Perhaps the most significant comment of the many O’Neill made about Dynamo was in a letter to Carlotta Monterey O’Neill, dated December 4, 1929,⁴ in which he expresses concern that the play does not live up to the qualities he has found in his new marriage and so does not justify him in his wife’s eyes. He describes the play as a backward step, and regrets the play is not truly a product of their marriage. In an unpublished letter to Joseph Wood Krutch, dated July 27, 1929, he again referred to the play as marking “a standing still, if not a backward move.” He wrote that, having revised the work extensively for publication, he liked it better, but had decided that it should never have been written:

It wasn’t worth my writing and so it never called forth my best. But a good lesson for me. Henceforth unless I’ve got a theme that demands I step a rung higher to do it, I’m going to mark time and play the country gent until such a theme comes. It wasn’t that I didn’t have such themes when I wrote “D” but “D” was more developed in my mind as a play and seemed an easy choice.

The Guild accepted the play in October and produced it on February 11, 1929. It played for fifty performances, sufficient to satisfy the Guild’s subscription audience and then closed. O’Neill continued to tinker, and, finally, rewrote it virtually in its entirety. The published script represents a radical reordering of scenes, the elimination of one character who appeared in the original production and much pruning and reshaping of the dialogue. None of these changes were tried out in the theatre, and it is therefore important to recognize that Dynamo, unlike any of O’Neill’s other plays produced in his lifetime, is an unfinished work, one which never had its important final shaping for the theatrical machine.*

Furthermore, kept alive over a five-year period, Dynamo had evidently been blown by the changing winds of O’Neill’s other plays, by shifts in his perspective and maturing attitudes. O’Neill was correct in saying that the play is a step backward, for the play belongs far more to the period of The Hairy Ape and The Emperor Jones than to the work of which he proved capable after Strange Interlude. As he wrote Dynamo, he was sketching the long autobiographical play to be called Sea-Mother’s Son, and the first conception of Mourning Becomes Electra had already fired his imagination. Dynamo was written because it was there and could represent him in the theatre while the more massive works germinated.

In its structure, Dynamo is developed in a series of relatively brief scenes as were The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape, and much of the narrative material which expands the play beyond the length of its predecessors is not essential. Fife’s baiting of Reuben with the lurid confession of a murder, for example, is an elaborate and unnecessary way of characterizing the older man as a freethinker. The fifteen-month gap between Acts I and II, which permits Reuben to turn from naďve idealist to cynical atheist offstage and allows time for Reuben’s mother to die, is also an expansion of little moment. The play feels like a shorter work and could easily have been more contained. Its central story, after all, is closely parallel to that of The Hairy Ape: the narrative of a man who turns from one God, because he has lost the sense of belonging, and comes in the end to another which destroys him. Without the picaresque elements of Yank’s quest, Reuben’s search has something of the same intensity and climaxes in the same sort of lurid destruction.

Although the final portrait is blurred, Reuben, whose name in the early scenarios was Benjamin,** is O’Neill’s typical dreamer as the play begins. He has the sensitive face, and the weak mouth that characterizes the portraits of Robert Mayo and other quasi-autobiographical heroes. He is also developed in terms of his quest for a belief that will enable him to belong to an elemental life force, and, like many of the earlier heroes, he feels a special responsivity to the sea. In early scenarios for the play, O’Neill seems to have conceived of his destiny as similar to that of John Brown in Bread and Butter. The Reverend Light, considering his son’s future, wants him to go to divinity school, but his wife wants the boy to have business training so that he may attain material success comparable to that of her daughters who have married successful business men. Although the daughters and sons-in-law were quickly eliminated, the image of the sensitive son torn between God and Mammon never disappeared entirely from the script.

From the incomplete first scenario, it is possible to see the outlines of the original conception of the play, the hero’s turn from uncongenial materialistic success and from the life-denying Calvinist God of his father toward a substitute faith in the idea of electricity, which in the figure of the dynamo seemed a mysterious, feminine source of life. Although in the final version, O’Neill retained something of the mother’s desire that Reuben should go into business and “marry a nice girl with money,” the mother’s materialism is not the cause of her betrayal of Reuben. Rather, it is caused by her jealousy of her son’s love for the neighbor girl, Ada. As O’Neill phrased the issue in an analysis to Benjamin de Casseres, “the boy’s psychological struggle . . . begins when he is betrayed by his mother and casts her off along with his father’s God: . . . he finally has to sacrifice the girl his mother hated to a maternal deity whom he loves sexually.”⁷ He noted that this story was three-fourths of the play and that it was a “human relationship” which counted.

Taken at this level, the play, although it is not to be entirely condoned, can at least be understood as the attempt of Reuben to recover his lost mother by immolating himself on the dynamo. In killing himself and Ada, he has gone through a ritual of self-purification, destroying the sources of his guilt and the vestiges of the Father God in himself so that he may be worthy of God the Mother. It is an ending not dissimilar to that renunciation and purification which marks Jim Harris’s surrender of himself at the ending of All God’s Chillun Got Wings.

Reuben’s worship of the dynamo evolves from the conception that seems to have been the germ of the play, the essay by Henry Adams on “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” that forms Chapter XXV of The Education of Henry Adams. There, Adams speaks of the dynamo as a moral force comparable to that which early Christians saw in the Cross. He writes of its humming as a warning to men to have respect for its power, and he adds, “One began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force.”⁸ The dynamo’s force, as Adams interpreted it, was a particularly American manifestation of the life force, seen in earlier times in Europe as the worship of Venus and the Virgin. “The Woman,” he wrote, “had once been supreme,” but in America, she had been covered with fig leaves by Puritans who knew that “sex was sin.” Nevertheless, Adams noted, the Puritans knew that The Woman, in whatever representation she was made manifest, was not worshiped for her beauty: “She was goddess because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction—the greatest and most mysterious of all energies; all she needed was to be fecund.”⁹ The dynamo was, in short, an icon of God the Mother of whom O’Neill had written obliquely in Desire Under the Elms shortly before he began work on Dynamo, and who appeared in other forms in The Great God Brown and Strange Interlude, finished while Dynamo was still being written. In fact, the dynamo is the first, rather than the last, direct representation of the Mother God in O’Neill’s theatre. That it proved somewhat obvious and clumsy for the Guild’s audiences in 1929 is a token, perhaps, of how rapidly O’Neill’s audiences were led toward sophistication, but taken in the period of its inception, it is no more clumsy or obvious than the crocodile god or the great ape in the zoo. Had the play in shortened form been produced in 1924 or 1925, it might well have succeeded as an exciting experiment.

In the interim between its conception and birth, O’Neill, reaching toward depth and complexity, hung more on the play than it could bear, and, as he acknowledged, he lost the essential psychological story.*** He also, and without hope of restoration, destroyed his conception, derived from Henry Adams, of the dynamo as a real symbol of God. It is difficult to conceive of an interpretation that Reuben’s death, arms spread as if crucified on the dynamo, is anything other than a triumphant return to the source of life. As he kills himself he cries “I don’t want to know the truth! I only want you to hide me, Mother! Never let me go from you again! Please, Mother!” His is a plunge toward identity with the God-force. The sacrifice made, perhaps he belongs.

Unfortunately, the possibility of accepting the ending as it appears to have been intended is vitiated by the context in which Reuben moves—between the puritanical Calvinism of his father and the cracker-barrel atheism of Ada’s father, Ramsay Fife. This conflict is a tedious one between, on the one side, Light’s fundamentalist God whose vengeance is in the lightning, and whose exaction of the wages of sin is implacable and, on the other, Fife’s belief that since the universe is Godless, the power of electricity is the sole source of life. It is a power which he jokingly equates with that of Lucifer. Fife and Light provide the intellectual polarities of the play, and, when he leaves his father, Reuben, by choosing the dynamo, chooses the atheism of Fife as his most profound religious perception. Since his final action reflects Fife’s belief in electricity, Fife’s atheism cuts across the meaning of the play’s last moments. The question is unanswered as to whether Reuben has committed an act of religious devotion or whether, out of madness and despair, he has followed Fife’s atheistical teachings to their warped end. The situation is complicated by the presence in the person of Mrs. Fife of a Cybel-like goddess who dreams moonily throughout the play and whose feeling for the dynamo is like Reuben’s. “I could sit forever and listen to them sing ... they’re always singing about everything in the world,” she says, and hums to herself as the dynamo hums. Mrs. Fife sees the dynamo as essentially creative and intelligible while her husband denies it the power of a God except in jest. Thus with such conflicting opinions expressed as to the nature of the God which surround Reuben’s story, his final act is unclear. No view, Reuben’s or that of any other character, has supremacy at the play’s end. The confusion was fatal and the play ends in an unresolved suspension: does Reuben find God? or does his death demonstrate “the general spiritual futility of the substitute-God search”?

The search for a substitute God was apparently to be the theme of the other parts of the trilogy whose titles were Without Endings of Days and It Cannot Be Mad. The third play was never written, and it is doubtful from O’Neill’s description of the content of the trilogy whether the second play, which finally emerged as Days Without End, can be considered as thematically related to Dynamo. O’Neill wrote to de Casseres, “A general idea-title for the trilogy might be God Is Dead! Long Live—What? with science supplying an answer which to religion-starved primitive instinct is like feeding a. puppy biscuit to a lion. Or something like that.”¹⁰ He discussed the matter more fully in letters to Langner and Nathan, to whom he wrote that Dynamo

is a symbolical and factual biography of what is happening in a large section of the American (and not only American) soul right now. It is really the first play of a trilogy that will dig at the roots of the sickness of today as I feel it—the death of the old God and the failure of science and materialism to give any satisfying new one for the surviving primitive religious instinct to find a meaning for life in, and to comfort its fears of death with. It seems to me anyone trying to do big work nowadays must have this big subject behind all the little subjects of his plays or novels, or he is simply scribbling around on the surface of things and has no more real status than a parlor entertainer.