Unmasking Electra

Last night, I attended a virtual talk on Eugene O'Neill's trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra by the mother-daughter team of Carole and Beth Wynstra.

Beth, who is an associate professor at Babson College, noted that her mother Carole, the co-president of the Eugene O'Neill Foundation Board, is a much better parent than the character of Christine in the play. Carole said that's a pretty low bar, being that Christine is an adulterous and murderous fiend.

Masks come up frequently in the play, including in the stage directions. Not only were masks used by actors in ancient Greece, but O'Neill originally intended the play to be performed masked, as was his earlier play The Great God Brown when it premiered in 1926. Later, O'Neill decided to discard the mask idea, and when Mourning Becomes Electra premiered in 1931, it was performed unmasked.

O'Neill based the work on another trilogy, The Oresteia by Aeschylus. However, the story of Electra was also told by other Greek dramatists. Both Wynstras agreed that the version by Sophocles is probably the best. Euripides also wrote a play called Electra, though, which goes a little off the rails in spots. In his version of the story, Electra is forced to marry a peasant, but is later rescued by her brother Orestes and his friend Pylades.

In O'Neill's telling of the story, that doesn't happen, but there's still plenty of room for other varieties of familial dysfunction. As the Mannon family tears itself apart, the action is commented upon by the community. In Greek plays, this would have been done by the chorus. While O'Neill did not introduce a chorus per se, he did provide the character of Seth to provide a choral element, along with several minor characters. Carole noted that the singing of the song "Shenandoah" also adds to the feel of a chorus.

Beth pointed out that the actress who originally played Christine, the Clytemnestra figure in O'Neill's work, also appeared in soap advertisements at the same time as she was featured in the play on Broadway. The actress, Alla Nazimova, seemed to be playing with her own image, both on and off stage, emphasizing her own good looks even as she acknowledged that she was an older woman. Nazimova, by the way, went on to perform other important roles on Broadway, including the Priestess in Bernard Shaw's The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles.

The Electra-like role of Lavinia was originally played on Broadway by Alice Brady, who later performed in numerous Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. Apparently, she and Nazimova did not get along. (Neither did their characters, as Lavinia plans her own mother's murder.) Carole mentioned that there was also a film made in 1947 with Rosalind Russell as Lavinia.

Next month, the play is scheduled to run at the Eugene O'Neill Festival in Danville, California. Tickets are already sold out, though, so you'll have to settle for the movie, or perhaps reading the play.