Chillun Got Research Articles

All God’s Chillun Got Wings: Whiteness as Property

ABSTRACT This article examines All God’s Chillun Got Wings in the context of renowned law professor Cheryl I. Harris’s analysis of American society’s construct of whiteness as property. Harris contends that property rights in the United States were founded on white supremacy and the protection of those rights by law results in many forms of racial discrimination. The attitudes and actions of the characters in All God’s Chillun reflect the destructive application of white property rights, which dooms the marriage of white Ella Downey and her Black husband Jim Harris. Analyzing this play through the lens of whiteness as property illustrates that the entrenched societal expectations rooted in racist property rights cannot be surmounted by the two protagonists; the unwitting but persistent assertion of same by the characters results in severe dysfunction in Ella’s and Jim’s relationship, tragically culminating in Jim’s self-sabotage and Ella’s insanity.

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

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

Spitting at Jim Crow

Spitting at Jim Crow

Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse

Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse

Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill

Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O’Neill’s Protest about White Supremacy in <i>All God’s Chillun Got Wings</i>

This article investigates Eugene O’Neill’s protest against racism and white supremacy found in his play, All God’s Chillun Got Wings. O’Neill expressed his protest in relation to white supremacy as a reflection of some part of his life. Therefore, M.H. Abrams’ (1971) expressive approach is applied. To answer the research questions, the primary data of this research, i.e., excerpts from All God’s Chillun Got Wings script and Eugene O’Neill biography related to white supremacy were collected and analyzed. Dictionaries, newspapers, journals, and articles related to the play and Eugene O’Neill were used as secondary data to support the analysis. The analysis reveals that O’Neill criticizes the different treatments because of skin colour and how to fix it. The study suggests that the different treatments related to the racial differences did not only affect the oppressed but also the oppressor. The solution Eugene O’Neill presented to remedy the situation is to see each other in the same standing regardless of the difference in racial genetics.

A Transactional Analysis of the Character of Jim Harris in Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings

Transactional analysis (TA), as a humanistic-existential tradition in psychology, originates in the contributions of psychiatrist Eric Berne to psychology in the late 1950s. This article involves the application of TA to Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings , drawing on notions such as ego states, exteropsyche, archaeopsyche, neopsyche, contamination and cathexis. Applying TA to O’Neill’s play renders a new understanding of Jim Harris’s character, shedding light on the impact of the messages he receives and the ways he responds to them. With a behavioral as well as a historical analysis of his character, this study reveals the roots of Jim’s neuroticism, his cognitive dysfunctionality and his deep-seated inferiority complex. Our study also shows that his Adult capacity is contaminated by social stances that have been integrated into his psyche.

Eugene O‟neill‟s Duality of Structure Reflected on All God’s Chillun Got Wings

In Gidden‘s Structuration theory, the most important concept is duality of structure, where agent and structure affects each other and have equally important position. This article is written to find out the duality of structure in Eugene O‘Neill drama entitled All God‘s Chillun Got Wings. The analysis is trying to examine the drama as one of O‘Neill‘s power to change the structure that he has. The analysis unit for the structure is taken from the the literature about the social background in American society in the late 19 th century and early 20 th century, while the analysis unit for the agent is taken from O‘Neill‘s drama as a reflection of the action in which O‘Neill implemented his power. Therefore, it is concluded that O‘Neill duality of structure can be observed through his action in the drama to change the structure which shaped him as an agent. Some of his actions has resulted in an unintended consequences which will become an unacknowledged condition of actions for another action.

America and the Individual: The Hairy Ape and Machinal at the Moscow Kamerny Theatre

Between 1926 and 1934 the Moscow Kamerny Theatre staged a cycle of six American plays: Eugene O’Neill's The Hairy Ape, Desire under the Elms, and All God's Chillun Got Wings; Sophie Treadwell's Machinal; Rosita, a stage adaptation of a Hollywood film; and John Dos Passos's Fortune Heights. In this article Dassia N. Posner analyzes and contextualizes two of these productions: The Hairy Ape (1926) and Machinal (1933). By the mid-1920s, Kamerny Theatre director Alexander Tairov was under intense pressure to stage work that aligned with the Soviet Union's political goals. A significant portion of the Kamerny's repertoire had long consisted of foreign plays that celebrated the individual's struggle against oppression. The Hairy Ape and Machinal provided Tairov with a unique opportunity to combine artistic, political, and human relevance in a way he had not achieved before, using the artistic language of the theatre's earlier stylistic and acting innovations. Drawing on rich archival sources, Posner illuminates ways in which stylistic juxtaposition allowed these productions to address a specific political context while also reflecting on oppression more broadly as it relates to class, gender, national origin, artistic freedom, and individual thought. Dassia N. Posner is Associate Professor of Theatre and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. Her books include The Director's Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde and The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance.

A Moon for the Misbegotten

A Moon for the Misbegotten

Eugene O'Neill: Le Génie Illégitime de Broadway

Eugene O'Neill: Le Génie Illégitime de Broadway

Eugene O'neill: The Contemporary Reviews

Eugene O'neill: The Contemporary Reviews

Trauma and the Tragic in The Hairy Ape and All God's Chillun Got Wings

Abstract The article views O'Neill's two early plays, The Hairy Ape and All God's Chillun Got Wings, as dramatic expressions of traumatic experience. They dramatize posttraumatic memory that haunts the characters to the point of death and mental illness respectively. The plays are seen as tragic in a sense different from the traditional view of tragedy. They are defined as trauma-tragedies, the term recently introduced into the theory of drama under the influence of Ruth Leys and her explorations of trauma. This tragic mode brings the audience into the traumatic drama by providing it with the most intense physical sensation of trauma possible and in this way with a specific tragic catharsis.

Trauma and the Tragic in The Hairy Ape and All God's Chillun Got Wings

Abstract The article views O'Neill's two early plays, The Hairy Ape and All God's Chillun Got Wings, as dramatic expressions of traumatic experience. They dramatize posttraumatic memory that haunts the characters to the point of death and mental illness respectively. The plays are seen as tragic in a sense different from the traditional view of tragedy. They are defined as trauma-tragedies, the term recently introduced into the theory of drama under the influence of Ruth Leys and her explorations of trauma. This tragic mode brings the audience into the traumatic drama by providing it with the most intense physical sensation of trauma possible and in this way with a specific tragic catharsis.

All God's Chillun Got Wings

All God's Chillun Got Wings

Foreword

As always, the classics from Eugene O'Neill's canon were well represented in 2013, with productions of Long Day's Journey Into Night at the Germinal Stage in Denver, at the Kansas City Actor's Theatre, and the Citadel Theater in Alberta, Canada. The Iceman Cometh was produced at Ensemble Theater, Cleveland, as part of the company's extended exploration of O'Neill's plays (they have announced a production of Beyond the Horizon in early 2014). Strange Interlude was at the National Theatre in London with Anne-Marie Duff in a widely acclaimed performance as Nina Leeds. The Hairy Ape had two productions in regional theaters, at Ghost Light Theatricals in Seattle and The Spot in Arroyo Grande, California, as part of its inaugural season.Yet this year was probably more noteworthy for productions and adaptations of less frequently seen O'Neill plays. Foremost among these was All God's Chillun Got Wings at the Jack Theatre in Brooklyn, which used the play to explore ongoing problems with race and racism in the United States to considerable effect. Desire under the Elms will have two productions in the second half of this year, one at Staten Island's Sea View Playwright's Theater and the other in Ireland as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. Bound East for Cardiff and In the Zone were produced on the Tall Ship Gazela at Penn's Landing as part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Chris Christophersen concluded the Eugene O'Neill Festival with a performance at Tao House, while “Anna Christie” was put on by Role Players Theatre, for good comparison, in downtown Danville. And O'Neill's seldom-produced one-act Thirst was innovatively integrated into The Big Show, which told the story of the life of Frances Farmer.Along with those drawing upon O'Neill's plays for dramatic raw materials, more and more dramatists have drawn upon his life. Jo Morello's E.G.O.: The Passions of Eugene Gladstone O'Neill, which won the biannual playwriting competition of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, was produced by Balagula Theatre, Lexington, Kentucky. Swedish playwright Lars Noren's And Give Us Shadows, which dramatizes encounters among O'Neill, Carlotta Monterey, and O'Neill's sons from previous marriages, was staged at the Schoolhouse Theater in Croton Falls, New York. These plays follow previous works like Begotten and A Blizzard at Marble Neck and demonstrate that O'Neill's life remains a near synonym for drama.

Censorship, Control and Resistance in Eugene O’Neill’s “black plays” The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings

The 1920s were a period of control, restriction and censorship on the American stage. From its creation in 1922 to its dismantling in 1927, the Play Jury was in charge of theater regulation in the United States, at a time when segregation was still enforced on the stage. White actors with their faces painted black played the roles of the black characters, while black audiences were generally denied access to Broadway theaters. In this context of severe prohibition and regulation, Eugene O’Neill wrote and produced The Emperor Jones (1920) and All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1923), two plays which bear witness to the then rising interest of white avant-garde writers and artists in African-American life and culture, and to their productive connection with the emerging literature of the Harlem Renaissance. But these two controversial plays (each of which featured a black actor in the leading role) also highlighted the difficulty of tampering with the “color line”. These two “black plays” raise the issues of censorship and resistance both at the level of their writing and in connection with their production and reception. This paper aims at arguing that they can be read as attempts to push back the limits of artistic expression on textual, scenic and social grounds simultaneously. In particular, O’Neill’s expressionistic techniques in the plays, with their symbolist staging and inexorably shrinking and oppressive settings, may be seen as a dramatization of the limitations of the American stage, which was then unable to accommodate his vision of a reshaped and modernized theater as well as the idea of a more tolerant American society. It is consequently possible to consider these two plays, which feature prominently the struggle against censorship both at the textual and institutional levels, as the beginning of major changes which occurred from the 1920s onwards.

Fear Mongering, Media Intimidation, and Political Machinations: Tracing the Agendas Behind the All God's Chillun Got Wings Controversy

In this article, I will argue that one of the most controversial productions in American theater history, perceived largely as an event provoked by racial prejudice, ought be re-examined in terms of the savvy political agendas behind the text. History remembers the contention surrounding Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings as simple case of racial intolerance, bur the truth proves much different, involving personal threats, government action, and constant attacks from the press mounted by two political powers. Both participants feared political irrelevance, and the prospect of losing influence or prominence inspired them reassert their clout by intimidating O'Neill and his cast. An exploration of the context behind the Chillun controversy reveals story of hidden machinations concerning political ambition and desperate attempts retain power. In early summer of 1924, the Provincetown Playhouse premiered Eugene O'Neill's newest work, All God's Chillun Got Wings. While O'Neill originally wrote the piece as one-act play for George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken in the fall of 1923, he later expanded it into a drama in two acts and seven scenes set in lower New York at an unspecified rime. (1) O'Neill's racial theme is rather clumsily handled at the beginning and then powerfully at the end. The first act traces the development of the relationship between Jim and Ella, beginning as childhood playmates who tease each other about the color of their skin while playing game of marbles on the sidewalk. The act continues by charting fourteen-year period highlighting Jim's inability overcome racial barriers in order pursue his desired romance with Ella. O'Neill's racially charged dialogue during this opening act unfortunately fails provide an emotional or intellectual impact because the immaturity of the two major characters, combined with the simplistic depiction of the secondary characters who hurl racial epithets, weakens dialogue that is based on racial tension. When the act concludes with Jim and Ella emerging from chapel as wedded couple, O'Neill provides little indication of the serious issues he addresses in the second half of the play. O'Neill salvages All God's Chillun Got Wings with second act that shifts from storytelling emphasis an exploration of tenuous romance between two human beings fighting against lifelong prejudices that conflict with their quests for love and validation. Ella constantly berates Jim for his lofty aspirations become lawyer, fearing that he will no longer fit in the stereotype that allowed her feel superior. In addition suffering her brutal verbal attacks, Jim is harassed by his sister, who questions why he continues endure Ella's abuse in the name of undying love. With Jim's defiance (if not ignorance) toward the external forces aiming doom his relationship and his confidence, O'Neill presents man determined to become someone other than who he and both his black friends and his white wife try shame him into staying who he is, resulting in drama that demonstrates not only the trauma of race relations but of the human condition in general. (2) While this racial subject matter certainly raised eyebrows and kept conservative audience members away from the theater, the premiere production of Chillun is most often remembered for one single moment. Most references Chillun in theater history books are accompanied by brief recounting of the controversial staging at the play's conclusion, when Ella kneels on the floor and kisses Jim's hand. It is this moment--when the white actress Mary Blair kissed Paul Robeson's hand--that sparked an incredible controversy that captured headlines and evoked vitriolic responses from all over the country. (3) Those who denounced O'Neill's work as an explosive face play ignored the many complex issues raised during the second half of the script. The concluding moment of the play involves not white woman's submission black man but, instead, tearful plea return their innocent childhood, when they treated each other with greater respect and dignity. …

The Unreported Miracle of Paul Robeson and The Miracle

{ 73 } \ The Unreported Miracle of Paul Robeson and The Miracle —Felicia Hardison Londré Miracles are not easily pinned down. What some see as a miracle, others consider mere coincidence. Granted, no violation of the laws of nature complicates the following chain of events from a religious spectacle in 1926 to a momentous moment for African Ameri­ can civil rights in 1942. Yet there is a miracle in it. The Miracle that we can all agree actually happened is the Austrian director Max Reinhardt’s production of a spectacular pantomimic drama about a young nun who goes astray but is redeemed through a miraculous intervention. With music by Engelbert Humperdinck and a scenario by Karl Vollmoeller, The Miracle premiered in 1911 at London’s huge Olympia, which Reinhardt and designer Ernst Stern converted into a cathedral seating eight thousand spectators. Over the next six years,Reinhardt staged The Miracle in sixteen cities:­Vienna in 1912; Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, Elberfeld, Breslau, Cologne, Prague, and Frankfurt am Main in 1913; Karlsruhe and Hamburg in 1914; and Stockholm, Göteborg , Malmö, Hälsingborg, and Bucharest in 1917. World War I stymied Ameri­ can arts philanthropist Otto H. Kahn in his initial efforts to get an Ameri­ can production of The Miracle, but it finally happened in New York in 1924. Its 298 performances at the Century Theatre, from January to November, surpassed the combined total for all the European productions . Before the New York Miracle closed, Cleveland arranged for a three-­ week engagement over Christmas 1924. Other cities picked up on the idea, which impresario Morris Gest readily facilitated—to his personal profit of two million dollars.1 The extraordinary cost of transporting forty boxcars of scenery and equipment, transforming a public auditorium into a cathedral, arranging accommodations for the enormous cast, and rehearsing local extras meant that { 74 } Felicia Hardison Londré only cities large enough to guarantee a minimum run of three weeks could book the spectacle. The Miracle played twelve Ameri­ can cities during the five years following its New York success. During those five years, the great African Ameri­ can actor-­ singer Paul Robe­ son was rising to prominence. He performed in two plays by Eugene O’Neill, The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings, in 1924. In 1925 he began giving concert performances with accompanist Lawrence Brown, and he gained the patronage of Otto Kahn. Despite being refused lodging in hotels and service in restaurants,2 Robeson persevered to achieve his first European concert tour and, in November 1929, a sell-­ out concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall. There is no indication that Robeson ever saw The Miracle. The fact that Kahn boosted both Reinhardt’s Miracle and Robeson’s career is irrelevant to the quasi-­ miraculous happenstance of timing that would give rise to an incident of lasting impact. When Robeson famously interrupted his own concert in Kansas City, Missouri, on February 17, 1942, to speak out against the segregated seating of blacks and whites in the audience, the ensuing national coverage not only contributed to curbing racial determinants in seating policies but also gave blacks a powerful example of how to take a reasoned stand on issues that mattered.3 The origins of that galvanizing moment in 1942 might be traced back to 1926, when The Miracle played Kansas City. Although the cast of The Miracle lacked racial diversity, the production certainly stands as a monument to multiethnic, multinational artistic endeavor. The internationally acclaimed Viennese “genius” director, Max Reinhardt, his Polish assistant, Rudolf Kommer, his Ameri­ can presenter, Morris Gest, and his Maecenas, Otto Kahn, were Jewish, while the story of The Miracle, which begins and ends in a cathedral, is grounded in Catholicism.“The Catholic Church should thank Max Reinhardt for the propaganda” was a comment reported after the London production. The scenario, supposedly based upon a Rhine legend, evoked comparisons to the Oberammergau Passion Play.4 A more obvious source would be the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Sister Beatrice, which had premiered in Berlin in 1901, when Reinhardt was working there. Maeterlinck’s Sister Beatrice and Reinhardt’s The Miracle employ the same plot devices, notably, the nun who leaves...

Theatrical Ethnography and Modernist Primitivism in Eugene O'Neill and Zora Neale Hurston

"Theatrical Ethnography and Modernist Primitivism in Eugene O'Neill and Zora Neale Hurston": The aesthetic of primitivism in the modernist era coincides with the emergence of other discourses that sought to uncover truths that lay beneath the veneer of modern culture. The science of anthropology and specifically the practice of ethnography led, in James Clifford's phrase, to an "ethnographic modernism" that would reveal "the universal in the local, the whole in the part." In American drama, Eugene O'Neill's plays typify the modernist primitive aesthetic, and like the work of such ethnographers as Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski, his plays The Emperor Jones and All God's Chillun Got Wings deployed the motifs of Africanist primitivism in order to convey to their predominantly white audiences a primal reality that confirmed the "depth" of their individual psyches by figuring the primitive as a metaphorical mask of the modern self and modern culture. By contrast, the plays of Zora Neale Hurston, much better known today for her novels and ethnographic studies of the American South and Caribbean cultures, developed a vision of a "Negro art theatre" that would be based directly on her fieldwork, combining cultures and current dramatic practices into a heterogeneous, "angular" construction animated by the notion of "mimicry," which she defined as the expressive transformation of Euro-American cultural forms, language, objects, and everyday practices. Though she had been writing plays before her anthropological training with Boas at Columbia in the mid-1920s, it was "the spy-glass of Anthropology," in Hurston's phrase, that gave her a perspective on African American cultures that she would express in her plays. For Hurston, the act of mimicry is a metonymic art (in Homi Bhabha's formulation) that depends on reinvention of the contiguous and local, whereas O'Neill's idea of modern drama as "an exercise in unmasking" (to cite his own phrase from "Memoranda on Masks") depends on the notion of the mask as a metaphor of a universal condition. Examining two of Hurston's unproduced plays, Meet the Mamma and Cold Keener, along with relevant passages from her 1934 essay "Characteristics of Negro Expression" will help show how her vision of drama was changed by her ethnographic work, and how her drama exemplifies, in another of Clifford's useful phrases, "ethnographic surrealism," an inventive amalgam of scientific fact and expressive art. Above all, the dramatic power of Hurston's mimicry lay in its ability to convey not the universalized voice of the tragic individual but the collective voice of the community, insisting on its specific metonymic representation and affirming the contiguity and connectedness of both rural and urban African American life.