Haunted House

ALL GOD'S CHILLUN GOT WINGS by EUGENE O'NEILL

T.S. Eliot once wrote a review of the printed text of All God's Chillun Got Wings. He observed, "Mr. O'Neill not only understands one aspect of the 'Negro problem,' but he succeeds in giving this problem universality--in implying, in fact, the universal problem of differences which create a mixture of admiration, love and contempt, with the consequent tension."

The trouble with the revival at Manhattan's Circle in the Square/Joseph E. Levine Theater is that it lacks that larger tension. One suspects that the drama has been revived for its presumed topicality and that the audience is supposed to generate strong emotions that scarcely exist in O'Neill's dead-battery prose.

Jim (Robert Christian), a black, and Ella (Trish Van Devere), a white, had been childhood playmates. Growing up, she marries a boxer who deserts her. Despite her aversion to blacks, Ella then marries Jim. However, the stress of social ostracism drives her insane, and she prays for Jim to flunk his bar exams, which he does. With his dream shattered, Jim reverts to a kind of devoted slave to a spectral child bride.

In giving Jim and Ella his real parents' names, O'Neill clearly showed that he felt a parallel to his mother's drug addiction and its role in stunting his father's capacity to become a great actor. Blacks, in this play, are not so much a race as a symbol for what O'Neill's mother regarded as the dark, tormenting world of the stage.

Van Devere is not ready to project that torment, and Christian fares no better. Nor has Director George C. Scott, Van Devere's husband, been able to elicit from the rest of the cast that sense of transcendence through suffering by which alone O'Neill's lesser texts can be salvaged.

qed T.E. Kalem

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