Eugene O’Neill. Strange Interlude. O’Neill: Complete Plays 1920-1931. New York: Library of America, 1988. Print.

Some consider Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude one of his best works. After all, it won a Pulitzer Prize. Others consider it one of his magnificent flops—hard to produce and tough for an audience to take. Let me tell you, it truly does show O’Neill’s characterization and storytelling comparable to his best works.

The play is long. It is like reading a short novel. When produced, Strange Interlude took about 6 or 7 hours, so productions would take an intermission for dinner. I remember in the sixties a film version of War and Peace did something similar. The tricky part—actually easy enough to read—is that half the play is asides to the audience. Shakespeare has asides and soliloquies. Now imagine more than half the lines as asides. We know what the characters are really thinking as well as what they are saying.

The story focuses on four characters over a period of about twenty-five years. The beautiful and charming coed Nina is in mourning over Gordon, her fiancé who is killed in the Great War. Gordon was a handsome football player at Yale and a charmer himself. She marries Gordon’s best friend, Sam Evans, who admires her greatly but is not the macho man Gordon was.

As in many of O’Neill’s plays, the women are diabolical at heart. After their marriage, Sam’s mother frightens Nina with details of the family history. We never really know how much of what the elder Mrs. Evans says is true—though a doctor friend affirms part of it—but she does not like her daughter-in-law, and this is her way of making Nina miserable. Years later, Nina appears just as jealous of her son’s fiancée.

Without going into too much detail to spoil the story, Nina, like most women wants children but Sam is convinced that he is impotent. Nina has a child by a family friend, the detached scientist Ned Darrell, but she lets Sam believe the boy is his. We also learn that the scientist realizes that the detachment only works in theory.

Fairly early in the play Nina’s college professor father dies, and we learn that one of his former students, Charles Marsden, carries the torch for Nina. He is about fifteen years older than Nina who calls him Uncle Charlie. He makes a living as a novelist, and Nina sees him as her father’s surrogate. She sees her happiness dependent on all three men, and she ably exploits each of them.

Nina is reminiscent of Ruth Atkins Mayo from O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon, who thinks she can go back and forth loving her husband Robert and his brother Andrew. Perhaps the archetype is Emily Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw Linton who could not understand why both Edgar Linton and Heathcliff could not love her. As in so many of O’Neill’s plays, the women are the troublemakers.

O’Neill was fascinated with Greek drama. He often wrote his plays with the concept of the mask. In his Beyond the Horizon, Andrew and Robert admit to one another they are lying, but they put on the masks for everyone else. In Strange Interlude it is as if the characters are constantly putting on masks and then taking them off, not for each other but for the audience.

Like Beyond the Horizon or Long Day’s Journey into Night, one might argue that Strange Interlude is not a tragedy. The main characters mostly go on living. If anyone does die at the end, they appear to die happy. Still, it does remind us of the sense of life experienced by the writer of Ecclesiastes when he observes matters “under the sun.”

I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit. (Ecclesiastes 1:14)

This fascinating novel-type play works. In another review I quoted O’Neill on science and religion. In Strange Interlude, Nina tells us (and we can hear O’Neill himself in this):

I tried hard to pray to the modern science God. I thought of a million light years to a spiral nebula—one other universe among innumerable others. But how could that God care about our trifling misery of death-born-of-birth? I couldn’t believe in Him, and I wouldn’t if I could! I’d rather imitate His indifference and prove that I had one trait at least in common! (668, 669)

Here the science is in the foreground, and it clearly does not satisfy even the scientist. Still, because of O’Neill’s language in the play where Ned speaks of his study of cells, we cannot help looking at the characters the way the scientist sees them, as a collection of cells. I recall being told in biology classes, “A hen is an egg’s way of making another egg.” O’Neill suggests something similar, but to what purpose? So it goes on, but it is all merely existential as we search elusively for happiness.

“There was no profit under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 2:11)