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Overview
Interesting! A less than favorable comment of Eugene O'Neill's play, The Fountain from "Drama Magazine" - May, 1926:
"The most important theatrical event of the month was the long-awaited production of The Fountain, the Eugene O'Neill play that was written four years ago and announced on several occasions by various managers. It ran just two weeks at the Greenwich Village Theatre, and was pretty generally condemned by the press and the small part of the public that went to see it. The production, directed by Robert Edmond Jones, who also furnished the lovely settings and costumes, was somehow not up to the play. This, however, is not entirely Mr. Jones fault. To begin with, The Fountain requires acting of a kind that is practically non-existent in this country. The Comedie Francaise could perhaps furnish two or three players, and the Moscow Art Theatre almost a whole cast competent to carry through the difficult roles written by Mr. O'Neill. Style there must be, and a certain mixture of tradition and untrammeled ecstasy. Then there were the long waits between scenes that Americans still stand for. These only served to accentuate the slowness of the performance. The manuscript is surprisingly short, and in reading it I saw far more clearly what the author intended. Where the poet passes lightly from scene to scene, the producer pauses with heavy emphasis. I have seen Macbeth performed only once in a wholly satisfactory manner; that was in Germany where the curtain fell but twice, and the entire acting time was something under two hours. By the time the O'Neill play began to move toward its exquisite culmination, the audience didn't care what happened.
" The Fountain-which is cast in the conventional romantic form of Cyrano-came as a surprise to the public, which has never yet realized that O'Neill is, and has from the beginning always been, an idealist and a poet. It is concerned with the almost whollyimaginary story of the quest of the Fountain of Youth by Juan Ponce de Leon, and his ultimate realization that such quests as his are and must be doomed to failure when rationally or materialistically conceived, but become shining and glorious events when identified with the quest for life, love and beauty. "One must accept, absorb, give back, become oneself a symbol... Juan Ponce de Leon is past! He is resolved into the thousand moods of beauty that make up happiness-color of that sunset, of tomorrow's dawn, breath of the great Trade Wind-sunlight on the grass, an insect's song, the rustle of leaves, an ant's ambitions. I shall know eternal becoming-eternal youth!" says Juan.
" The Fountain is a dramatic poem of exaltation-the reflection of the poet's never-ending aspiration toward life, love and beauty. Except for the form, which with O'Neill is always changing, this play is fundamentally a logical development of the art of the same man who wrote The Moon of the Caribbees and The Hairy Ape. O'Neill has never been simply a naturalist. It is therefore the more amusing to read his note on the program, the last sentence of which should silence those who declare the man to be devoid of a sense of humor. He says, "Therefore, I wish to take solemn oath right here and now, that The Fountain is not morbid realism." As if he had ever been a morbid realist!
"In spite of its conception, and in spite of the beauty of individual scenes, The Fountain is not wholly successful as a work of art. I feel that O'Neill, as always, is seeking a new means of expression, in this case a rather conventional romantic form that is not familiar to him. Of course, he knows the form, but I suspect he disdains it. In The Fountain he went to great pains to do the job as neatly as possible. While the conception was sincere (could it be otherwise with him?) the technical means employed were not wholly so. To be successful a play of this type must be written a little naïvely: it must master the poet. The trouble here is that the poet knew his form so well that he mastered it. Then there is the matter of language. There are scenes toward the end of the play that cry aloud not for fine writing or mere literature but for poetry. I mean formal verse. The poetic urge, the heat of the poet's passion, seems to burst the bonds of the prose good as it is-and demand the formal freedom of inspired verse.
"But in the final analysis I prefer such plays as this in book form. There is too much left to the mechanics of the theatre and to the individual temperaments of human actors.
"What I wrote last month about experimental productions and the Provincetown Players I reiterate this month with added force. The high cost of experiment in the theatre today makes it impossible for any but a wealthy manager to put on plays that have little chance of a box-office success; and such men are not the kind to go tinkering with the fool manuscripts of unknown playwrights." --Barrett H. Clark
"The most important theatrical event of the month was the long-awaited production of The Fountain, the Eugene O'Neill play that was written four years ago and announced on several occasions by various managers. It ran just two weeks at the Greenwich Village Theatre, and was pretty generally condemned by the press and the small part of the public that went to see it. The production, directed by Robert Edmond Jones, who also furnished the lovely settings and costumes, was somehow not up to the play. This, however, is not entirely Mr. Jones fault. To begin with, The Fountain requires acting of a kind that is practically non-existent in this country. The Comedie Francaise could perhaps furnish two or three players, and the Moscow Art Theatre almost a whole cast competent to carry through the difficult roles written by Mr. O'Neill. Style there must be, and a certain mixture of tradition and untrammeled ecstasy. Then there were the long waits between scenes that Americans still stand for. These only served to accentuate the slowness of the performance. The manuscript is surprisingly short, and in reading it I saw far more clearly what the author intended. Where the poet passes lightly from scene to scene, the producer pauses with heavy emphasis. I have seen Macbeth performed only once in a wholly satisfactory manner; that was in Germany where the curtain fell but twice, and the entire acting time was something under two hours. By the time the O'Neill play began to move toward its exquisite culmination, the audience didn't care what happened.
" The Fountain-which is cast in the conventional romantic form of Cyrano-came as a surprise to the public, which has never yet realized that O'Neill is, and has from the beginning always been, an idealist and a poet. It is concerned with the almost whollyimaginary story of the quest of the Fountain of Youth by Juan Ponce de Leon, and his ultimate realization that such quests as his are and must be doomed to failure when rationally or materialistically conceived, but become shining and glorious events when identified with the quest for life, love and beauty. "One must accept, absorb, give back, become oneself a symbol... Juan Ponce de Leon is past! He is resolved into the thousand moods of beauty that make up happiness-color of that sunset, of tomorrow's dawn, breath of the great Trade Wind-sunlight on the grass, an insect's song, the rustle of leaves, an ant's ambitions. I shall know eternal becoming-eternal youth!" says Juan.
" The Fountain is a dramatic poem of exaltation-the reflection of the poet's never-ending aspiration toward life, love and beauty. Except for the form, which with O'Neill is always changing, this play is fundamentally a logical development of the art of the same man who wrote The Moon of the Caribbees and The Hairy Ape. O'Neill has never been simply a naturalist. It is therefore the more amusing to read his note on the program, the last sentence of which should silence those who declare the man to be devoid of a sense of humor. He says, "Therefore, I wish to take solemn oath right here and now, that The Fountain is not morbid realism." As if he had ever been a morbid realist!
"In spite of its conception, and in spite of the beauty of individual scenes, The Fountain is not wholly successful as a work of art. I feel that O'Neill, as always, is seeking a new means of expression, in this case a rather conventional romantic form that is not familiar to him. Of course, he knows the form, but I suspect he disdains it. In The Fountain he went to great pains to do the job as neatly as possible. While the conception was sincere (could it be otherwise with him?) the technical means employed were not wholly so. To be successful a play of this type must be written a little naïvely: it must master the poet. The trouble here is that the poet knew his form so well that he mastered it. Then there is the matter of language. There are scenes toward the end of the play that cry aloud not for fine writing or mere literature but for poetry. I mean formal verse. The poetic urge, the heat of the poet's passion, seems to burst the bonds of the prose good as it is-and demand the formal freedom of inspired verse.
"But in the final analysis I prefer such plays as this in book form. There is too much left to the mechanics of the theatre and to the individual temperaments of human actors.
"What I wrote last month about experimental productions and the Provincetown Players I reiterate this month with added force. The high cost of experiment in the theatre today makes it impossible for any but a wealthy manager to put on plays that have little chance of a box-office success; and such men are not the kind to go tinkering with the fool manuscripts of unknown playwrights." --Barrett H. Clark
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940186586647 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthony Bly |
| Publication date: | 12/19/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 676 KB |
About the Author
Eugene O'Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the U.S. the drama techniques of realism, earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. The tragedy "Long Day's Journey into Night" is often included on lists of the finest U.S. plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams's "A Streetcar Named Desire" and Arthur
Miller's "Death of a Salesman."
O'Neill's plays were among the first to include speeches in American English vernacular and involve characters on the fringes of society. They struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations, but ultimately slide into disillusion and despair. Of his very few comedies, only one is well-known (Ah, Wilderness!). Nearly all of his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism.
Miller's "Death of a Salesman."
O'Neill's plays were among the first to include speeches in American English vernacular and involve characters on the fringes of society. They struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations, but ultimately slide into disillusion and despair. Of his very few comedies, only one is well-known (Ah, Wilderness!). Nearly all of his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism.
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