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Billboard, April 15, 1922 Off the RecordBy PATTERSON JAMESThe stark
“realism” of “The Hairy Ape” justifies the elevation of
Eugene O’Neill to the official position of Archpriest of the
Unwashed Drama and pet divinity of its Unsoaped Patrons.
But, like all “realists”, Mr. O’Neill mistakes
sensationalism for reality. The
Provincetown Playhouse idea of naturalism in the drama is to make
all the characters criminals or mental defectives, the scenes of the
play the interior of a loaded garbage scow, the language that of a
waterfront bawdy house. In
order to be “strong” enough to attract the sensitive nostrils of
the insurgent playgoers above and below Fourteenth Street the meat
offered them must be “high”.
“The Hairy Ape” smells like the monkey house in the Zoo,
where the last act takes place and where the play should have been
produced. The stage
presentation of the Neanderthal “man” is accompanied by
outbursts of profanity which quite out-fetor all and any of Mr.
O’Neill’s previous efforts.
“Christ!” seems to be h is favorite expletive, while his
conversation is lightened every other word by “Wot de hell!”
He “God damns” the lady visitor from the promenade deck
when she enters the stoke hole, throws his coal shovel at her with
an airy “You lousy tart”, and calls the engineer, whose whistle
is constantly calling for more steam, a “Belfast son of a Catholic
bastard”. “All of
which is to be expected in a character like ‘Yank’, and its use
is courageous and strong and natural,” chant the idolators.
So are the obscenities exchanged between draymen caught in a
traffic jam. So are hundreds of other things which happen in everyday
life. So are the
digestive processes of human beings.
The latrine is not only a feature of organized sanitation,
but it is made imperative by law. What
right or place has it in the theater on the stage?
None, but we may expect its stage reproduction any night now. A
play by Mr. O’Neill, with the mise-en-scene in the entrails
cleaning department of a stockyards slaughter house, would not
surprise me in the least. I
once saw a little girl, the daughter of the driver, sitting, while
her father was making his house –to house- collections, atop a
swill-gathering wagon (on) a hot day in August calmly eating an ice
cream cone what time the neighborhood reeked and the passers-by held
their noses to avoid strangulation.
That is the picture I have made of Mr. O’Neill in the daily
throes of dramatic composition.
No matter how vicious the stink he raises around himself and
others he munches his ice cream cone undisturbed. If
we are to be annoyed with stage dialog like that with which “The
Hairy Ape” is polluted to satisfy the demands of a Mr.
O’Neill’s “realistic” conscience, let us go the whole hog
and not merely the hind quarters.
Surely there should be no half-way measures in the Greenwich
Village brand of realism. Cowardice
should have no place in the makeup of the writers of drama for the
insurrectos. If Mr.
O’Neill wished to give us real view of the firemen’s forecastle,
why did he not have the drunken inmates vomiting all over the place?
Unless I have been badly misinformed, that is one of the
painfully actual concomitants of too much tidewater liker and just
as common as the language used by “Yank” Smith.
Why strain at a gnat and swallow a cuspidor?
Let’s have is all – or not of it. In
the eagerness to shock the native Mr. O’Neill (or the stage
director) totally neglected some bits of real realism which should
have been put in, and the neglect sticks out like a sore thumb. The
big scene of the play is the boiler room of the steamer.
Before the fire doors stand the stokers stripped to the
waist, the hairy ape, Smith, towering like a giant in their midst.
As the curtain rises the roar of the engines sells, the doors
are swung open and the coal passers shovel in furious unison until
the gang boss yells, “Enough”.
From the front there is a fine view of the fireboxes, with
their red coals and the grimy figures standing in the foreground.
But the illusion is smashed like a clinker under a slice bar.
The stokers shovel AIR into the blazing fires. What should be more foolish than the picture of firemen
seating the racing to the command of the engineer’s whistle
scooping up heaping lumps of nothing and feeding that into the
hungry gullet of the boilers? The
bunkers should be filled with piles of papier mache coal or black
cotton balls. When the
call for more steam sounds from the engine room “Yank” and his
mates then can have something to pass into the fire. The fires, like any other fire, would be blackened for an
instant by the fresh coal, but as the doors are closed long enough
between times the black lumps could be raked out of sight and the
fiery glow seen when they are opened again.
But the necessity for thinking up unpleasant dialog was too
great, doubtless, to permit of a little thought being given to
perfecting a good idea. Another
bit of incongruity is the scene in which “Yank” encounters a
Fifth Avenue Sunday morning parade.
One might suppose that he figures which roused his rage would
be extravagantly dressed men and women.
Instead of that they are manikins, with faces encased in
masks, and all mincing upstage-downstage-upstage-downstage while the
stoker empties the slop pail of his vocabulary over them.
Even the cause of his arrest is an unworthy and unmanly
attack on a clothing window dummy.
How come such symbolism in our “realist”? The
last touch of irrationality is the taking off of the hairy ape by
the gorilla in the Zoo. According
to all well-regulated monkey house rules, visitors are not allowed
to poke the animals, nor are the animals permitted to scalp the
visitors as they pass by the cages.
Also, the cages are bolted, barred and double locked.
Mr. O’Neill has changed all that.
In his zoo the gorilla’s cage is left unlocked so that he
can receive callers at all hours.
All “Yank” Smith ahs to do is open the door, the gorilla
walks out and crushes him to death. Just as easy!! Where
the gorilla went after he cracked “Yank’s” ribs is no business
of Mr. O’Neill’s. His
responsibility ended when he left the cage unlocked. Another
bit of symbolism might have been introduced by showing the gorilla
taking tea at one of the cellar dumps with which the immediate
vicinage of the Provincetown Playhouse is broken out. But
“The Hairy Ape” is doing business.
It is packing ‘em in – literally – at the Palace of
Macdougal Street. The
night I saw the show the ventilation of any ship’s forecastle
could have been sweet heaven over what had to be suffered. The audience at best was not alluringly savory – It never
seems to be – and the standees in the rear of the building made
the entrance of a solitary breath of fresh air an impossibility.
Any suggestions that the doors be opened were sweetly but
firmly vetoed. I heard
one woman, who looked as if she was about to swoon, inquire of the
doortender whey the ban on clean air was so rigid. “The
people from uptown come down here to see our naked actors and you
don’t want ‘em to take cold?” was the explanation given with
an oleaginous grin. That – in a mouthful – is the complete philosophy of the O’Neil school of playmaking. Give ‘em something they don’t see every trip to the theater, make it rough, and the gullible will make a path to your box-office. Mr. O’Neill has successfully capitalized the stoke hole. The gorilla of Broadway in its unlocked cage waits for “The Hairy Ape” to come uptown. I wonder whether it will kill with one ugly crunch or whether is twill fall on the neck of “Yank” Smith and – kiss him? |
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