Word: electras
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...seemed always to be only half in earnest, at once passionately sought for and scornfully east aside. In "Strange Interlude" there are poetic outbursts from Nina identifying God with herself as an all-compassionate Mother, and men as flashes in the electrical display of God. In "Mourning Becomes Electra" the dramatist seemed to drift into a completely mechanistic attitude, at least to give expression to such a concept. "Days Without End" is indeed a modern miracle play, if we consider this undercurrent attitude even in its barest outline...
...drama. The work of all the best known U. S. designers was represented but, more often than not, settings for their best known plays were lacking. People looked in vain for Robert Edmond Jones's The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, The Jest, Mourning Becomes Electra; for Bel Geddes' Miracle or Lysistrata; for Jo Mielziner's Street Scene...
...Strange Interlude." Soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, doctor, and butcher flocked to this intellectual play. Being intellectual was the fad of that period; you might surreptitiously go to see Clara Bow, but you were "passe" if you couldn't discuss your complexes and O'Neill intelligibly. Then came "Mourning Becomes Electra." The public tried to be classical and pronounce Oedipus and argue about the merits of Aristophanes--now was it he or Sophocles. But the great masses were too lazy to go to libraries for research; "depression" in one sense was enough. O'Neill had failed to pick the "psychological moment...
...characterizations which are about as lifelike as Victorian porcelain under glass, hitherto frail Miss Gish stands out full-blooded and alive. Gone is her pastel shy- ness, gone are her girlish gasps as she takes the part of the murderess who gave up a pallid suitor to stalk Electra-like after her vicious father and his paramour through the gloom of their New England parlor, killing one with a walking stick, another with a flat iron. Actress Gish still has a strong hold on her part in the otherwise flabby final scene when, a misty old lady self-imprisoned...
...contemporary writers. Ibsen did not, as Mr. Harris think, write "Ghosts," or "Hedda Gabler," on the basis of the social values of his day, he wrote them in order to attack and denounce those values. And what social values does the author of "Strange interlude," and "Morning Becomes Electra" believe...