Suffocated Souls

Desire Under the Elms, by Eugene O'Neill, seems, after 38 years, as familiar as inherited folklore. It is the mid-19th century New England saga of the flinty, greedy. God-bedeviled, lust-maddened Cabot clan and its internecine struggle over the family farm. To possess it. the sons wish their father dead, brother plots against brother, a young woman marries a fanatical old man, seduces his son to obtain an heir, and murders the infant to repossess the son's love. George C. Scott plays the fire-breathing old father Ephraim with monomaniacal force. As the woman, Colleen Dewhurst achieves a masterly transitional shading between feline will and wiles and the whole-souled vulnerability of love. Son Eben is played by Rip Torn, who unfortunately adopts a tone of flat understatement and clenched-nerves hysteria that tends to throw the play's passions off pitch.

Despite their best efforts, the actors seem to be playing with dramatic tire-works rather than setting the drama on fire. Part of the trouble is the arena stage: Desire's sense of puritanically suffocated beings seeps away on a wall-less stage, and, paradoxically, the movie-close-up intimacy of such a stage makes silence more dramatically potent than speech. The deepest flaw is O'Neill's failure to understand the essence of the Greek tragedies from which he borrowed. The Greek hero was a man trying to be god and failing, the tragedy of overweening pride. O'Neill's heroes indict god for failing to be god, or even to be; they suffer the pathos of grievance at man's inscrutable lot. By superimposing the events of the Greeks on the attitudes of moderns, O'Neill gives playgoers the sometimes heartrending spectacle of a man undone by numbing catastrophes, but never the elevating grandeur of a man so towering that he is struck down by jealous Fate.

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