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“Write a Dance”: Lazarus Laughed as O'Neill's Dithyramb of the Western Hemisphere

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2010

Robert K. Sarlós
Robert K. Sarlós
Affiliation:
Professor of Dramatic Art at the University of California, Davis.
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Extract

Eugene O'Neill pushed his habitual experimentation with theatrical forms toward the establishment of a radically new esthetic in The Great God Brown (1925) and Lazarus Laughed (1926). He groped toward a poetic theatre with religious and ceremonial overtones that involved further visual and aural departures from the accepted norm of Broadway productions. In the first of these plays, O'Neill's mastery of visceral effects continues to cast a spell over spectators in occasional imaginative and skillful productions. But the second remains his least accessible; ever since its first production at the Pasadena Playhouse in April 1928, it has continued to mystify or repel both theatre people and litterateurs.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 29 , Issue 1: Eugene O'Neill Centennial Issue , May 1988 , pp. 37 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1988

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References

NOTES

1 Gillette, William H., “Author's Preface,” Sherlock Holmes, (Garden City, N.Y.: Double-day, 1935), p. xix.Google Scholar

2 See my Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players: Theatre in Ferment (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982). See also my “George Cram (‘Jig’) Cook: An American Devotee of Dionysos,” Journal of American Culture, 8,3 (1985).

3 They may not have been entirely wrong. O'Neill probably knew of Jig Cook's ideas concerning a projected theatre of “pure space,” — see Jig Cook, pp. 205–6.

4 Clark, Barrett H., Eugene O'Neill; The Man and His Plays (New York: Dover, 1947), p. 117.Google Scholar

5 Nathan, George Jean, The Theatre Book of the Year 1946/47 (New York: Knopf, 1947), p. 103.Google Scholar

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9 Cited from a 1928 O'Neill letter, Simonson, Lee, The Stage is Set (New York: Dover, 1946), p. 117.Google Scholar

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12 Bogard, pp. 285–286; Arthur, and Gelb, Barbara, O'Neill (New York: Harper, 1962), pp. 602–603.Google Scholar Emphasis added.

13 George Cram Cook cited, Glaspell, Susan, The Road to the Temple (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1927), pp. 252–253.Google Scholar

14 Glaspell, p. 245.

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17 The fact that they did was attested to by the hostile critic who declared the experience repellent. (Morning Telegraph, November 23, 1918.)

18 Glaspell, p. 393.

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21 India, p. 170.

22 The play was Em Jo Basshe's Adam Solitaire, which opened at the Provincetown Playhouse in November 1925.

23 Nilla Cook to the author, August 28, 1974.

24 Nilla Cook to the author, December 18, 1963. — In a letter to Manuel Komroff (22 March 1926), after requesting translations of the Talmud and the Koran, O'Neill mysteriously announced: “I'm going in very heavily these days for the study of religion along certain definite lines… as a sort of large background for certain work in the future. Am also starting to study ancient Greek…” Sheaffer, Louis, O'Neill; Son and Artist (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), p. 197.Google Scholar Emphasis added.

25 Nilla Cook to the author, August 28, 1974.

26 Nilla Cook to the author, February 5, 1975.

27 Nilla cook to the author, December 17, 1975.

28 Jig Cook, pp. 50–54.

29 Gelb, p. 603; Sheaffer, p. 202.

30 Clark, p. 148.

31 Seltsam, William H., comp. Metropolitan Opera Annals; A Chronicle of Artists and Performances (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1947)Google Scholar, and Kelly, Alan, “Fedor Ivanovich Chaliapin — A Discography,” The Record Collector, 22, 8–10 (August 1972), pp. 184–230.Google Scholar

32 India, p. 53.

33 See “Navaho Sings,” Waters, Frank, Masked Gods; Navaho and Pueblo Ceremonials (New York: Ballantine, 1970), pp. 229–261.Google Scholar

34 Rudnick, Lois P., Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), p. 284.Google Scholar

35 Cook's notes cited, Glaspell, pp. 292–293.

36 “Certainly, I know of no play like ‘Lazarus’ at all… In short, ‘Lazarus’ is damned far from any category. It has no plot of any sort as one knows plot.” O'Neill to Macgowan, May 14 [1926], “The Theatre We Worked For”: The Letters of Eugene O'Neill to Kenneth Macgowan, Edited by Jackson Byer, with the assistance of Ruth M. Alvarez; With introductory'essays by Travis Bogard (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 112.

37 Nilla Cook to the author, February 5, 1975.

38 Jig Cook. pp. 144–152.

39 Despite Macgowan's co-authorship of Masks and Demons (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1923). The preface describes the book as “not the work of an authority.” — Apart from a few reports about how well the writing of Lazarus is going, most letters during the relevant period concern Macgowan's and O'Neill's attempts to secure productions in New York, Chicago and Moscow, none of which were realized. “The Theatre We Worked For”, passim.

40 The Gelbs describe O'Neill proposing the placement of a commemorative plaque on the playhouse, and writing an inscription “in a repentant mood.” P. 546

41 Quinn, 2, p. 199, discussing Lazarus in a context of religiosity as varied as ancient Celtic and American transcendentalist, cites a 1925 O'Neill letter.

42 Tietjens, Eunice, The World at My Shoulder (New York: Macmillan, 1938), pp. 18–19.Google Scholar

43 Dell, Floyd, Homecoming; An Autobiography (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1933), pp. 263–264Google Scholar, expressed a view echoed by several erstwhile Provincetown Players.

44 Whose Laughter he requested from Manuel Komroff on 1 March 1926, along with “anything else you know printed about the spirit of laughter among the Greeks or Ancients of any sort.” Sheaffer, p. 197. Emphasis added.

45 Scheff, T. J., Catharsis in Healing, Ritual, and Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 14–16Google Scholar, emphasis added.

46 See above, p. 39 — According to Floyd, Virginia, ed., Eugene O'Neill at Work: Newly Released Ideas for Plays (New York, Ungar, 1981), p. 98Google Scholar, O'Neill “made copious notes on Dionysus.” Although the base incident of the risen Lazarus is from the Gospel of Saint John, O'Neill reported to Macgowan to have removed a great deal from the manuscript “that reminded one of a regular Biblical play — a bad start for Laz.” “The Theatre We Worked For,” p. 142.

47 All quotations in this paragraph are from Waters, pp. 235–240.

48 “The Theatre We Worked For,” p. 146.