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Drunk Boy vs. Eugene O'Neill | page 1, 2
"What were you doing that made him come
up to you?" she asked. "Oh, causing trouble. Laughing at the
wrong times. Having too much fun." Cintra Wilson Cintra Wilson's column appears every other Thursday in People + Archives
"Here's your gin and tonic." Back in the theater, after a few more pages of dialogue, the moment is deadly serious; the whole audience is holding its breath. Jamie is quietly weeping on Josie's lap about his terrible sins, and Josie the Virgin of Rural Connecticut is redeeming him, and they're both having a Catholic epiphany in the moonlight, and right when you could hear a pin drop in the velvety, dark-golden womb of the theater, there was a choking sound that came from the back of the orchestra section. It was Drunk Boy, violent kid, and he was laughing, loudly and derisively, a sputtering, insulting laugh that was aimed at the stage and the whole audience. It was truly shocking; a public unraveling, a person announcing that he was fucked up to the level of police intervention. The trance of the play popped like a balloon. At that moment (and I've felt that moment before, in audiences, when a member of the audience explodes) everyone's hair stiffened on their necks because they knew the drunk young bastard had no social boundaries holding him together and was capable of anything. Nobody would have been surprised if he'd gotten up and started randomly executing people. People half expected it, I think, such is the commonness of morally retarded wackos with guns. In any case, the play had a big hole in it and was sputtering out into space, and the crazy fucker got dragged into the lobby and was yelling behind the big, thick doors. Only super-unflappable pros like Byrne and Jones could possibly have kept going at full gallop -- lassoed, captured and swung the attention of the frazzled audience back to themselves -- and they did. That was quite impressive, a great save on par with any seen on the Wide World of Sports. But back to the play. In retrospect, if I were a terrible drunk asshole, I might have started guffawing at that point, too. After the big moonlight redemption scene, where Josie's love heals all of Jamie's sins and forgives him on behalf of his dead mother, Jim wakes up and it's a new morning; he feels fresh and alive. But do they live happily ever after? Noooooo. Do they even attempt to pursue health, wealth, happiness and hope? Nooooooo. Josie speaks to her father of the "great miracle" that occurred during the night: "A virgin who bears a dead child in the night, and the dawn finds her still a virgin. If that isn't a miracle, what is?" The idea being that Jamie is so habitually drunk, guilt-ridden, bitter and set in his rotten ways that he is already actually dead -- totally unsalvageable -- and even Josie's great, simple matronly love can't save him. This is contrary to the logic of humanity, contrary to any human heart. It's enough to make you want to chew up your program and spit it at the stage. The last line of the play is the worst. Jamie walks away into the sunrise after they both gush how much they truly love each other, and Josie stares into the light and says, "May you have your wish and die in your sleep soon, Jim. May you rest forever in forgiveness and peace." Die in his fucking sleep? Didn't she just spend the whole night resurrecting him? What is this ridiculous hopelessness, where a vital young man walking around under his own power with a heart full of love is sent off to die in his goddamned sleep? Maybe it's just a thing of the past; maybe in O'Neill's day, willfully unhappy people like old Eugene's brother Jamie were tolerated and even romanticized. Nowadays, a drunk like that would be peer-pressured into AA, given intense, excoriating batches of psychotherapy, tough love and antidepressants, and not indulged in the boozy pity patch he keeps crawling into. He'd be kicked around and nobody would hang out with him anymore until he got sober, and he would clean up in a mildly shamefaced manner, and life would go on. Why would we tolerate the end of this play, if we won't tolerate the snickering, drunk MTV bitch having a meltdown in the back row? Why romanticize any form of egomaniacal self-destruction, in any decade? If we lived in Eugene's world, we'd be shooting people for broken legs. O'Neill tries to portray his brother as somehow noble for totally giving up and drinking himself to death, but any Oprah-watcher knows it's much more difficult and heroic to get your shit together and claim happiness for yourself, especially when True Love is aiming both barrels down your throat. There is no excuse for this play. I say
Eugene O'Neill is a pathetic sot, and "A
Moon for the Misbegotten" should be
interred with the rest of the bad habits
of the early 20th century, like
unnecessary hysterectomies and
segregated drinking fountains. Selah.
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