O'Neill's Dramatic Process

Abstract

EUGENE O'Neill said of himself that as a poet he stammered. If he achieved verbal elegance only occasionally, he nevertheless created in his best work texts of remarkably poetic density and complexity. He expressed dramatic meanings less with words themselves, less with imagery or rhetoric, less with the content of things his characters say, than with the processes and rhythms of the speeches and interactions, processes that have frequently been likened to musical expressions. O'Neill himself mused from time to time in his notebooks about unconscious use of musical structure in nearly all my plays-impulsion and chief interest always an attempt to do what music does (to express an essentially poetic viewpoint of life) using rhythms of recurrent themes-is my, at times, blundering vague groping and missing caused by just the very fact that my use of musical structure is unconscious and ignorant of its own laws? Concluding the same 193 I notebook entry he vowed to Study some authoritative books on structure of symphony, sonata, etc.' Probably O'Neill never made good his promise to study formal musical structures, although he made several more notes on the subject. But the plays of the late nineteen-thirties and early forties show, more than ever, the use of rhythms, recurrent themes, and other musical qualities. He organized each movement of The Iceman Cometh around paired themes. In Act One the theme Where's Hickey? interweaves with the individual orchestral voices expressing, andante, their particular pipe dreams. The major-keys of the themes in Act One give way to minor-keys in Acts Two, Three, and most of Act Four. In Act Two the theme of