| Chapter 1: | Radicalizing the Discourse of American Drama |
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full-length plays, The Personal Equation dramatizes terrorism and the inability of the American proletariat to recognize the class struggle. In almost every one of his subsequent plays––even the final “autobiographical masterpieces”––O’Neill takes shots at American bourgeois values. Yet, even in this consistency, there is the hobgoblin of detachment. The Iceman Cometh’s Larry Slade is, of course, the supreme O’Neillian raisonneur: “Be God, there’s no hope! I’ll never be a success in the grandstand––or anywhere else! Life is too much for me!” Those words from Slade’s final speech, are an O’Neillian summa.28 Slade proudly declares himself a “convert to death,” and could anything be more at odds with American optimism and belief in the gospel of wealth than this?
Thus, we observe the fundamental anomaly of O’Neill’s being “the greatest American playwright.” And when we automatically accept O’Neill’s status as a dramaturgical deity we obscure his consistently brutal attack on our every cultural donnée. The obvious broadsides of his cycle plays aside, all of his other plays contain characters or incidents that challenge American complacency. O’Neill even belittles artists and radicals; he is a relentless naysayer. Before Breakfast chastises the bohemian aspirations of the silent husband, Alfred. The Hairy Ape cruelly depicts the inhumanity of “movement” politics. Conversely, in Beyond the Horizon, O’Neill demolishes several ideas cherished by the genteel: the idyllic sanctity of the farm, the salvific nature of romantic love, and the vitalizing gusto of the entrepreneurial spirit. In Desire Under the Elms, any promise of fulfillment in life is dashed––hard work itself is only worthy as an end in itself. Love is only true if fully expressed on the way to the gallows. And nothing is more antithetical to American mythology than the play’s dismissal of going west as a sluggard’s option. Strange Interlude makes a sham of chastity, marriage, and paternity. Mourning Becomes Electra