O'Neill's Last Long Remnant

More Stately Mansions. Watching a Eugene O'Neill play fail is sometimes as awesome as seeing the Titanic sink. More Stately Mansions, however, is more like a becalmed Flying Dutchman on which trapped passengers spend three hours torturing one another and ranting about their fate. On the spacious stage of Los Angeles' elegant Ahmanson Theater, site of the play's U.S. premiere last week, Mansions stays within hailing distance of the playgoer's interest, but it never gets heartbeat close.

The play would have been the fourth in O'Neill's aborted nine-play cycle, A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed, an epic intended to span two centuries of U.S. life in one family's history. Mansions begins where A Touch of the Poet leaves off, in the Massachusetts of the 1830s. The hero of the earlier play, a swaggering, staggering Irish tavern keeper named Con Melody, has just died, having spent most of his life in brash discord with the Yankee landowning gentry. But before he dies, Con has a vision of personal revenge and future glory for his daughter Sara: "She'll live in a Yankee mansion, as big as a castle, on a grand estate of stately woodland."

In More Stately Mansions, the dream comes true, but it turns out to be more like a nightmare. A suffocating drama of deadly possessiveness is played out among a mother (Ingrid Bergman), a wife (Colleen Dewhurst) and a son-husband (Arthur Hill). This is a Laocoon trio, coiled in a strangling embrace in which no one can leave the others, or leave them alone. The face of love is blistered with hate, and ecstasy mirrors anguish. The language of the heart is used to mask the power politics of the emotions, and love becomes war. The terms: unconditional surrender of the others' selves.

In this war of the sexes, Deborah Harford, the mother, is a neurotic daydreamer who cannot yield her son Simon to another woman. A fretful, aging charmer, her hidden impulse is as sin-deep as incest. Using spider-and-fly tactics, Deborah invites Simon to take over the tangled web of his dead father's business and installs Daughter-in-Law Sara as mistress of the Harford mansion. Simon, an erstwhile poet turned gimlet-eyed merchant, agrees--if he can absorb the entire firm and expunge his father's name. Deeper shades of Oedipus. In the end, mother goes mad; Simon and Sara's doom seems to await another play. The collegiate aphorist in O'Neill has sententiously announced: "Success is its own failure."

The central failure of the play is a credibility gap between the audience and the characters. One believes in neither their shenanigans nor their sufferings. The actors do not close the gap. Ingrid Bergman is beguilingly lovely at 52, but she poses, more often than she performs, for a camera that is not there. Colleen Dewhurst puts consistent bristle, greed and spunk into Sara, bul cajolery does not seem to be her brand of brogue. Since quite a bit of O'Neill's dialogue is melodramatic, maudlin or mushy, Arthur Hill does little more than tread gingerly on his lines, as if they were booby-trapped.

Faced with O'Neill's rhetorical soliloquies and the awkward device of having characters utter their unspoken thoughts, Director Jose Quintero apparently folded his hands in slothful reverence. When it came to cutting the script by three hours, however, he became indiscriminately agile, severing vital tendons of continuity, meaning, mood and theme. O'Neill had specified that the play be destroyed if he could not revise it, and after a fashion, Quintero has obliged. What remains is a remnant of O'Neill's melancholy conviction that hell hath no fury quite like a human family.

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