The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1928-02-18

dCIOISs is JldL VI N XsSa SS.sSf#
the Vedas the sss
ascetic ideal-that N
life is terror and EasESs ~ u
trouble. and all the
healthy part of life Eugene - VEN
is but a Strange
interlude" between birth and life's
proper contamination, old age, and its
peaceful ashes, from which the fires
of passion and desire and ambition,
all of the self, shall have burned
themselves away-provided of course,
you are good and have sacrificed.
Like all asceticism, it is intensely
preoccupied with sex, and there is
more than an echo of Babylonian sac
red prostitution in the heroine's
promiscuity with disabled soldiers in
e. veterans bureau hospital, which
she practises as a sacrifice of herself
in punishment for not bearing a child
to her soldier betrothed before he got
himself killed.
The play is about an author with
q EIGuuldu ulOIIlSI 1lhdVloIl, q pIOACo-
sor with daughter fixation, father
of the promiscuous lady, Nina Leeds,
who herself is neurotic with an alb
normal desire to bear children, and
who is eventually persuaded by her
shocked friends to marry Sam Evans,
descendant, unknown to himself, of
a long line of insane ancestors.
The sane characters in the play
are Sans mother IA fine character,
played brilliantly by Helen Westley),
who confesses to Nina the faint on
the Evans family and persuades her
not to allow Sans child to be born
alive, and Edmund Darrell, q neurol-
ogist and biologist, whose life is
wrecked on the corners of the triangle
that results when he becomes the
father of Nina's eugenic baby (Which
they let Sam think is his in order to
keep him from going clean crazy).
Sam, incidentally, becomes a million
aire instead of a lunatic, or because
he is one, maybe.
Ol tl0 ldIeI dCLlUI wi H.
around the unusual affection of the
neurologist for his illegitimate child,
and the child's abnormal dislike for
his actual father, also Nina's plots to
keep her son from marrying a
shadowy and i'll defined parsonage, a
college flapper.
O'Neill's artistry proves itself in
his ability to keep this queer tumble
going for four and a half hours, I'M
til it just naturally fades away into
Nirvana, in a ninth-act that sends
chills up and down your back and
sends you home with a feeling of in
tense pessimism and world-weariness,
or maybe just WEAKNESS.
The length is due to O'Neill's
development of the "aside." AS
every one knows by now, the char
acters in "Strange Interlude" speak
their thoughts, as well as the con-
versation 1t is brilliant idea, es-
pecially in a psychological drama,
but darned hard on the actors, and
sometimes confusing to the audience.
Occasionally, when some business can
keep the other actors busy, the long
soliloouies sound reasonable. Dur
ing an animated conversation, though,
the pauses become rather awkward
for all except the person exposing
his thoughts. The tendency is for
everybody else on the stage to sit
with a metallic, frozen expression,
waiting until one of them shall have
finished thinking. Here we need a
new invention, some combination of
cinematograph and spoken DIANA,
some color organ device with sys-
tenn of previously explained symbols,
some monograph attachment which
can talk in different key, and SIM
ultaneously, or something like that.
All the acting is good Despite the
irving circumstances, Lynn Fontaine
gives strong and fearless i'm
personation Of the neurotic Nina.
Tom Powers might be signaled out
fe- his sympathetic and highly skill
full representation of the literary
old maid, Marsden. 1t is his human
handling of the anti-human philo-
sophy of the ninth act, where Mars
den inherits Nina after the lusts of
the flesh have wasted away and died,
that gives so much of the queemess
20 it.
Well, what about O'Neill. This play
is miles away from "The Hairy
Ape" though there is connection
for all of that. O'Neill is writing
now for a leisure class, and even if
the working class some day frees it.
self from drudgery, it will not make
the sort of leisure class he speabs