Theater: More Curio Than Classic

Strange Interlude, by Eugene O’Neill, gives the Broadway season an event of forgotten novelty, rich performance, and disillusioning irony. The sheer bulk of a nine-act play lasting from 6 p.m. to 11:30 p.m., with an hour out for dinner, makes an intriguing evening—the theatrical equivalent of the 50-mile hike. The formidable debut of The Actors Studio Theatre, with a superlative cast headed by Geraldine Page, delivers a smashing rebuttal to the sly and caustic sniping that has peppered Method acting in recent years. The irony is that the radiance of the company, magnified by Jose Quintero’s brilliant direction, merely deepens the shadow of doubt that must now fall heavily on the value of the play.

A 35-year-old Pulitzer prizewinner, Strange Interlude emerges as more of a curio than a classic, more a petulant bundle of grievances than a grand stroke of tragic inevitability, more a gallant and pretentious stab at writing a masterpiece than the assured creation of one. The play is like a massive keyboard, one-third of whose notes have been muted by time and changing mores. Another third tinkle with unintentionally funny and anachronistic noises. A final third have the resonance of an anguish that belongs less to the characters than to O’Neill. Strange Interlude is indelibly datemarked: Lost Generation, made in the 1920s.

Pessimist-Philosopher. If Fitzgerald Tilled the role of the Lost Generation’s emotional emancipator, flaunting such heady deviltries as necking and kissing. O’Neill poses as its disenchanted pessimist-philosopher. He holds a kangaroo court on God as the callous absentee landlord of the universe, and calls up such fashionable witnesses as Freud. Strindberg, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer to testify on man’s fatal disease—the disease of having been born.

From these prophets. O’Neill gleaned the gospel of self-realization, and in Strange Interlude he preaches the beyond-good-and-evil amorality of personal happiness. Says one of his characters. “To kill happiness is a worse murder than taking life,” the corollary to Hemingway’s “About morals. I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after.” The sins in Strange Interlude are committed in the name of happiness; its miseries stem from the Puritan ethic that grips O’Neill even while he rails against it. the ethic that makes happiness itself a kind of sin. Life thus becomes an atonement in which “afternoons of happiness” are “paid for with years of pain.”

Adultery for Mental Health. Strange Interlude is the drama of Nina Leeds’s sparse joys and lifelong atonement. Nina (Geraldine Page) is the hub of the play, and her needs are the five spokes—father, husband, lover, friend, son—of the wheel of life that revolves around her. At play’s start, she is neurotically bedeviled by the ghost of a World War I flyer with whom she feels she ought to have made love before he went off to die. Close to a crackup, she marries an uncomplicated Babbitt named Sam Evans (Pat Hingle). Blissfully pregnant, she is told by Sam’s mother that the family is tainted with insanity. She has an abortion, but to restore Sam’s self-confidence and her own happiness, she decides to become pregnant, secretly, by another man.

In a faintly ludicrous scene in which adultery is discussed as a venture in mental health and an experiment in scientific objectivity. Dr. Edmund Darrell (Ben Gazzara) agrees to sire her child. Unfortunately, the guinea pigs, as they call themselves, fall in love. But to save Sam’s sanity, the child is raised as Sam’s son. and grows to hate his real father. Years pass. Sam bloats with pride. Darrell shrivels with self-contempt, and Nina pins her heart on her son’s sleeve until a flapper (Jane Fonda) steals the boy.

By the ninth act, Sam has died, and Nina sinks gratefully into a twilight-sleepy love offered by “dear old Charlie” Marsden (William Prince), a desexed lap dog who has trotted devotedly in Nina’s shadow since she was a girl. Obviously, O’Neill thought that his characters had richly exhausted life, but the prevailing impression left by the play is that life has thoroughly exhausted them.

The Patient Enemy. As Nina, Geraldine Page climaxes a decade of steady growth as an actress, with a soaring, searing performance that comes close to fulfilling Tennessee Williams’ prophecy that she may become “the American Duse.” Ben Gazzara plays the lover with dark, penetrating force, and Pat Hingle’s Sam alternately snorts at life like a pig in a trough and tearfully contorts his bruised ego like an infant who has missed the 2 o’clock feeding.

What is strongest in the play itself is O’Neill’s flashing mastery of theater, the way he can put a character in a preposterous situation and still make a playgoer cliffhang over the outcome. The archetypal relationships, father versus son. Nina grieving over the child that will never be born, have unimpaired emotional authority. So do some scenes of Chekhovian poignance. such as Nina’s autumnal soliloquy on the meaning of the men in her life and what time has done to her and them.

What is weakest is O’Neill’s language. He stuffed his people’s mouths with pebbles under the delusion that it was prose poetry. English is a patient enemy, but after 35 years, scene after scene is maimed or destroyed by O’Neill’s self-indulgent reliance on bumbling, commonplace speech and gassy rhetoric. Strange Interlude’s famed asides, or internal monologues, clog the flow of the action without adding density of meaning.

A classic is the victory art wins over time. In Strange Interlude, time is the winner.