(See front cover)
Solely to amuse themselves, a group of friends at Provincetown, Mass., 16 summers ago, went over to Hutchins Hapgood's verandah and put on a couple of plays. Susan Glaspell was there; so were George Cram ("Jig") Cook, rebel John Reed, Mary Heaton Vorse. Robert Edmond Jones, a young man of talent and resource, fashioned scenery out of porch furniture, odds-&-ends. The Almighty supplied the backdrop, a tumbling ocean. Next year the play-acting fad persisted. Mary Vorse turned over a shack on her wharf to the enterprise and someone named Eugene Gladstone O'Neill, a lank, bushy-headed fellow with no money but "a trunkful of plays," contributed to the second bill a one-acter called Bound East For Cardiff. Sick with stage fright, "Gene" O'Neill spoke a few lines as the mate. Lending a particularly happy atmospheric effect, under the feet of an audience of 30 lapped the restless sea.
At four p.m. one afternoon last week, a crowd of people who were not quite sure how to dress for the occasion bustled into the neo-Andalusian splendor of Manhattan's Guild Theatre. They, too, were going to see an O'Neill play—an important one backed by the resources of the world's most ambitious experimental theatre, performed by great Actresses Alice Brady and Alla Nazimova, the work of a mature genius of 43.
The Play, Mourning Becomes Electra, had been in the mind of many a theatregoer for over a year. Rumor about it had been rife. It would be three independent pieces. It would take three days to see it. Each unit would run a week and it would take three weeks to see it. Not until ten days before production was the matter definitely cleared: the trilogy would run continuously with an hour's intermission for dinner, would last five hours. One wag remarked, "We won't go home until Mourning Becomes Electra." Admission: $2-$6.
When coats were stowed under seats, house lights extinguished, the audience was shown the exterior of a large New England home, a portico of deathly paleness only partially masking the building's sepulchral grey face. Here dwell the Mannons. With swift, sure strokes a long story is told.