Three Plays: Anna Christie / The Emperor Jones / The Hairy Ape

by Eugene O'Neill

Winner of the Nobel Prize
 
This edition includes Anna Christie, The Emperor Jones , and The Hairy Ape three classic plays of uncontested power from the Nobel laureate and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for drama.
 
In Anna Christie, a sailor reunites with his estranged daughter after years apart. As she begins to fall in love with a younger sailor, she realizes she must come clean to her father and her new love interest and reveal her troubled past.
 
In The Emperor Jones, African American fugitive, Brutus Jones, recounts his life through a series of flashbacks as he runs from rebelling subjects through a West Indies Jungle, showing just how he came to rule over a small island, and his eventual downfall.
 
In The Hairy Ape, O’Neil explores class and identity as he follows the existential crisis of Yank, an engine worker for an ocean liner. After being called a beast from the daughter of a rich industrialist, Yank realizes he has no place in modern society, or even a class he can call his own.
 
William Faulkner, Philip Roth, Alice Munro, Thomas Mann, Doris Lessing, Albert Camus, V.S. Naipaul, Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, Joan Didion, and Cormac McCarthy, among many Vintage International is devoted to publishing the best writing of the past century from the world over. Offering both classic and modern fiction and literary nonfiction in elegant editions, Vintage International aims to provide readers with world-class writing that has stood the test of time and essential works by the preeminent authors of today.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Classics, Fiction, Theatre, Literature, American

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1937

About the author

American playwright Eugene Gladstone O'Neill authored Mourning Becomes Electra in 1931 among his works; he won the Nobel Prize of 1936 for literature, and people awarded him his fourth Pulitzer Prize for Long Day's Journey into Night , produced in 1956.

He won his Nobel Prize "for the power, honesty and deep-felt emotions of his dramatic works, which embody an original concept of tragedy." More than any other dramatist, O'Neill introduced the dramatic realism that Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg pioneered to Americans and first used true American vernacular in his speeches.

His plays involve characters, who, engaging in depraved behavior, inhabit the fringes of society, where they struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations but ultimately slide into disillusionment and despair. O'Neill wrote Ah, Wilderness! , his only comedy: all his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism.

Reviews

[Alexis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was difficult to read, and I mean that in at least three ways. First of all, Dover Thrift Editions, true to their name, have no scholarly apparatus; the margins are extended all the way to the edge of the page, and the proofreading is quite indifferent. Fine, you get what you pay for. Second, there’s O’Neill’s dialogue. Unlike the more genteel milieux of his autobiographical plays, these pieces involve a great deal of regional and ethnic dialect, rendered in torturous phonetics. Here are some examples, chosen pretty much at random:

“I pretends to! Sho’ I pretends! Dat’s part o’ my game from the fust. If I finds out dem ******* believes dat black is white, den I yells it out louder’n deir loudest.”
“Ay don’t tank dey got much fancy drink for young gel in his place, Anna—sas’prilla, maybe.”
“Take it easy dere, you! Who d’yuh tinks runnin’ dis game, me or you? When I git ready, we move.”

It was of the style of the time. Finally, this was gruelling to read because O’Neill is probably the most painful of the great American playwrights: not in Miller, Williams, or Shepard do you find plays so densely populated with characters at the end of their tether, flayed to the bone, dashed upon the skids. This is a slim volume, but I took my time reading it because there’s only so long any reader can spend in the rag and bone shop of the heart. O’Neill knew it all too well, and his life was one of the bitterest of all tragedies.

[Raimo Wirkkala · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of this slim volume is hyperbole; O'Neill's great plays were still ahead of him when he wrote these two 1-act plays and the more expansive "Anne Christie". These plays are important not because they are great but because they show us O'Neill working his craft. In these early-works he is just beginning to mine his own experiences and influences; ships and the sea, the bars, the women of ill-repute, broken families. In an interview the late, great actor and O'Neill-specialist, Brian Dennehy, said that O'Neill was America's greatest playwright because "he dug the deepest." He is but scratching the surface in these formative plays. But here begins the path that leads to "Long Day's Journey Into Night".

[Don · Rating 3 out of 5]

Exciting plays. Especially love "The Emperor Jones".

[ML Character]

Okay, I'd had this nagging not-good-enough theater academic feeling because I'd only read one O'Neill play in all these years (Long Day's Journey into Night) and people drop Emperor Jones and Hairy Ape all the time, Anna Christie some too. So I've always felt like I should know, and also couldn't imagine how Emperor Jones could contain all the things I've been told it contains and go how it goes (and be by THIS GUY?!)

So now I know cos I finally read my little old Modern Library Edition of these three plays from my bottomless slush pile. And what I found myself thinking is this: O'Neill might be a sort of victim of his own timeliness. I can see how these plays were bombshells in their own moment, garnering Pulitzers and acclaim and headlining the 1910-20-30s section of textbooks: they take on burning issues, people (supposedly) left out of other plays of this era (Black - in which working class goes without saying at this moment-- man, working class immigrant woman, working class white man in the plays collected here). Emperor Jones and Hairy Ape are very expressionist in their elucidation of the challenges facing these male characters, cycling through moments of personal and inherited racial history while lost "in the forest" in Africa versus cycling through the stages and locations of modern capital's subjugation of the working class man in Ape. It's a little tempting to speculate about women being somehow impervious to expression in Anna Christie, although obviously that's an overly simplified claim made possible by the narrow selection of these three plays only together. The larger thing about Anna Christie that I both hate sitting through and also think might be its genius is how Anna is herself a pretty unproblematic, nicely rounded, strong and pragmatic character who is destroyed by the toxic masculinity that surrounds her. Although discussing prostitution is not really all that shocking by the time O'Neill is writing his work--thinking Mrs Warren's Profession, Lulu, and a bazillion novels--it must still have been quite the issues-laden night at the theater in New York.
So here's where I think O'Neill is now much more honored as a namecheck than for any remaining usefulness of these scripts. They're so linked to their moment in terms of issues addressed, aesthetic choices made-- some that remain interesting to history like expressionist metaphorical stage action and some that feel excruciatingly outdated like dialect. SO MUCH AWFUL DIALECT. omk, so much. Stop already. Okay, they're so locked in their moment and I can see what made them useful and interesting to that moment, but they are hard to pry out of that moment to offer something of real intellectual, political, or aesthetic interest to a moment that has proceeded without O'Neill. But it was histotically interesting to finally learn why these titles come up over and over again in theater history discussions. So now I know that.

[T. Tokunaga · Rating 5 out of 5]

【Three Plays - Anna Christie, The Emperor and The Hairy Ape / Eugene O'Neill/ 1937, The Modern Library, Random House】

Imagine there was one playwright who's quite unsure about what to write himself, but can make 'the better version' of the plays he got attracted to - here you have three 'improved' version with perfect arrangements - Miss Julie by August Strindberg, A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen and Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. That's what O'Neill did here, still in his career's early phase.

He put a black dictator in Haiti in the place of a self-indulgent bourgeois woman. Put an escaped sex worker in the place of Nora - which twisted so many things in its plot except for its very essence. He even put an extremely ugly guy called Hairy Ape in the place of Eliza the beautiful. He did all of these with better theatrical effects with these changes.

And his style, also a rather artificial, but extremely, almost grotesquely 'real' vernacular which the middle-class audience/ playgoers in general can barely imagine:

--Jones: Seems like - seems like I know dat tree - an'dem stones - an'de river. I remember - seems like I been been heah befo'. [Tremblingly.] Oh, Gorry, I'se skeerex in dis place! I'se skeered! Oh, Laud, pertect dis sinner! (P51, Emperor Jones, Scene 7)

--Marthy: Well, yuh can bet your life, kid, he's as good an old guy as ever walked in two feet. That goes! (P84, Anna Christie, Act 1)

--Yank. [Staring at the sidewalk.] Clean, ain't it? Yuh could eat a fried egg offen it. (P226, The Hairy Ape, Scene 5)

He'd be quite lost, embracing his talent in writing plays, probably the bigger gift he had than anyone else in the US back then. Then he started drifting - with the American theatrical history itself.

[Hugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Tinkin is hard."

The three plays in this volume read like a cross between the tv series Deadwood and Popeye the Sailor Man. The coarse dialogue, characters, and settings are wonderful. All three were good but I preferred Anna Christie and The Hairy Ape. This is a reread of a book I read early in high school and found difficult at the time. One of the plays has haunted me for many years and I needed to be sure it was as memorable as I thought. I enjoyed these plays even more this time around and think I have put to rest another one of my book neuroses. Well worth a read/re-read and I will pursue more Eugene O'Niell - these are not necessarily considered his best work so I may have good reading ahead of me.

[Mundy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Life after Literature degrees means reliving the experience of, “hey I love [that thing] written by [that author], let’s read more!” “A Long Day’s Journey into Night” is the best play I have ever read, yes. I picked up this paperback collection from a resale store dollar bin. How “Anna Christie” won a Pulitzer Prize is beyond me. “The Emperor Jones” is aggressively racist. If I do enough mental gymnastics, I can maybe see how these three plays say something about humanity’s hubris and thirst for power, blah blah blah. Can you do it without punching down on women and Black folks? This is what happens when the ivory tower institutions of higher ed still worship old White men.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eugene O'Neill is widely considered to be among the best playwrights ever in the United States concerning drama, having one four Pulitzer prizes for his playwriting.  To put it mildly, these are not his best works.  I had never heard of any of these, and I am someone who reads plays relatively often, and looking at these plays in greater detail (thankfully they are all pretty short), they are not plays that I would expect to see revived now or any time soon.  In fact, the word that springs to mind when looking at all of these plays as a set is problematic.  And it is not only in one way that these plays are problematic, for they are problematic in a variety of ways.  Whether we are looking at the author's insensitive and borderline racist use of dialect, his tendency to paint women as whores that appears over and over again in his works, or the author's lack of nuance when it comes to dealing with issues of class and politics, these plays can do one thing well, and that is offend, as these plays are likely to offend most of the people who read them, for better or worse.

The three plays of this collection combine for less than 200 pages of material, making them easy to read, at least, from a perspective of length.  We begin with "Emperor Jones," which looks at a high and mighty black in the postwar period who acts with a great deal of violence and ends up killing himself in a vain attempt to escape madness.  The titular black character is portrayed with a startling lack of empathy and compassion, and is viewed as a savage and as almost an animal, and would surely run afoul of contemporary attitudes regarding race and ethnicity.  The same concerns about ethnicity follow into the second play, "Anna Christie," which takes up about half the book's contents as a whole and contains a conflict between a father with a strong Swedish accent and would-be suitor for control over the free and independent titular woman, who ends up having spent some time as a harlot before her return home to the sea.  The third play, "The Hairy Ape" looks at the decline of a man from an honest worker on a ship in the ocean to a victim of an aggressive ape as he comes to realize (thanks to science and politics) that mankind is nothing more than a hairy ape.

Obviously there are some problems to be found here, but it is unclear just where these problems come from and how they could best be handled.  It is clear that O'Neill had some very stereotypical views when it came to others, whether those others were women or people of different backgrounds than his own.  His best works (especially Long Day's Journey Into Night) deal with insider stories where he is at his most penetrating, but when he writes outside of his own experience he seems to do a poor job of it.  He also seems to view scientific ideas like evolution a bit too highly--and it has some negative results on the dignity of humanity that he has in some of his plays.  His drama as a whole could use a bit more dignity, but given his problems with alcoholism and his own worldview problems, the fact that his plays fail so notably when it comes to issues of morality and decency is not a surprise.  The fact that he views "The Hairy Ape" as a comedy when it involves the death of a person who it is fairly easy to identify with suggests that he is laughing at others rather than seeking to laugh with them, and I'm not inclined to laugh at any of these plays or their lack of humanity.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part of why I like my local library is that I can find a 1938 edition of three Eugene O’Neill plays and read an introduction that is a contemporary rather than historical essay of the plays. Lionel Trilling’s introduction is the perfect preface to this collection, and if you can find this edition, I’d recommend it. As for the individual plays:

The Emperor Jones: Those who prefer their plays strongly rooted in reality should avoid this one. I’m mixed about expressionism, but I liked this tale of an African-American man who escapes to a Caribbean Island and sets himself up as an emperor. The play opens as his empire tumbles down, and I can’t help but think that, with some tinkering, this would make an interesting revival for a commentary on Wall Street.

Anna Christie: Netting O’Neill his second Pulitzer, Anna Christie is the story of a prostitute, and, unlike the other two in this collection, grounded in realism. It’s a love story but not, a family drama but not, and even in written form, the foggy, damp chill of the ocean snakes off the page.

The Hairy Ape: Throughout The Hairy Ape, I kept thinking of Plato’s "Allegory of the Cave." I haven’t seen any references to it in the few essays I read about the play, but I can’t escape my own feeling that The Hairy Ape is Plato’s tale set in a capitalist system that borders on an oligarchy. For that matter, if I were back in school and writing an essay on The Hairy Ape, I’d want to compare and contrast Yank and Ragtime’s Coalhouse Walker. This is all to say I enjoyed The Hairy Ape and found it as much a philosophical reflection as a dramatic work.

To the whole collection: Highly recommended.

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though I read all of these plays for academic games in high school, I really only remember "The Hairy Ape" and "The Emporer Jones".

O'Neill's plays on the whole are some of the best to read because they have a mix of mostly gritty realism with some fantastical or expressionistic elements; on the whole you can really "see" everything happening, and what the characters look like, and then you'll run into something fun that will really make your imagination work, and you just long to see how it might be put onto the stage in a production.

I've heard "The Emporer Jones" compared to Ibsen's "Peer Gynt" symbolically, but it always reminds me more of "Heart of Darkness" due to the jungle setting, but also the feel of persecution permeating throughout, and the explorations of how a seemingly regular or even low-class or undeserving person can set onself into power through the use of superstition, fear, manipulation, and exploitation of ignorance.

"The Hairy Ape" is one of my favorite plays for exactly the reasons I mentioned above. From the beginning you have a great idea of what Yank must look like, this rough sailor who some socialite calls a "filthy beast" but then at the end you're encountered with this bizarre scene that it's really hard - but exciting - to imagine on stage. "The Hairy Ape" is also a pretty bold, if depressing, treatment of the dehumanization of the poor working class, or in another view, of the human condition.

I should read these plays again at some point.

[Joseph Crupper · Rating 2 out of 5]

I went into reading this collection, which includes a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, thinking I was going to enjoy well crafted drama. Maybe it was back in its day. But I found it underwhelming, hard to follow, and bogged down with racism and sexism.
Emperor Jones - I don’t know what it is with white people writing shows where people of color do nothing but suffer. The main character was written to be evil, and then was contrasted with a equally evil white man who never suffers, and then all we do is see the black protagonist suffer the entire rest of the play, constantly at the expense of other black characters...it was a mess, and difficult to stomach.
Anna Christie - Ah yes, the not-so-fair maiden who just can’t seem to make up her mind about whether she will wed a man who just walked through the door intent on murdering her. A love story for the ages.
The Hairy Ape - I honestly got halfway through this one, and decided to predict the end and then skip there to see how close I was. I wasn’t far off. Glad I didn’t waste more of my time.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Emperor Jones and Anna Christie (you can buy the film with Greta Garbo--they did an English version and a German version) are two of my favorites by O'Neill. While they lack the epic scale, grandeur, and grace of Long Day's Journey (obviously a masterpiece), these plays are still brilliantly innovative and present a more raw vision of the experimentation that would be taken to Shakespeare-esque transcendent theater with LDJN. The drum beats of Emperor Jones!!! The dialogue in Anna Christie! AH!

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Haven't read any O'Neill in more than 20 years and have thus far only read The Hairy Ape from this collection. Still settling in to it, but it's good enough to make me reread Emperor Jones. Gotta be a helluva challenge to stage this thing. O'Neill's dialect jangles like a brutal caricature (See:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfH9pC... for reference) in my head, but Yank--the oppressed hairy ape/boiler man of the title who fits exactly nowhere--feels just as real and moving and in this thing as he insists he is. He belongs, y'see?

[Alfresco · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Nietzsche had an Irish temperament he would be Eugene O'Neill. One of the greatest playwrights to ever live. He create his plays from an autobiographic perspective, lanced with wit, candor, and raw emotions.If i had to pick one from the three, Hairy Ape is one of his best plays "It takes a MAN to work in hell"! But read ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING O'Neill wrote he doesnt disappoint in showing the subtle tensions that make the human condition a tragic-comic one!

[Isabel · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5 stars.

I was required to read Anna Christie for my American Studies class and found that it was an interesting take on gender, class, and prohibition in the early 20s. The other two plays were included in the copy that I had so I read them as well. The Hairy Ape is very clearly centered around social class and The Emperor Jones around the effects of imperialism.

Anna Christie 4/5
The Emperor Jones 2/5
The Hairy Ape 4/5

[Ali · Rating 2 out of 5]

یوجین اونیل (1953-1888) نمایش نامه نویس آمریکایی برنده ی نوبل، متاثر از تیاتر واقع گرای چخوف و هنریک ایبسن بود. او که سال ها روی کشتی کار کرده بود، در اغلب آثار اولیه اش به زندگی ملاحان و سفرهای دریایی پرداخت. آخرین نمایش نامه های اونیل، بهترین آنها هستند که به نوعی تراژدی شخصیت های نومید مشهور اند.

[Numa Parrott · Rating 1 out of 5]

I just don't like reading plays. Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose?
I didn't really not like it though. It just didn't add or subtract anything to/from my life at all, except maybe the hour or two spent reading it.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

More of a 3.5 - These might be classics, but they aren't O'Neill's best work (I enjoyed The Hairy Ape quite a bit). The real draw here is just seeing a young O'Neill find his voice, and seeing how far he was attempting to push performance art right out of the gate.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

'The Emperor Jones' was interesting but short, 'The Hairy Ape' less interesting but longer. My favourite was definitely 'Anna Christie' - a provocative work on love, sexuality, family, and redemption.

[Katie R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had to read 'The Hairy Ape' for class, and I finished the other two on my own. 'Anna Christie' was my favorite of the three.

The dialogues were hard to read, but I got through them.

'The Emperor Jones' reminded me of 'Their Eyes Were Watching God' for some reason.

[Kate Dalton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've just read the last play in this book, "The Hairy Ape," but I enjoyed the dialect of it and the use of a Greek chorus throughout a more contemporary play. The main character, Yank, speaks like Pop-eye, but is profoundly sincere at several moments.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

The plays fell flat with me. But then, most of the plays I've read alone since college have also lacked something. I think it's in the nature of the thing -- better to read these aloud with a group, and best to see them performed.

I'm sure I'll reevaluate once I take in a good performance.

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I love Long Day's Journey... and O'Neill in general, I found The Emperor Jones really hard to read - mostly because the attempt at capturing the vernacular really failed (for me). Anna Christie is best for this aspect.

[Conor Madigan · Rating 3 out of 5]

race

[joey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Local staging.

[Nicholas Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great plays! Emperor Jones was a fantastic read, so was Anna Christie. Very refreshing change from reading normal books.

[Miranda · Rating 3 out of 5]

ENG 105: Literature in English


The Emperor Jones

Anna Christie

[Elibardo Villegas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful plays that addresses social problems and human dark hidden emotions.

[Monique · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read The Hairy Ape for uni

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Emperor Jones is predictable, Anna Christie was okay nothing special, The Hairy Ape was good.