The National Black Drama Anthology: Eleven Plays from America's Leading African-American Theaters Book

This is a fine collection of O'Neill's early plays. Many are one act. Some are worth a quick pass by. Others may linger beyond their first reading, like The Rope did for me with its dark comic irony, or Ile with its creeping despair. Most of the one acts deal with themes of sailoring and life lived on the sea. O'Neill drew from his own personal seafaring experiences. The theme of being a manly man with the freedom to satisfy cravings of wanderlust through struggle with the merciless sea usually gets a Nietzschean tinge from most commentators. Quite frankly, what stood out for me as being even more Nietzschean was the heroic solitude many of O'Neil's characters are forced to endure, or break apart accordingly. Beyond the Horizon, perhaps the best play of the bunch, is about chosen solitude against one's dreams endured until culminating in ultimate tragedy. The longer plays display the young O'Neill at his most developed and innovative. The Emperor Jones reads awkwardly today, to say the least, for its racism, but taken in its historic period for what it is one can admire its innovative features. Magical realism clearly finds its origins in this peculiar and unsettling play. This collection finishes with the disturbing protest play, The Hairy Ape. Yank is the most tragic of solitary figures: one who imagines he fits in, when in fact he doesn't. Merely used and discarded without thought or care by the world he once foolishly imagined he owned, in the end not even rude nature, much less human society, offers him any relief of bonhomie or a kind turn. As you read through this collection, you can feel O'Neil develop his social conscience as a writer as he moves away from the struggles of solitary figures and begins to engage in larger, more important questions. One needs, however, to open O'Neill with an ample resource of good humor. By the time you close him, you'll be drawing on that resource, to be sure.