Word: aikens
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...because he represents the final distillation of some of Aiken's pet ideas that Mr. Arcularis the person has so little impact on the reader. And yet the apparent thinness and elusiveness of the character are reasonable enough in the context of the play. As the curtain rises. Mr. Arcularis lies on the operating table in a surgical amphitheater, surrounded by doctors and nurses and watched by unseen medical students. Then Mr. Arcularis drifts into his ether dream, a strange, cold, ocean voyage which makes up the heart of the play. Finally in the growing chill and the gradual slowing...
...operating table there should be a remoteness to the characters, a fleeting vaporousness that makes orientation in time and space more and more difficult. If this results in some loss of humanity in the drama, it creates an atmosphere most congenial to the brilliantly clear play of some of Aiken's ideas--the loneliness of a human being who feels he has been set off from his fellows by an experience for which many of us will find a counterpart in our own lives...
There is much in this play to delight the seeker after hidden meanings, for Aiken ignores neither symbols nor that interrelation of characters and events which suggests more than appears on the surface. The surgeon who bends over Arcularis as he lies on the operation table reappears as another passenger on the dream voyage. And this passenger is the owner of the chisel which Arcularis likens to a scalpel, and with which he tries in his sleep to break open the coffin in the ship's refrigeration room, the coffin which he comes to realize contains his own corpse. Other...
...play has been very carefully and very excellently put together, and if well-produced it should have a great deal of power. But it will be the power to child and frighten, for there is not enough humanity in it to produce the tears that should melt Aiken's icicles...
...Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night best illustrates the underlying spiritual weakness of Mr. Arcularis. The broken hearts of O'Neill's play still overflow with their own power over both life and death; even in sordid recrimination and disillusionment there is the hint of victory. In Aiken's play the affirmation lacks conviction; it is beautiful but momentary, and cannot exist as one with the horrors. If Aiken had meant to say this--if this is something to say--his play would be successful in every respect. I do not believe he did mean...