"Vital contact": Eugene O'Neill and the working class

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2003 by Patrick J. Chura

Judging by his early career, Eugene O'Neill seems to have been extremely intrigued by these questions. In his early plays, O'Neill repeatedly explored situations that would have both troubled the pageant and complicated the thinking of the settlement movement--situations that suggested that the harsh lessons from Paterson, along with the practical limitations of the Hull House paradigm of "vital contact," were ultimately not lost on the self-proclaimed sailor-playwright. The result is that while O'Neill's actions, public persona, and public discourse explicitly accept the viability of "vital contact" as a method of both self-realization and social progress, his plays betray other, less sanguine conclusions. (14) Moreover, the relation between O'Neill's personal "vital contact" and the deeper theorization of identically situated class issues in his early drama is defined by disillusionment--disillusionment engendered by a willingness to confront the contradictions and potentially negative effects of cross-class interaction.

Joel Pfister has referred to O'Neill's role as author of the early Glencairn plays as that of a "tour guide" for a middle and upper class that was "fascinated by exhibits of 'exotic' workers" (109). This formula seems applicable not only to O'Neill's audition in Provincetown but also to the premier evening of "Bound East for Cardiff"--the first O'Neill work ever produced--on 28 July 1916. The atmosphere in the wharf theater, notes Susan Glaspell, recreated the feeling of a ship at sea: "There was a fog, just as the script demanded, and a fog bell in the harbor. The tide was in, and it washed under us and around, spraying through the holes in the floor, giving us the rhythm and the flavor of the sea" (254). As Glaspell indicates, "the people who had seen the plays, and the people who gave them, were adventurers together. The spectators were part of the Players." What the spectators saw was "a kind of realism and naturalism unexplored on the American stage" (Pfister 109), a new type of drama with a focus on the working-class subject as its crucial element. In the play, Kemp recalls, "we heard the actual speech of men who go to sea; we shared the reality of their lives; we felt the motion and windy, wave beaten urge of a ship" (96).

For the Provincetown group, the play confirmed that O'Neill's assumption of the outward markers of the laboring class--a class identification previously judged dubious--was not shallow or exterior but deep, visceral, and genuine enough to move middle-class audiences. While the playwright's adopted sailor's clothing was certainly part of the equation, what impressed the group about O'Neill had more to do with the illusion that this play fostered--the creation of a form of shared experience between the classes.

Several critics have viewed the play as a turning point in theater history, and the long-term collaboration between O'Neill and the Provincetown Players that began with this play as a milestone in the development of American drama. (15) The artistic merits of the work stem from its plausible treatment of tragic emotions under lower-class conditions and its accurate rendering of working-class dialect. As Pfister has noted, O'Neill's depiction of the lonely last hours of a sailor's life in the stifling forecastle "brought the lower class life and idiom to the American stage" (109). The play's setting, considered along with O'Neill's self-identification as a common seaman, suggests the correspondence between what Reed and "Jig" Cook termed "native art" (qtd. in Glaspell 252) and radical social theory.