Eugene O’Neill’s Late Tragedy Shows Women Taking Revenge 

by Mary Lou Herlihy

I will never see Eugene O’Neill’s Tao House in quite the same light. The gorgeous setting with views of Mount Diablo will always bring a faint echo of “Shenandoah.” At the O’Neill Festival at Danville, his “Mourning Becomes Electra” (1931) presents the disturbed, vengeful Mannon family. In this late O’Neill play the family is consumed by vanity and destroyed by war, filling us with dread.

Inspired by Greek tragedies, O’Neill highlights the family’s post-Civil War revenge, as they pick at the fresh scars of War. O’Neill sprinkles a little Freud in the wound. The operatic results leave only the innocent Chorus of musical townsfolk unscathed.

The action unfolds as fathers and sons return from our Civil War to dangerous, conspiratorial homes. Like all wars, especially those that pit countrymen against each other, the Civil War left wives and husbands, sons and daughters dead, blasted, or unsteady. Love recoils under all that suffering.

Those lucky enough to return from the war, like the father General Ezra Mannon (earnest Josiah Polhemus) and brother Orin (convincing Hans Probst) haul home a trunk full of visible and hidden traumas. The war waits for them at home, too.

The ‘far away’ wars ALWAYS come home. O’Neill shatters our American illusions of civility in his account, written after WWI, after The Crash, and at the start of the Great Depression. The Mannons’ fury becomes EPIC, so that their grotesque bedlam borders on the comic.

We welcome a few moments of comic relief, but they pass quickly. The inebriated chantey man (mellifluous John Mannion) with his seafaring tunes and braggadocio, begs for employment on a ship. Turned away, he exits singing “Hanging Johnny,” another chilling note.

In three hour plus run-time, director Eric Fraisher Hayes finds small moments to highlight. When the murderous wife Christine (dynamic Cynthia  Lagodzinski) races to her young lover Brandt (fiery Woody Harper), we see Christine’s daughter Lavinia (masterful Adrian Deane) and Lavinia’s brother Orin, looking on from a hidden perch.

Lavinia holds her brother gently yet firmly. On Orin’s face, we see rage, jealousy, and betrayal in the visually rich scene. Lavinia exhibits her familiar stoicism.

As Lavinia, Deane consistently does the heavy lifting—and there is MUCH to be done. As the wronged daughter, Deane plumbs depths of despair, betrayal, anger, and transient joy. After returning from an island respite, her momentary transformation from stony to sparkling convinces us she’s changed. But the production loses steam as endless reversals crop up. The Mannons can never let go of their anger and conspiracies.

“Mourning Becomes Electra” is, after all, a story about women who wait for war to end. Mother and daughter, bitterly at odds, take charge of their lives and the lives of the men around them. They believe they can take control. But they cannot—they have signed up for the war, too—the inevitable war that lands at home.

A hypnotic, torturous play, “Mourning Becomes Electra” stands as O’Neill’s rambling warning about WAR and its aftermath. Beware of the wars that embrace us.

 

“Mourning Becomes Electra” by Eugene O’Neill, directed by Eric Fraisher Hayes, sound/music by Rob Evans, set design by Robert Bo Golden & Carlotta Monterey, costumes by Jeffrey Hamby, lighting by Jeffrey Beyer, at Tao House, Danville, California. Info: eugeneoneill.org – to September 29, 2024.

Cast: Heather Kellogg Baumann, David Boyll, Adrian Deane, Woody Harper, Cynthia Lagodzinski, John Mannion, Josiah Polhemus, Hans Probst, Brad Satterwhite, Megan Soledad, and Marsha van Broek.