“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, May 25, 1922, Brook Farm, 845 North Salem Road, Ridgefield, Connecticut

Just a few days ago, Irish-American playwright Eugene O’Neill, 33, was awarded his second Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for Anna Christie which premiered last year. His first Pulitzer was for his first full-length play staged on Broadway, Beyond the Horizon, back in 1920. In addition to the awards, both plays received good reviews from the New York Times drama critic, Alexander Woollcott, 35, who told theatregoers that Anna Christie is

a singularly engrossing play…[that you] really ought to see.”

Other critics agreed.

Pauline Lord in Anna Christie

His most recent, The Hairy Ape, started out with his Greenwich Village theatre troupe The Provincetown Players, but has just been transferred to the Plymouth Theater on Broadway. With the playwright’s name in lights on the marquee, instead of any actors’ names. Quite a tribute.

Although Woollcott likes the Hairy Ape as well, calling it “vital and interesting and teeming with life,” the New York Police Department has deemed the play “obscene, indecent, impure.” Because of its themes of working class rebellion, the mayor wants to shut it down to avoid labor riots. Really.

His success has enabled O’Neill and his wife, English writer Agnes Boulton, 28, and their son Shane, 3, to move to this 31-acre Connecticut country house, with a library, a sun-room, four master bedrooms and servants’ quarters. As well as an Irish wolfhound Eugene has named Finn MacCool.

Eugene O’Neill with his dog and his farm  

He is also $40,000 in debt.

Today he is writing to a friend,

Yes, I seem to be becoming the [Pulitzer] Prize Pup of Playwrights—the Hot Dog of the Drama. When the Police Department isn’t pinning the Obscenity Medal on my Hairy Ape chest, why, then it’s Columbia [University] adorning the brazen bosom of Anna with the Cross of Purity. I begin to feel that there is either something all wrong with me or something all right…’It’s a mad world, my masters.’”

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I and II covering 1920 and 1921 are available as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, and also in print and e-book formats on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

Next month I will be talking about the Stein family salons in Paris before and after The Great War at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Carnegie-Mellon University.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, March 10, 1922, New York City, New York

Last night New York Times drama critic Alexander Woollcott, 35, saw the premier of The Hairy Ape by Eugene O’Neill, 33, at the Provincetown Playhouse on McDougal Street in Greenwich Village, and his review runs in the paper today:

Provincetown Playhouse, Greenwich Village

A bitter, brutal, wildly fantastic play of nightmare hue and nightmare distortion…[The auditorium was] packed to the doors with astonishment…as scene after scene unfolded…[Although the script was] uneven, it seems rather absurd to fret overmuch about the undisciplined imagination of a young playwright towering so conspicuously above the milling mumbling crowd of playwrights who have no imagination at all…A turbulent and tremendous play, so full of blemishes that the merest fledgling among the critics could point out a dozen, yet so vital and interesting and teeming with life that those playgoers who let it escape them will be missing one of the real events of the year.”

O’Neill is already established as a playwright, with two Pulitzer Prizes under his belt—for Beyond the Horizon and Anna Christie. And his play The First Man just opened a few days ago at The Neighborhood Playhouse in Midtown. When the company, which O’Neill has been associated with for the past five years or so, did its first reading of The Hairy Ape, he proudly proclaimed,

This is one the bastards [uptown on Broadway] can’t do!”

Last night the auditorium was packed and the audience enthusiastic. The lead actor, Louis Wolheim, almost 42, got a standing ovation, and there were cries of “Author!”

But O’Neill wasn’t in the theatre.

The Hairy Ape

His mother had died while on a trip to the West Coast about a week ago, from a brain tumor at the age of 64. The opening night of The Hairy Ape coincided with the arrival of her body at Grand Central Station. A friend went looking for O’Neill to bring the good news of the play’s success. But the hit author was too depressed to be interested.

The two friends spent the night walking around Central Park.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I and II covering 1920 and 1921 are available as signed copies at Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA, and also in print and e-book formats on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.

In June I will be talking about the Stein family salons in the Osher Lifelong Learning program at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.