The American Pipe Dream: Performance of Drug Addiction, 1890–1940

Abstract

Although Eugene O’Neill did not coin the term “pipe dream,” he certainly popularized it in The Iceman Cometh to the extent that, in many minds, the term is directly associated with him and his work. Furthermore, even if one discounts most of O’Neill’s addicts because they are dependent on alcohol rather than drugs, Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night looms large as a morphine addict on the American stage. And although these plays were first produced in 1946 and 1956, respectively, O’Neill completed them between 1939 and 1941, and he did, let’s not forget, win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to expect Max Shulman’s The American Pipe Dream: Performance of Addiction, 1890–1940 to consider O’Neill. Surely, when it refers to American drama, the “performance of addiction” evokes Eugene O’Neill.Shulman begins his brief introductory inventory of the evolving depiction of drug addicts identifying the predominant drug users in the United States prior to the 1890s asSurprisingly, he makes no reference to Mary Tyrone here.A few pages later, however, Shulman does devote a paragraph to Mary, in which he promises that his concluding analysis of Long Day’s Journey Into Night will mark that play as a turning point in the performance of addiction and will prompt scholars to “reimagine its place in performance history and to consider how this reshuffling opens new avenues of potential exploration, both historical and contemporary” (15). Even though O’Neill has been relegated to a seven-page epilogue, this paragraph seems to affirm the promise of the book’s title that O’Neill will somehow be central to Shulman’s thesis.Alas, an analysis of O’Neill’s transformative effect on American drama through the lens of drug addiction is not the purpose of Shulman’s book. His purpose is “to trace the representational history of the drug addict” (3) in this period of American drama and to suggest the impact that representations in the theater and other forms of popular culture can have on public perceptions and public policy debates. The book succeeds more on the first point than the second. It is an illuminating look at recurring tropes relating to drug users and addiction in a collection of mostly lesser-known plays and characters in the American theater, well organized and clearly explicated. While these lesser-known plays and characters may have reflected beliefs and attitudes of their time, the influence they may have had is questionable.Shulman identifies the “disease/vice” dichotomy (5) as an enduring paradoxical reality in the social perception of the addict as well as a source of conflict for drama. His focus on “performance of addiction” allows him to look beyond conventional theatrical texts and consider other relevant performances in venues like vaudeville and nightclubs. In a chapter on “Jive,” Shulman’s analysis of Cab Calloway’s important contributions to the performance of addiction with dual resonances for those within and outside of the “Jive” community is informative and interesting. He concludes each chapter with specific references to more recent problematic representations of drug users and addiction, suggesting further study into representations of addiction in popular culture that reflect the persistent challenges of drug addiction in society. Shulman makes a strong case for viewing the addict as an “underrepresented and marginalized figure” in need of “allyship” (190), and for the potential role of the arts and humanities in the public policy conversation.All of this, though, without any mention of O’Neill. Expecting that Long Day’s Journey, marking the chronological endpoint of Shulman’s study, would be central to the book’s epilogue and that Mary would get her due, I still wondered about other addicts in earlier O’Neill plays. It is true that alcohol is the drug of choice for most of O’Neill’s addicts, and Shulman does rightfully explain that the drug addict is a different and discrete figure, both in life and onstage. Yet, is not the very early one-act The Web (1914) worth a mention while considering drug addicts and prostitution? Why not include the more recently rediscovered Exorcism (1919), especially given its autobiographical ties to Long Day’s Journey, not to mention its autobiographical and dramaturgical ties to The Iceman Cometh, already evoked by the book’s title?Furthermore, among the many characters in O’Neill’s plays between 1913 and 1940, more than a few embody some of the traits that Shulman associates with the drug addict as depicted in plays by other dramatists of this era. Shulman identifies “neurasthenia” as a “pathological condition . . . loosely defined as extreme pathological nervousness” (40), which became a characteristic commonly portrayed on stage at the turn of the century. He mentions Chekhov and Ibsen (40), but no O’Neill, the most prominent American dramatist of the period in question whose neurasthenic male characters are legion, from the offstage husband, Alfred, in Before Breakfast, to Michael Cape in Welded, Robert Mayo in Beyond the Horizon, Dion Anthony in The Great God Brown, Orin Mannon in Mourning Becomes Electra, Simon Harford in A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions, and of course Edmund in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Considering characters from plays by O’Neill, better known than those Shulman identifies, would surely provide a broader and more familiar context, sharpening his points about the performance of addiction for most readers.In his sixth chapter, “Opiated Genius,” Shulman considers Baudelaire in relation to De Quincey and the “philosophical and aesthetic shifts from Romanticism to modernism” (160) but ignores O’Neill’s suggestive references to Baudelaire and others in Long Day’s Journey Into Night and in Ah, Wilderness! Surely, the rebellions of Edmund and Richard, respectively, in those plays embody that shift to modernism. In chapter 5, “Jive,” Shulman identifies several plays from 1927 that featured “Black drug use” as “unusual for their time in that they featured Black actors rather than whites in blackface. And yet, they were all written by white authors” (135). No mention, not even a footnote, to state that, in 1920, O’Neill famously insisted that only a Black actor could play his Emperor Jones, and the same interracial casting was true for All God’s Chillun Got Wings in 1924. Even if these plays do not meet Shulman’s criteria for “performance of addiction,” it is important to acknowledge the broader historical context.As I continued reading through these six chapters, despite my frustrations about O’Neill’s absence and still intrigued and informed by Schulman’s well-researched and documented history of the performance of addiction, I tried to keep my eye on the prize. Perhaps Shulman was ingeniously using the delayed entrance dramaturgy of Long Day’s Journey to make his point. Perhaps it was intentional that as I read about the dope dens, dope doctors, criminals, comic dope fiends, addicts of jive culture, and the “opiated genius,” I was constantly aware of Mary moving around upstairs, anticipating (with high hopes, rather than dread) her descent down those stairs and into the living room of the epilogue: “The Mad Scene: ‘Enter Ophelia’!”No such luck, though. In the mere four pages he devotes to Long Day’s Journey Into Night (reserving the last three pages of his epilogue for a summarizing look forward), Shulman dismisses Mary as an “anomaly” among drug addicts on the American stage in the period of his study, with little influence on the depiction of addiction in the decades to follow. Shulman accurately identifies the dramaturgical significance of addiction in O’Neill’s play: “the playwright uses addiction to express an existential worldview that defines his later works” (185). What Shulman seems to ignore is that this worldview and the dramaturgy behind it in these late plays are what fundamentally distinguish O’Neill from all the other playwrights he mentions in his study.The American Pipe Dream effectively identifies what Shulman calls “a broad range of . . . representational paradigms” (188) of drug addiction on stage. The attentive reader learns that drug addiction was a familiar character trait in a number of unfamiliar turn-of-the-twentieth-century plays and other early twentieth-century performances. Shulman effectively demonstrates that many aspects of this character have endured in American media, reflecting the persistence of the negative images and marginalization of addicts in American society that might perhaps influence public policy on drug addiction. “Representational paradigms,” however, are different from three-dimensional characters in whom an audience sees reflections of their own lives and circumstances, in whose experiences an audience finds reasons to question the meaning of their own existence.That may be the reason why none of the plays included in Shulman’s study have endured as O’Neill’s have. That may be the reason why “Long Day’s Journey Into Night inevitably enters the conversation” on “performances of addiction” (184). Shulman does not do that play, or O’Neill, justice in the four pages of his epilogue. He is justified in insisting on the differences between alcoholism and drug addiction; the drug addict and alcoholic perform differently onstage—and off—although those differences are worth further exploration. The drug addict and the alcoholic share a common pathology that resonates with the modern human condition. Plays that O’Neill wrote at the end of the period under consideration in Shulman’s book—as well as some of his earliest plays, written in the midst of the time period—reinforce Shulman’s support of “[Alina] Clej’s claims that addiction is ‘one of the central paradigms of modernity’” (162). This paradigm deserves more study; The American Pipe Dream would be richer for it.Surely the works of the major American dramatist of the era under consideration are relevant to a study of the “performance of addiction,” especially when addiction is pretty much that dramatist’s brand.