work: Newly Released Ideas for Plays. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981.

 

Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces." Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 22-27.

 

Garner, R. L. Apes and Monkeys: Their Life and Language. Boston: Ginn and Company, 1900.

 

———. The Speech of Monkeys. New York: Charles L. Webster, 1892.

 

Goodall, Jane R. Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order. London: Routledge, 2002.

 

Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge, 1989.

 

Hillman, Bill. "The Edgar Rice Burroughs Library, Shelf: B5." ERBzine. 8 September 2007 <http://www.erbzine.com/dan/b5.html>.

 

"History." Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University. 16 October 2007 <http://www.yerkes.emory.edu/index/history>.

 

"Jack Johnson Free, Seeks Fight at Once." New York Times 10 July 1921, 9.

 

Keane, Christopher. "Blake and O'Neill: A Prophecy." Blake Studies 2.2 (Spring 1970): 32.

 

King, William Davies, ed. "A Wind is Rising": The Correspondence of Agnes Boulton and Eugene O'Neill. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 2000.

 

"Knockout." Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. 2005. PBS. 2 November 2007 <http://www.pbs.org/unforgivableblackness/knockout/>.

 

Levin, Richard, ed. Tragedy: Plays, Theory, and Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1960.

 

"Louis Wolheim Biography." Moviefone. 29 September 2007 <http://movies.aol.com/celebrity/ louis-wolheim/77200/biography>.

 

Macgowan, Kenneth. The Theatre of Tomorrow. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921.

 

MacNeice, Louis. Zoo. London: Michael Joseph, 1938.

 

Malamud, Randy. Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

 

McCullough, Jack W. Living Pictures on the New York Stage. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983.

 

McMichael, George and James Leonard, eds. Concise Anthology of American Literature. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 2006.

 

"`The Monster' Brings a Genuine Breath of the Grand Guignol to Broadway." Theatre Magazine 36.4 (October 1922): 227.

 

Mullett, Mary B. "The Extraordinary Story of Eugene O'Neill." American Magazine 94 (Nov. 1922): 34+, rpt. in Conversations with Eugene O'Neill. Ed. Mark W. Estrin. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. 26-37.

 

Musser, Charles. Edison Motion Pictures, 1890-1900: An Annotated Filmography. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997.

 

Naipaul, V.S. The Mimic Men. New York: Vintage Books, 1985.

 

Nickel, John. "Racial Degeneration in The Hairy Ape." Eugene O'Neill Review 22.1/2 (Spring/Fall 1998): 33-40.

 

Noble, Graham. "`The Lion of the Punjab' _ Part II: Stanislaus Zbyszko." InYo: Journal of Alternative Perspectives on the Martial Arts and Sciences 3 (June 2002). 13 October 2007 <http://ejmas.com/jalt/jaltart_noble_0602.htm>.

 

———. "`The Lion of the Punjab' _ Part IV: Aftermath." InYo: Journal of Alternative Perspectives on the Martial Arts and Sciences 3 (August 2002). 13 October 2007 <http://ejmas.com/jalt/jaltart_noble_0802.htm>.

 

Noell, Anna Mae. The History of Noell's Ark Gorilla Show. Tarpon Springs, Fl.: Noell's Ark, 1979.

 

Norris, Margot. Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, & Lawrence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.

 

O'Neill, Eugene. The Hairy Ape: A Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life in Eight Scenes. Complete Plays: 1920-1931. Vol. 2. New York: Library of America, 1988. 119-163.

 

———. The Hairy Ape: A Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life in Eight Scenes. Theatre Magazine 36.2 (August, 1922): 80+.

 

———. "Memoranda on Masks." The Unknown O'Neill: Unpublished or Unfamiliar Writings of Eugene O'Neill. Ed. Travis Bogard. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. 406-411.

 

———. The Moon of the Caribbees. Complete Plays: 1913-1920. Vol. 1. New York: Library of America, 1988. 525-544.

 

Peel, Sylvia Terrill. "Mildred Shivers." Eugene O'Neill Review 16.1 (Spring 1992): 142.

 

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.

 

Primate. Dir. Frederick Wiseman. Videocassette. Zipporah Films, 1974.

 

Rice, Diana. "Champion at 42 Years: Zbyszko, Wrestler, Stays Young on Exercise, Fresh Vegetables, Little Meat, and Much Buttermilk." New York Times 15 May 1921, 1+.

 

Riley, William B. The Menace of Modernism (1917), rpt. in Conservative Call to Arms. Ed. Joel A. Carpenter. New York: Garland Publishing, 1988. 1-181.

 

Roach, Joseph R. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

 

———. "Darwin's Passion: The Language of Expression on Nature's Stage." Discourse 13.1 (Fall-Winter, 1990-91): 40-58.

 

———. The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting. [1985] Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.

 

Robinson, James A. "The Masculine Primitive and The Hairy Ape." Eugene O'Neill Review 19.1/2 (Spring/Fall 1995): 95-109.

 

Roediger, David R. "White Looks: Hairy Apes, True Stories, and Limbaugh's Laughs." Whiteness: A Critical Reader. Ed. Mike Hill. New York and London: New York University Press, 1997. 35-46.

 

Schaller, George. The Mountain Gorilla: Ecology and Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.

 

Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. London: Routledge, [1988] 2003.

 

Shafer, Yvonne. Performing O'Neill: Conversations with Actors and Directors. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.

 

Sheehan, Paul. Modernism, Narrative and Humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

 

Siegmund, Gerald. "Voice Masks: Subjectivity, America, and the Voice of the Theatre in the Wooster Group." The Wooster Group and Its Traditions. Ed. Johan Callens. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2004. 164-178.

 

Skinner, Richard Dana. Eugene O'Neill: A Poet's Quest. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1935.

 

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Anchor Books, 1977.

 

Styan, J.L. Modern Drama in Theory and Practice: Expressionism and Epic Theatre. Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

 

"`Tarzan of the Apes' Here: Astonishing Play, With Lions and Monkeys, Entertains." New York Times 8 Sept. 1921, 22.

 

Törnqvist, Egil. A Drama of Souls: Studies in O'Neill's Supernaturalistic Technique. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969.

 

Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. 2005. PBS. 2 November 2007 <http://www.pbs.org/unforgivableblackness/index.html>.

 

Wainscott, Ronald H. Staging O'Neill: The Experimental Years, 1920-1934. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

 

Walker, Julia A. "Bodies, Voices, Words: Modern Drama and the Problem of the Literary." Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital. Ed. Jani Scandura and Michael Thurston. New York: New York University Press, 2001. 68-80.

 

———. "`De New Dat's Moiderin' de Old': Oedipal Struggle as Class Conflict in Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape." Art, Glitter, and Glitz: Mainstream Playwrights and the Popular Theatre in 1920s America. Ed. Arthur Gewirtz and James J. Kolb. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. 19-30.

 

Woodbridge, Homer E. "Beyond Melodrama." (1938), rpt. in O'Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism. Ed. Oscar Cargill, N. Bryllion Fagin, and William J. Fisher. New York: New York University Press, 1961. 307-320.

 

Yerkes, Robert M. Almost Human. New York and London: The Century Co., 1925.

 

Young, Stark. "The Hairy Ape." New Republic 22 March 1922, rpt. in The Critical Response to Eugene O'Neill. Ed. John H. Houchin. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. 41-43.

 

"Zbyszko Retains Wrestling Title." New York Times 29 Nov. 1921, 23.

 

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