Photograph by Robert Day
Michael Thomson (Dick Miles) and Liz White (Heavenly Critchfield) in Spring Storm
Having come to South Bank for the past twenty years, leading classes of American university students in courses on Shakespeare at the Globe, I was shocked to encounter two rare examples of American drama at its finest at London’s National Theatre this summer. Within a single week in July, I attended productions of the Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon (1920) and one by one of St. Louis' own: Tennessee Williams’ Spring Storm (1937). Both these early works were staged by the same director, Laurie Sansom, and performed by an ensemble cast from the Royal & Derngate Theatre, Northhampton.
The O’Neill play is not frequently performed, although it was his first real success (his Glass Menagerie if you will), and won the playwright the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes. Spring Storm has an even more obscure history, and was only “discovered” in 1996 amongst his mother’s papers in the Tennessee Williams Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. It has never had a major production in the U.S., and this was its first performance abroad. Both plays were beautifully staged, and the productions reveal just how much of the later, more famous efforts of both writers is anticipated by these early efforts.
O’Neill might be the most successful writer in the world no producer dares produce. His stark, tragic vision (derived from the ancient Greeks), makes him virtually untouchable on Broadway today, unless buttressed by overwhelming star power. Even regional theatres with an eye on the bottom line dare not trust him. His greatest works, The Iceman Cometh and the supreme Long Day’s Journey into Night, are 4+ hours in performance; museum pieces which everyone venerates, but few dare undertake. Part of the problem is exacerbated by O’Neill’s own ponderousness, the self-conscious “heaviness” which enters into his works and was so brilliantly identified by Eric Bentley in the essay, “Trying to Like O’Neill.” Not so, Beyond the Horizon. It is O’Neill before he became “O’Neill”—the play is written with a chiseled economy which the playwright lost as he grew older and began to take himself (and his intellect) more seriously. Like much of his (and Williams’!) greatest work, Beyond the Horizon is profoundly autobiographical. It asks the question what might have happened to the young artist had he not abandoned his first wife and child and gone to sea (as O’Neill actually did). In Horizon, Robert, the O’Neill persona, is a sickly youth reminiscent of the dreamy Edmond in Long Day’s Journey. Like Edmond, he longs for the sea, and is discontented with the life he has been born into. Instead of following his passion, he stays home and marries his sweetheart Ruth. The rest of the play inexorably works out the tragic implications of this one great mistake. Robert becomes enmeshed in a lonely, miserable marriage, and they have a child who dies. Unfit for manual labor, Robert promptly runs the prosperous family farm he inherits into the ground. His brother Andrew, a born farmer who was also in love with Ruth (and hoped to marry her), takes his brother’s place and goes to sea. Although he becomes wealthy, it is clear that Andrew, like his younger brother, is dissatisfied with his lot. The power with which O’Neill dramatizes the choices which lead both brothers from harmony into tragedy and loss, has been magnificently realized in Sansom’s excellent production. The two brothers, one neurasthenic and frail, the other robust, are like two halves of a single divided consciousness. The young playwright (thirty when the play was written) conveys the inevitability of tragedy with an economy we scarcely see in later O’Neill.
Spring Storm was begun in 1937 when Thomas Lanier Williams was twenty-six—literally before he became Tennessee. Still an undergraduate at the University of Iowa, he was trying to finally complete his degree, and forget his recent debacle at Washington University, the school he left in disgrace in the spring of the same year. While clearly more of an apprentice work than Horizon, Spring Storm contains scenes of immense power, and reveals many, perhaps most, of the mature playwright’s pre-occupations and obsessions. Set in a small Mississippi town similar to the one Williams and his sister were born into, the play treats a mother who is concerned with her daughter’s approaching spinsterhood. Heavenly Critchfield is attracted to the young, sensual Dick Miles, and they have already consummated their relationship. However, her socially climbing mother disapproves of the match and has her eye on Arthur Shannon, a wealthy young man. Arthur is drawn toward Heavenly’s sexual frankness, yet also repulsed by it. In his portrait of Arthur’s sexual ambiguity, Williams creates a character study which is remarkably nuanced, and foreshadows many of the sexually tormented males of later plays, especially Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Arthur may want to possess Heavenly as proof of his heterosexuality, but he has a deeper, more authentic bond with another woman (Hertha). When he makes a drunken pass at the latter, unexpectedly revealing her deep feelings for him, he destroys her and drives her to suicide. Literally torn between these two women, Arthur is an amazing self-portrait of the early Williams, uncertain and tormented about his own sexual inclinations. Like Beyond the Horizon, Spring Storm avoids the heavy-handed symbolism which plagues some of the playwright’s later work. Although not as “finished” as the O’Neill, it reveals an artist fast approaching the height of his powers. While Arthur is clearly the most interesting character in Spring Storm, it is Heavenly who seems to be the ostensible focus of the playwright’s concern. This disjunction is probably the reason Williams left the play unpublished, and why it went unproduced for nearly seventy years.
These two early works offer remarkable glimpses into America’s two most important dramatists in their formative periods. They remind us not only that the so-called “immature” works of great artists offer fascinating light into later masterpieces, they reveal that early O’Neill and early Williams had a kind of energy and concision in their writing which, sadly, was sometimes absent in their later works.
Henry I. Schvey received his master’s degree in West European studies and his Ph.D. in comparative literature from Indiana University, and was chair of Washington University’s Performing Arts Department from 1987–2007. Prior to his arrival at Washington University, Schvey was professor of English and American literature at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and was founder and principal director of the Leiden English Speaking Theatre, a touring company dedicated to performing English-language plays with Dutch actors. At Washington University, Schvey teaches, directs, and writes. Widely recognized as a scholar, he has published extensively on modern American and European drama. His teaching encompasses a wide variety of periods, from ancient Greek to contemporary American and European drama, and he has directed more than 30 plays, most recently Metamorphoses at Edison Theatre. He founded the “Shakespeare’s Globe” program, an intensive, four-week undergraduate summer program in Shakespeare studies that made Washington University the first American university to establish formal ties with the newly rebuilt Globe Theatre in London. Schvey is also a playwright. Among his plays are an adaptation of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and Kokoschka: A Love Story, about Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka. He is married, with three grown children, of whom he is exceptionally proud.
