By JOHN MASON BROWN

For exciting proof that the theatre is still very much alive, that it still has grandeur and ecstasy to offer to its patrons, that fine acting has not disappeared from behind the footlights’ glare, that productions which thrill with memorability are still being made, that scenic design and stage direction can belong among the fine arts, and that the Theatre Guild, in spite of any causes for discouragement it may have given in the past, is still the most accomplished as well as the most intrepid producing organization in America, you have only to journey to Guild Theatre these nights and days, and sit before Eugene O’Neill’s new trilogy.  “Mourning Becomes Electra.”

It is a play which towers above the scrubby output of our present-day theatre as the Empire State Building soars above the skyline of Manhattan.  Most of its fourteen acts, and particularly its earlier and middle sections, are too, the kind of radiant austerity which was part of the glory that was Greece.

It is one of the most distinguished, if not the most distinguished, achievements of Mr. O’Neill’s career.  It is – as the dull word has it – uneven, but so – as the no less dull retort phrases it – are the Himalayas.  It has blemishes which are obvious, especially as it reaches its third section.  But it remains to the end a magnum opus beside which “Strange Interlude” and most of the earlier, simpler plays sink into unimportance.  For it is an experiment in sheer, shuddering, straightforward story-telling which widens the theatre’s limited horizons at the same time that it is exalting and horrifying its patrons.

It finds Mr. O’Neill forgetting the pseudo-scientific jargon of Mother Dynamo and the mystic laugh of Lazarus, dispensing with such special technical devices as masks and asides, and writing without any hindrances of form as an emotionalist.  And as an emotionalist, who knows how to dramatize the curdling rancors of hate, the surging of thwarted passion, and the taut demands of murder, he has no equal in the contemporary theatre.

As his title makes very clear, Mr. O’Neill’s concern is with one of the grandest, most spine-twisting tales of murder that the theatre’s history knows.  It is, in short, the Electra story that he is retelling in more or less modern terms, substituting the white pillars of a country house in Civil War New England for the Doric columns of ancient Argos.

Mr. O’Neill’s play, in other words, is a testing of his strength with that fable of the luckless house of Atreus which Æschylus first treated in the “Oresteia,” which Sophocles and Euripides both dealt with in their respective “Electras,” and which such a modern as the late Hugo von Hofmannsthal vulgarized into a Reinhardtian guignol of lights and leers and snakelike gestures.

It is, as every one knows, a story of revenge, a saga of the way in which fate calls upon Electra and her brother Orestes to avenge the murder of their father, Agamemnon, by slaying their wicked mother, Clytemnestra, and her no less wicked lover, Ægisthus.  It is a myth which all three of the great tragic dramatists of Greece have told in their own way, taking their own liberties with its details, distributing the emphasis according to their own sensing of its moral and dramatic values, and managing to make a decidedly their own in each of their independent retellings.

Mr. O’Neill, needles to say, has taken even greater liberties with this classic myth than any of his ancient predecessors dared to do.  But by taking them, he has made the story very much his own, without robbing its terrible sequence of catastrophes of either their force or their essential outlines.

Unlike Sophocles and Euripides, who contented themselves with the writing of a single play about the “recognition” of the long-separated Electra and Orestes, and the murder of Clytemnestra and Æschylus for the model of “Mourning Becomes Electra.”  Like that earliest of Greek tragic writers, Mr. O’Neill has chosen to give the story in full, to prepare for its coming, to catch it at the height of its action, and to follow his avengers (he follows both Electra and Orestes) past the awful deed fate has demanded of them to the time when the Erinyes (of Furies) are pursuing them.

Accordingly, just as Æschylus divided his “Oresteia” into the “Agamemnon,” “The Chœphorore, or Libation Pourers” and “The Eumenides,” so Mr. O’Neill has divided his “Mourning Becomes Electra” into three parts that bear such Bulwer-Lytton titles as “Homecoming,” “The Hunted” and “The Haunted.”  Contrary to the example of Æschylus, and much more according to the practice of Sophocles and Euripides, Mr. O’Neill gives his trilogy to Electra.  It is she who dominates its action and fuses it, even as Orestes fused the Æschylean original into one long play – with pauses – rather than three separate dramas.

Mr. O’Neill’s Agamemnon (Lee Baker) is Ezra Mannon, a hard unbending New Englander, who has been off to the Mexican War in his youth, who has studied law, been a skipper, achieved great success in business and served as Mayor of the small town in which his family is outstanding.  His Clytemnestra (Alla Nazimova) is Christine, a foreigner who has long been out of love with her husband and who has now come to hate him.

Their children, Lavinia (Alice Brady) and Orin (Earle Larimore), are, of course, the Electra and the Orestes of Mr. O’Neill’s piece.  While old Ezra Mannon has been away from home, winning the praise of General Grant for the military abilities he has shown as a brigadier general in the Civil War, his wife has had an affair with a Captain Adam Brant (Thomas Chalmers), the Ægisthus of “Mourning Becomes Electra,” who in this case is the illegitimate son of a wayward Mannon who has brought shame on his family.

Lavinia, who has also been in love with Captain Brant, follows her mother to New York, learns of her infidelity to her father, and resolves to break off the affair.  She confronts her mother, makes her promise to see no more of Brant, and prepares to welcome her father and brother home from the war.  Meanwhile Christine has already confided in Brant that their one way to happiness lies in the death of Ezra, who stands between them.

She is prepared to murder him, and murder him she does by taking advantage of the heart trouble from which he suffers.  Not only does she bring on one of his attacks by naming her lover to him but she offers him as a medicine the poison Brant has sent her.  Lavinia comes into her father’s room just before he dies, hears him accuse her mother, sees the powder she has administered, and resolves to take justice into her own hands in avenging his death.

Both Lavinia and her mother fight for the love of Orin, but he, like the spineless Orestes of Sophocles and Euripides, soon falls under the domination of Lavinia.  She proves her point to him by leading him to the clipper ship Brant commands and there shows him their mother in Brant’s arms.  Thereupon Orin kills Brant when his mother has left him; she commits suicide when she learns of her lover’s death (thus sparing us the mother-murder of the Greeks); the ghosts of the dead who refuse to die haunt Orin and Lavinia; Orin shoots himself and Lavinia forswears the happiness her impending marriage might have brought her, has the shutters nailed down on the Mannon house and locks herself inside it to atone during the rest of her life for the sins of her family.

As Mr. O’Neill rehandles this venerable story it preserves its awesome fascination.  It emerges, as it has always emerged, as one of the most gripping melodramatic plots in the world.  It also comes through its present restatement as a tragic melodrama of heroic propositions.  The poetic beauty the Greeks gave it is lacking in Mr. O’Neill’s prose modernization.  But the dilemma remains, and so does much of the agony and exhaltation that belong to it.

Mr. O’Neill’s treatment o fit is vigorous with the kind of vigor our theatre rarely sees.  It is stark, unadorned and strong.  It has dignity and majesty.  And nearly the whole of it is possessed of such and all-commanding interest that one is totally unconscious of the hours its performance so freely consumes.

That is longer than it need be seems fairly obvious, as does the fact that, like so many of O’Neill’s plays, it stands n need of editing.  It is at its best in its first two sections, and most particularly in its fine middle portion.  But its last part seems overlong and lacks the interest of its predecessors.  It marks the same falling off from what has preceded it as the “Eumenides” does from the “Chœphoroe.”  Deprived of plotting that sweeps forward to a climax and dealing with the conscience-stricken course of its avengers, it goes a tamer, more uncertain way.  Nor is it helped by the incest motive Mr. O’Neill has added to it.  It rises to the very last act of all, however, to a final curtain that is Greek in its whole feeling and flavor.

The production the Guild has given “Mourning Becomes Electra” is one of the most successful feats in the Guild’s long career.  It has been superlatively well directed by Philip Moeller, with a fine eye for pictorial values and a shrewd sense of pace.  Robert Edmond Jones has done his best work in recent years in his settings for the trilogy.  They have the sort of luminous beauty at which he, more than any of our designers, excels.  They are simple in details, rich in their atmosphere, and strong in their lines.  They are, in fact, the ideal backgrounds for a tragedy that is touched with greatness.  The white columns Mr. Jones has given the Mannons’ country home, and the steps below them on which Lavinia and Christine sit, are constant and exciting reminders of the fact that the house of Mannon, of which Mr. O’Neill writes, is vitally connected with the house of Atreus.

Mme. Nazimova’s Christine is superbly sinister, possessed of an insidious and electric malevolence, and brilliant with an incandescent fire.  As Lavinia Miss Brady gives the kind of performance her admirers have log been waiting to see her give.  It is controlled.  It has the force of the true Electra.  And it is sustained throughout as log and sever an actor’s test as any player has been called upon to meet.  The moments when she stands dressed in black before the black depths of Mr. Jones’s doorways are moments that no one can forget who has felt their thrill.  Mr. Larimore’s Orin is a vivid picture of frenzy and weakness.

There were flaws her and there in last night’s performance, details which were not quite right, and a few scenes which were slightly muffed.  But the lack of flaws was far more remarkable than their presence.  Be that as it may, “Mourning Becomes Electra” is an achievement which restores the theater to its high estate.  It is an adventure in playgoing that no wise lover of the theatre will be so foolish as to deny himself.