Final Acts: The Creation of Three Late O'Neill Plays by Judith E. Barlow

Abstract

278Comparative Drama Judith E. Barlow. Final Acts: The Creation of Three Late O'Neill Plays. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1985. Pp. 215. $22.50. Judith Barlow's purpose in this study is to use the notes, scenarios, and drafts O'Neill wrote in creating his last three full-length plays to account more fully for the mastery these works achieve. She has used O'Neill's "Work Diaries" most extensively; and she has worked with all available versions of the plays, from manuscript and typescript drafts, to production scripts, to published texts. Her central theme is that O'Neill "softened" his characters as he revised his last plays, thereby rendering those plays more complex and (implicitly) greater works of art. Beginning with The Iceman Cometh, Barlow finds that while its characters may begin as dramatic representations of people O'Neill knew, or knew about, in his young adulthood, they end up as figures who go far beyond their models. Several of the characters, she observes, like those in Long Day's Journey Into Night, are based on the members of O'Neill's immediate family. She especially notes parallels between Hickey and O'Neill's brother Jamie. Iceman, she finds, was the most heavily revised at all stages of its composition; and she proposes that through revision O'Neill ultimately made the false message of the would-be savior Hickey not so central as the compassion and beneficence of Larry Slade. While she agrees with Cyrus Day's idea that the play deals with the showing up of a false Christ, she observes that in O'Neill's deliberate visual imitation of the Last Supper (in Act Two) it "is Larry who occupies the central place" at the table, "the place Da Vinci assigned to Christ." It is also Larry, she continues, "who makes the Christ-like sacrifice of his own security to help another human being: his 'Judas,' Parritt" (p. 57). Barlow finds the centrality of Larry's compassion developing through the various stages of the play's composition, implying that it counters the single-mindedly pessimistic view which many critics ascribe to the work. Moving next to Long Day's Journey, Barlow contends that too much time has been spent comparing the play to O'Neill's life. She demonstrates that O'Neill freely alters fact in the play to create art. Noting that the entries in O'Neill's Work Diary were more extensive for this play than for the other plays she deals with, Barlow observes once again that in his revisions O'Neill builds the play's dramatic intensity by increasing our sympathy for the characters. She concentrates chiefly on Mary, whose "duality" (split between loving wife/mother and hysterical castigator of her family), while evident in the earliest drafts, was made more subtle and "believable" as the playwright moved through the various stages of the play's composition. Similarly, Barlow feels that by softening the edges of both James's fatherly compassion and harsh tirades, O'Neill put the old actor in a more favorable light. The revisions Barlow finds in the generation of Jamie and Edmund also deepen their characterizations. In Jamie, she sees O'Neill increasing the juxtaposition of guilt and guiltlessness, comparing that juxtaposition to the "idea of fate" in Greek tragedy (p. 107). But she concentrates more of her attention on Edmund, whom she feels O'Neill sought to make more central as he revised the play. Nevertheless, Barlow finally agrees with those critics who feel that the focus never quite shifts to Reviews279 Edmund. He is "less compelling" than the others, his well-known Romantic speech about the sea "almost a set piece on the miseries of any sensitive soul" (p. 111). It lacks the "pathos" of the other characters' confessions. Since the scenario in the Work Diary is much shorter for A Moon for the Misbegotten than are those for the other two plays, Barlow is less dependent on that gold mine here than on manuscript and typescript. The published version indicates extensive revision, which has once again resulted, she says, in the softening and deepening of the major characters —as well as in an...