By ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

The little theatre of Provincetownsmen in Macdougal Street was packed to the doors with astonishment last evening as scene after scene unfolded in the new play by Eugene O'Neill.  This was The Hairy Ape, a bitter, brutal, wildly fantastic play of nightmare hue and nightmare distortion.  It is a monstrously uneven piece, now flamingly eloquent, now choked and thwarted and inarticulate.  Like most of this writing for the theatre, it is the worse here and there for the lack of a fierce, unintimidated blue pencil, but it has a little greatness in it, and it seems rather absurd to fret overmuch about the undisciplined imagination of the young playwright towering so conspicuously above the milling, mumbling crowd of playwrights who have no imagination at all.

The Hairy Ape has been superbly produced.  There is a rumor abroad that Arthur Hopkins, with a proprietary interest in the piece, has been lurking around its rehearsals and the program confesses that Robert Edmond Jones went down to Macdougal Street and took a hand with Cleon Throckmorton in designing the eight pictures which the play calls for.  That preposterous little theatre has one of the most cramped stages New York has ever known, and yet on it the artists have created the illusion of vast spaces and endless perspectives.  They drive one to the conclusion that when a stage seems pinched and little, it is the mind of the producer that is pinched and little.  This time O'Neill, unbridled, set them a merry pace in the eccentric gait of his imaginings.  They kept up with him.

O'Neill begins his fable by posing before you the greatest visible contrast in social and physical circumstance.  He leads you up the gangplank of a luxurious liner bound for Europe.  He plunges you first into the stokers' pit, thrusting you down among the men as they stumble in from the furnaces, hot, sweaty, choked with coal dust, brutish.  Squirm as you may, he holds you while you listen to the rumble of their discontent, and while you listen, also, to speech more squalid than an American audience heard before in an American theatre, it is true talk, all of it, and only those who have been so softly bred that they have never really heard the vulgate spoken in all its richness would venture to suggest that he has exaggerated it by so much as a syllable in order to agitate the refined.  On the contrary.

Then, in a twinkling, he drags you (as the ghosts drag Scrooge) up out of all this murk and thudding avengeance and brawling of speech to a cool, sweet, sunlit stretch of the hurricane deck, where, at lazy ease lies the daughter of the President of the line's board of directors, a nonchalant dilettante who has found settlement work frightfully interesting and is simply crazy to go down among the stokers and see how the other half lives aboard ship.

Then follows the confrontation -- the fool fop of a girl and the huge animal of a stoker who had taken sort of a dizzy romantic pride in himself and his work as something that was real in an unreal world, as something that actually counted, as something that was and had force.  Her horrified recoil from him as from some loathsome, hairy ape is the first notice served on him by the world that he doesn't belong.  The remaining five scenes are the successive blows by which this is driven in on him, each scene, as written, as acted and as intensified by the artists, taking on more and more of the nightmare quality with which O'Neill seemed possessed to endow his fable.

The scene on Fifth Avenue when the hairy ape comes face to face with a little parade of wooden-faced church-goers who walk like automata and prattle of giving a "Hundred Percent American Bazaar" as a contribution to the solution of discontent among the lower classes: the scene on Blackwell's Island with the endless rows of cells and the argot of the prisoners floating out of the darkness: the care with which each scene ends in a retributive and terrifying closing in upon the bewildered fellow -- all these preparations induce you at last, to accept as natural and inevitable and right that the hairy ape should, by the final curtain, be found dead inside the cage of the gorilla in the Bronx Zoo.

Except for the role of the girl, which is pretty badly played by Mary Blair, the cast captured for The Hairy Ape is an exceptionally good one.  Louis Wolheim, though now and then rather painfully off the beat in his co-operation with the others, gives a capital impersonation of the stoker, and lesser parts are well managed by Harry O'Neill as an Irish fireman dreaming of the old days of sailing vessels, and Harold West as a cockney agitator who is fearfully annoyed because of the hairy ape's concentrating his anger against this one little plutocrat instead of maintaining an abstract animosity against plutocrats in general.

In Macdougal Street now and doubtlessly headed for Broadway, we have a turbulent and tremendous play, so full of blemishes that the merest fledgling among the critics could point out a dozen, yet so vital and interesting and teeming with life that those playgoers who let it escape them will be missing one of the real events of the year.