Members of the Provincetown Players setting up the stage for Eugene O'Neill's Bound East for Cardiff at their first Playhouse at 139 Macdougal Street in New York City, Fall 1916. O'Neill stands on the ladder at the far left.
The last birthday present I received from my father before his death was a DVD of the American Experience biography of Eugene O’Neill that first aired on PBS in 2006. Decades earlier, one of the first books of plays I ever came across was the Modern Library edition of The Long Voyage Home, which was in my father’s small library and which, in my early teens, I read as I began to think about writing plays myself. I mention this only because the relationship between fathers and sons is one of the central themes of O’Neill’s career, a theme that even led to the titles of each of Louis Sheaffer’s two-volume biography of the dramatist (Son and Playwright and Son and Artist). My own relationship with my father was considerably more benign than O’Neill’s with his. But as a starting point for a project I am calling “American drama: A personal history,” it seems appropriate to begin with these origins.
The tensions of the father-son relationship, though a strong thread that runs through American drama, is not exclusive to American drama alone. Hamlet and Oedipus had their significant run-ins with their daddies too. Before O’Neill himself faced these tensions, however, he concentrated on men alone, and alone on a vast ocean, in the four one-acts that make up the Glencairn cycle: The Moon of the Caribbees, Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone, and The Long Voyage Home. Except for the first, the plays retain a whiff of the melodramatic theatre in which James O’Neill had his success and which Eugene O’Neill strained against, not always successfully, through his career. With the exception of the last-named above, they all take place in the forecastle and on the deck of the British tramp streamer Glencairn and center on a group of sailing men from a variety of nations and backgrounds, each one of whom has their private reasons for staying on the seas. What they have in common is that they are alone with themselves and each other, adrift in an environment which constitutes a dangerous and serious threat to their well-being. Some are there voluntarily; some (like Olsen in The Long Voyage Home) are shanghaied into seemingly unending servitude on the seas, the victim not only of nature but also, in some cases, of sadistic captains and mates.
Most of these plays were written in the wake of O’Neill’s apprenticeship with George Pierce Baker in 1914-1915, when he attended Baker’s playwriting class at Harvard (Baker’s other students included George Abbott, Hallie Flanagan and Thomas Wolfe). O’Neill submitted a draft of Bound East for Cardiff as part of his application package, and though O’Neill was accepted, Travis Bogard reports that Baker dismissed it as “not a play at all.” Set in the forecastle of the Glencairn, the play is a deathwatch for Yank, a sailor fatally injured in a fall down a hold (“He puts his leg over careless-like and misses the ladder and plumps straight down to the bottom. … He was hurt bad inside for the blood was drippin’ from the side of his mouth,” eyewitness and fellow sailor Davis reports). There is little story beyond this; the play centers on the relationship between Yank and Driscoll, who sits by Yank’s side until the former’s death. As melodramatic as this may seem to 21st century readers, Baker’s objection was likely that it was not melodramatic enough — its lack of a stronger narrative is accompanied by a lack of stage business, which Baker probably also recognized.
The relationship between the two men has certain homoerotic undertones (O’Neill, no stranger to Freud, the sea or the theatre even at the age of 26 when he wrote the play, must have been aware of them). As part of their last conversation, Driscoll and Yank dream of starting a farm together: “This last year has seemed rotten,” Yank says. “I’ve had a hunch I’d quit — with you, of course — and we’d save our coin, and go to Canada or Argentine or some place and git a farm, just a small one, just enough to live on.” The erotic tone of the play is also underscored by Yank’s final vision of the Angel of Death: “A pretty lady dressed in black,” he says “faintly” just before “his face twitches and his body writhes in a final spasm, then straightens out rigidly.”
This marriage of Eros and Thanatos in an allegorical figure, as the “Angel of Death” cliche indicates, is not new to our eyes. But it was new to the American drama at the time, and is only one indication of O’Neill’s modernistic tendencies. (And because what is old always becomes new again over time, such a close relationship between sexuality and death lends the play a contemporary tone even now.) These tendencies are also revealed in the cacophony of dialect that constitutes the play’s dialogue (among the seamen are a Cockney, a Scot, a Swede, an Irishman, a Norwegian and an American), which both Pound and Eliot were integrating into their poetics. Of course dialect dramas based in specific ethnic communities were not uncommon at the time, but O’Neill’s chosen milieu — the tramp steamer — allows him to blend a variety of these dialects into a unique linguistic fabric of English stage discourse, providing it with a new, discordant and atonal music. The sentimentality of this death scene is balanced by O’Neill’s strict naturalism, born of his familiarity with Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser. Within ten years, O’Neill would be abandoning the realism and naturalism of this theatre, a development from Victorian and Edwardian dramatic forms, for the more expansive possibilities of Expressionism. But even in Bound East for Cardiff, O’Neill’s experimentation was broadening the discourse of stage realism and naturalism as it hewed closely to those forms.
Another thing that distances us from these plays now is the Sea itself as metaphor — a Sea which O’Neill would continue to explore and fight against to the end of his days, as the waves of the Atlantic Ocean lapped up upon the shore near the beachfront summer home of the Tyrones. Transatlantic air travel would render the power of the sea, its dangers and awe-inspiring breadth, as it appears in O’Neill’s plays (and as it appears in Joseph Conrad’s and Herman Melville’s novels) something less significant to twentieth-century experience, when the ocean became a puddle over which an airplane could leap in a matter of a few hours. On the other hand, this is no more distant from us than medieval England is to the experience of King Lear or pre-revolutionary France to The Misanthrope. To the sensitive reader, O’Neill’s sea plays retain this majestic power as they approach a new stage poetics for the American drama.
