Critical Evaluation
Strange Interlude, though a very long drama, was enormously successful. The curtain went up on its nine acts at 5:30 p.m.; the evening included a supper break after the fifth act, and the final curtain did not fall until after 11 p.m. There were two touring companies and a London production for the play, which brought Eugene O’Neill his third Pulitzer Prize. In book form, the play became a best seller. Later there was a motion picture (starring Norma Shearer), and, in the middle of posthumous revival of interest in the playwright, a restaging of the play in 1963.
While its psychology came to seem somewhat dated, the play appeared fresh, experimental, and exciting in the 1920’s. Its major dramatic departure, the soliloquies (in themselves scarcely new to the theater), are as long as the regular surface dialogue. The action freezes when they are delivered. The technique is a way of dramatizing the fears, drives, and obsessions below the surface of human lives that rarely see the light of day. The technique also enables O’Neill to present one of his favorite themes, that of identity conflict or division, a theme evident in many of his plays, including The Emperor Jones (1920), The Hairy Ape (1922), All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924), The Great God Brown (1926), Days Without End (1933), and A Touch of the Poet (1957). At times, as in The Great God Brown, O’Neill employs masks to suggest sharp conflict between our public and our private images. In Days Without End, he divides his hero literally in two, employing two actors to present the two sides of his hero. Sometimes, as in Days Without End, O’Neill seeks to heal the divisions, but elsewhere, as in A Touch of the Poet, he presents them as tragic facts of life.
The technique also suggests another favorite theme of O’Neill—that of the past reaching into and controlling the present. As the characters deliver their soliloquies, they seem to live not only in the moment but also in their remembered pasts. Thick heaps of time surround and control them. Past and future are always present. This theme is also present in other O’Neill plays such as The Emperor Jones, Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956). O’Neill occasionally suggests the possibility of redemption from the past, as in Anna Christie (1921) and The Fountain (1925), but finds it increasingly difficult to do so, and his last plays are his most pessimistic.
As a character Nina Leeds suggests a figure who appears in other plays, the woman who is at once wife, mother, and lover. Nina resembles Cybele of The Great God Brown and Josie Hogan of A Moon for the Misbegotten (1947). She is the archetypal woman; she is daughter, adolescent hero worshiper, wife, mistress, and possessive mother. Each part of her being seeks expression and, frequently, gets in the way of the others, leading to much of the play’s bitter torment. However, while the feminine drives are located in one person, Nina finds it necessary to satisfy these urges with different men, which leads to conflict and bitterness. Nina summarizes the conflicting drives of the play when she speaks of “God the Mother,” an image of the life force, as opposed to God the Father, who is hard, arbitrary, moral.
Conflict and ambivalence appear at the very beginning of the play. Nina’s hero worship is vested in the aviator Gordon Shaw who, as a youthful ideal, appropriately does not appear. He is dead when the curtain rises. As daughter, Nina...
(This entire section contains 981 words.)
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lives with the genteel, withdrawn history professor Henry Leeds. Nina’s father and her hero have already been in conflict, the professor in his jealousy seeing to it that Gordon goes off to war without marrying Nina. The result is that, feeling cheated and guilty, Nina retreats into nymphomania. Her father moves through a series of emotions: fear of what Nina will do, contempt for himself, resignation. A third character who appears in act 1, Charles Marsden, who suffers from a mother fixation, loathes sex but feels alternately drawn to and repelled by Nina. O’Neill early establishes him as Nina’s father substitute. Thus both hero and (in the guise of Marsden) father accompany Nina through the play.
Expressing everything from hero worship to cynical depravity, Nina reacts again, exhibiting another necessary facet of a woman’s being: She seeks solace in a conventional family life with yet another man, Sam Evans. Pregnant, and briefly happy in her role as would-be mother, Nina reacts against her role as wife when she discovers that she cannot have her baby. Thus it is that she calls on Edmund Darrell, who makes her happy again and supplies her with a son but discovers that his relations with Nina interfere with his career. Each of the men in the play has his own problems, urges and needs, but each is drawn into Nina’s orbit as she seeks to fulfill herself.
At the end of part 1, Nina has her son, her husband, and her father-substitute, but loses her lover. Only at the beginning of part 2, and then briefly, is Nina fully in control of all her men, which gives her a momentary sense of wholeness. Quickly enough, the splintering, fragmentation, and tension resume. Ultimately, there is no escape for Nina except in the loss of her drives, yet these drives are her life. As she moves from stage to stage of her existence, nothing really changes for Nina, and nothing really changes in life—O’Neill insists—except those who play the roles. Nina finally discovers herself in her father’s position, playing the possessive parent just as her father did. After Evans dies, Darrell leaves, and Gordon flies off with his fiancé, Nina returns to her father in the guise of Marsden, who can provide her with a sexless, passionless haven.
