Hairy Ape Part 1

This is part one of a two part article on Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape. If you have already read this part, please also read part two. And, as always, let me know what you think ( blackstock@suite101.com )

          In the absence of an omnipresent deity, modern tragedy and our fight against fate-what used to be man's desire versus the will of the gods-now pits heroes against their heredity and environment. While we have abandoned some of the principles of modernism, this struggle against both nature and nurture remains elemental in many contemporary plays.

          This point may seem too obvious to discuss unless the works that do not follow the trend are mentioned. First, most classic and classical plays pit man against his decisions (King Lear) or against the gods (The Bacchae). In contemporary plays, David Mamet, one of our best writers, pits man against environment but believes that heredity should not factor into characterization. Furthermore, we have a number of expressionist writers, of whom David Ives comes most readily to mind, whose characters have no heredity and have little environment against which to struggle. These samples certainly do not exemplify something done wrong but are mentioned only as varieties different from the struggle I wish to discuss below. On the other hand, some contemporary writers, such as Dael Orlandersmith, create a tighter conflict against heredity and environment than many of the original modernists did.

          Of those earlier modernists and, more importantly, their work, Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape provides not only a quintessence of this fight against heredity and environment but also an ideal format for our immediate art and the modern use of chorus.

          This play, rather than starting with a great opening line, begins with the rising evolution of sounds. As O'Neill's describes it, "The room is filled with men, shouting cursing, laughing, singing-a confused, inchoate uproar swelling into a sort of unity, a meaning-the bewildered, furious baffled defiance if a beast in a cage." Not unlike the primordial rising of life from whatever it came from to the formation of whatever we are now, the sounds evolve from the "inchoate" to "a sort of unity, a meaning." The chorus, specifically called "Voices," begins the play with the garble of phrases that, even in their incomprehensibility, present characterization and introduce the dialect so that the Yank's first lines are free from having to set up the mood, tone, and general characterization. This freedom from exposition also allows Yank more power when his first lines are delivered. At rise, the Voices are the shipmates, but they will later be the people of New York and the jail mates. You may also notice that no more than three named characters appear onstage along with the chorus, a structure that would have also been presented on the Euripidean stage.

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