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Commentary
by Margaret Loftus Ranald
This comedy is completely out of character for O'Neill,
for he has taken autobiographical elements and manipulated them with
romantic nostalgia, unabashed sentiment, and humor instead of the
bitterness he displayed in later autobiographical plays. Aspects of
O'Neill himself can be perceived in Richard, but the structure of this
Connecticut family is somewhat different from that of the O'Neills, with
the Millers having four boys and one girl. The basic situation, a young
man's discovery of love, is a stock situation, as are the characters. We
have the clumsy servant, the family drunk, the old maid aunt, the
college athlete and the college sport, and the parents who don't quite
understand their children but who eventually overcome the generation
gap. Similarly, there are stock scenes, particularly those in which Mrs.
Miller takes Richard's posturings literally, and when Mr. McComber is
appalled by Richard's obscene poetry. The repetition of drunk scenes is
also a series of variations on a stock theme, while the lovers' meeting
and the series of reconciliations are the stuff of romantic
sentimentality rather than reality. Nonetheless, the play works and has
remained deservedly popular, despite the fact that there is little
character drawing and the situations tend to telegraph their outcome in
advance. The tone of amused tolerance and the nostalgia for lost
innocence that pervade the play recall a simpler age, and as a result,
the playwright's deliberate manipulation of stock characters and
situations becomes a legitimate dramatic device rather than a subject
for hostile criticism. To a considerable extent, the play owed its
acceptance and long run to the casting of George M. Cohan, the original
Yankee Doodle Dandy (whose ad-libbing became legendary), in the role of
Nat Miller and later, in a Los Angeles production, to the performance of
Will Rogers in the same role.
For O'Neill himself, the play was easy to write and
represented a pleasant vacation from the seriousness of Mourning
Becomes Electra and Days Without End, that ultimately
unsuccessful play which had occupied him for five years. After these
plays O'Neill did not produce a new stage work until 1946, with The
Iceman Cometh. |
