Greek Tragedy under the Elms

Once you know that Eugene O'Neill wrote "Desire under the Elms" as a kind of updating of Greek tragedy, it's not hard to figure out which one he used for his starting point. The Phaedra story - a heartwarming tale of quasi-incest and gruesome death - provides the backbone for the plot of "Desire under the Elms." Within that story, the changes that O'Neill makes are crucial. First and foremost, Eben returns Abbie's love. The fact that it's ultimately depicted as love, and not lust, between the two of them is another crucial change - in the myth, Phaedra wildly desires Hippolytus, but different versions have different opinions on whether or not it's also love that she feels. O'Neill adds a child (Phaedra's children barely figure in the myth), and Abbie's murder of that child is comparable to Phaedra's destruction of her reputation in a similarly misguided attempt to win Hippolytus' love. And Cabot, with his unbending harshness and desperate need to be understood, is far more compelling than Theseus, who in the myth comes off as a bit of an idiot for not realizing sooner that his wife wanted to sleep with his son.

But there are, of course, some similarities. Here are two photos. The first is from a production of Jean Racine's "Phedre," which directly dramatizes the myth. The second is from a production of "Desire under the Elms."





The Phaedra-Hippolytus relationship ends much more catastrophically than the Abbie-Eben relationship - both the mythological characters die, she by poison, he by being trampled in his own runaway chariot. And, crucially, Hippolytus never feels anything for Phaedra but dislike or revulsion; Eben feels the same at first, but his feelings change over the course of the play. But the physical situations in these pictures are strikingly similar, despite the plot differences. The trapped woman who still exerts sexual influence, the young man unable to take definite action without her prompting, the intense physicality of the scenes, and the danger of giving in to those physical impulses that drive the relationships - these are constants of both plays, and come across equally strongly in these pictures.

And how about the woman and her husband? Cabot is very much Abbie's senior - part of her dilemma stems from the fact that he's probably not going to get her pregnant. In the myth, on the other hand, there's no reason to believe that Theseus is vastly older than Phaedra - after all, he was once engaged to her sister Ariadne. Here's a photograph (from the same production of "Desire") of Cabot and Abbie:



And here's a photograph of Phaedra and Theseus from a "Phaedra" production:



Eerily similar! A notably older man, a younger (if not "young") wife who can't hide her disgust - DESPITE the reason that in "Phaedra," there's no textual need to make Theseus this old. O'Neill was on to something with the age difference between Cabot and Abbie - not only does it help to explain Abbie's attraction to Eben, but it widens the gap between Abbie and Cabot to a chasm that cannot be crossed.

There's more going on here than an adapted story. O'Neill fixed on the heart of the characters' relationships. Because they translate so effortlessly from Greek tragedy to 20th-century drama, they end up feeling timeless - disturbingly so, since not a single relationship escapes havoc and chaos and heartbreak. But then again, what else is tragedy about?

Death of a (Semi)Certainty

If someone put a gun to my head and made me give a definite opinion on what style of play "Death of a Salesman" is, I would probably say it was realistic. The characters are recognizable as people from our own world; they speak like we speak, they fear and love and hate like we do. You don't get a resolution that turns on insurance money in "Six Characters in Search of an Author."

But then you've got a character like Ben. And this is why, in order to make me give a definite opinion on what kind of play this is, you would have to put a gun to my head. Ben's presence keeps the play from being firmly realistic, in the way that "A Doll's House" is realistic; instead it throws us headlong into Willy's mind, into the ways that Willy sees the world. Ben skews perception and time - whenever he appears, he triggers some kind of flashback for Willy (although some are more full-fledged than others). Ben's in the play partly so that we understand Willy - so that we're with him, and not Charley or Biff or even Linda, when he can't hold on to reality. But he's also there to throw us off-kilter, to put us on edge, to make us aware that Willy's world of dreams is NOT reality, and that Willy's mistake is in treating it like it is real.

Admittedly, this sort of thing is easier to do onscreen than onstage. Here's a series of clips from the 1985 made-for-TV "Death of a Salesman," with Dustin Hoffman as Willy and Louis Zorich as Ben.



The quick cuts, the pastel colors in the flashbacks, the uses of camera angles to remind us that Ben is not in fact present in any physical sense - it gets the point across that we are in Willy's head, that this is how he sees the world. And that he does not, cannot, differentiate between what he dreams and what is actually there.

Here's this, too. Not a clip of a staged performance, alas, but close - a set of stills FROM a staged performance, in order from the start of the play to the end.



They're some lovely stills, and it's well worth looking at them all, but here are the ones with Ben: 1:05-1:15, 2:13, 4:00. Every time he appears, there's a dramatic shift in the lighting. He's dressed in white, which stands out better than neon. And it's interesting to see him invading the space of the stage, in a way that he can't in a filmed version - a presence without being a reality, since no one but Willy acknowledges him.

And since Ben embodies the American dream, at least for Willy, what are we to make of the fact that his existence in the world of the play is profoundly disturbing? Every time he appears, Willy gets even more unable to cope with the real world - in fact, his appearances always happen at moments when Willy NEEDS to grasp what's actually going on, moments when Ben's presence and influence is a real detriment. The unreality he offers Willy is beautiful, yearned for, and ultimately destructive. Miller's not just critiquing the American dream - through Ben, and Willy's interactions with Ben, he's actively condemning it as a negative influence on the entire country. We're MEANT to find Ben disturbing - we're meant to become aware of our own Bens, our own imaginative constructs that we cling to, that do us more harm than good. And while there's certainly a kind of metareality in that idea, Miller can't convey it except through the unrealistic device of a phantom character. If Ben is the American dream, his hovering presence over the play is truly ominous, and absolutely necessary to the drama.

So which is it - a realistic or unrealistic play? Please put the gun down, I really can't decide.