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Long Story Short
Meet the Mannons, who put the “fun” in dysFUNctional family.
Who's Who?
Ezra Mannon, a brittle New Englander, is judge, mayor and, most
recently, one of Grant’s generals in the Civil War. He has a bad heart
and a hard time expressing love.
Christine Mannon, his vivacious wife, stopped loving him as soon as they
were married.
Lavinia Mannon, their severe daughter, hates her mother and adores her
father.
Orin Mannon, Lavinia’s weak-willed brother, hates his father and adores
his mother.
Adam Brant is the bastard son of Ezra’s uncle by a servant. He is
captain of a ship in the merchant marine, and romances both Christine
and Lavinia.
Peter is Orin’s childhood friend and Lavinia’s fiancé.
Helen, Peter’s sister, is Lavinia’s childhood friend and Orin’s fiancée.
Where and When?
A house in a small Massachusetts town (and a ship in Boston harbor) in the summers of 1865 and 1866.
What's Going On?
The curse on the house of Mannon, a prominent New England family, goes
back a generation to Ezra Mannon’s father Abe and uncle Ben. Ben was
kicked out of the family when he impregnated a French Canadian serving
girl named Marie Brantône. A gambler and a drunk, eventually he killed
himself. Marie asked Ezra, now head of the family, to help her; but he
ignored her, and she died. Thus her son, Adam Brant, has an
understandable grudge against Cousin Ezra. While Ezra and his son Orin
are off fighting in the Civil War, Adam Brant approaches the family as a
suitor to Lavinia. The handsome captain ends up seducing Christine.
When the opera begins, the war has ended—President Lincoln has just been
shot—and Ezra Mannon is on his way home. His wife Christine and his
daughter Lavinia are both awaiting him: Lavinia is excited to see him,
Christine is not. She never loved her husband, and having finally
experienced love with Adam, cannot endure Ezra’s touch. The night of
Ezra’s return, Christine gives him poison instead of his heart medicine;
but before he dies, Ezra reveals to Lavinia what Christine and Adam have
done.
A few days later, Orin returns home from the war. A new war is now
raging, between Lavinia and Christine, and Orin becomes the
battleground. Lavinia forces Orin to come with her as she follows
Christine at dead of night to Adam’s ship. They spy on Christine and
Adam, and when Orin sees the mother he loves so passionately in another
man’s arms, he starts to unravel. He stabs Adam the instant his mother
is gone. When Orin tells Christine what he has done, Christine shoots
herself.
Lavinia and Orin travel to the South Seas for a year. When they return
to Massachusetts, their friends Peter and Helen find them transformed.
Lavinia has finally become a beautiful woman, the spitting image of her
mother, and Orin has disintegrated. Orin writes a letter outlining the
grisly history of his family and threatens Lavinia that he will give it
to Peter if she tries to marry him. He tries to molest his sister, and
when she runs from him, crying “Go and die!” he shoots himself. Lavinia,
who seems eager to marry Peter, reveals when he embraces her that she
still loves the dead Adam Brant. She dismisses Peter and instead
embraces her lonely fate, shutting herself up forever in the house of
Mannon.
The Greek Tragedy of Electra
If the story of the Mannon family seems familiar, you’ve either (a) been
watching too many daytime television talk shows or (b) studied the Greek
myth that inspired this story.
The myth has inspired dramatists, writers, and composers since the days
of ancient Greece, and is one of the cornerstones of our culture. If
you’re not familiar with the myth, here’s a brief refresher to bring you
up to speed:
It all began with Tantalus, king of Phrygia, who wanted to show he could
ridicule the gods. He invited them all to his house for a feast and
served, as the main course, his son Pelops. When the gods found out what
Tantalus had done, they punished him by placing him in hell, where he
has been standing upright in a pool ever since. When he bends down to
get a handful of water to drink, the pool dries up and all he gets is a
handful of dirt; and every time he reaches up to get some of the grapes
that are growing above his head, a gust of wind blows them out of reach.
Thus the word tantalize.
The curse on the family continued down the generations. Tantalus’
grandson, Thyestes, ran off with the wife of his brother Atreus. In
revenge, Atreus invited Thyestes over for dinner and fed the poor man
his own children—all except his nephew Aegisthus, who avenged his father
and brothers by killing Uncle Atreus. We’ll leave Aegisthus brooding for
a while and follow the fortunes of his cousins, Atreus’s two sons
Agamemnon and Menelaus.
These brothers married a pair of sisters, Clytemnestra and Helen. And
when Helen left her husband Menelaus for the handsome Trojan prince
Paris, the Trojan war began. On his way to Troy, Helen’s brother-in-law
Agamemnon, commander in chief of the Greek armies, happened to shoot a
stag that was sacred to Artemis. The goddess was so angry, she refused
to let Agamemnon continue until he sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia.
Agamemnon had his daughter killed and continued on to Troy, where he
(eventually) won the war.
But Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, was furious with him on two counts:
(a) he abandoned her for ten years to go fight a war; and (b) he killed
her beloved daughter to buy himself smooth sailing. So re-enter
Aegisthus! Agamemnon’s cousin, still mad that Uncle Atreus fed his
brothers to his father, seduced Clytemnestra and became her lover. They
got rid of Agamemnon’s son Orestes by shipping him off to boarding
school. Orestes’ sister, Electra, hangs around the castle, hating her
mother, yearning for her father, and getting more and more neurotic.
Then, when the Trojan War is finally over, Aegisthus and Clytemnestra
welcome Agamemnon home and kill him as he is taking a bath. Aegisthus
takes his wife and his throne and treats Electra like a dog.
The story continues as Orestes returns home, and, aided by Electra,
avenges his father’s murder. He kills Aegisthus, but has a much harder
time killing his own mother. When he does so he is driven mad by the
Furies (three demonic sisters who long ago sprang out of the blood
spilling from the severed testicles of the sky-god Ouranos and now who
rise up from the blood of Orestes’ murdered mother). In some versions of
the story, Orestes finds a way to be free of the Furies. In real life,
it would take an awfully good therapist.
You’ll notice that Eugene O’Neill even modeled the names of his
characters in Mourning Becomes Electra on the names of their mythic
ancestors illustrated here in a Mannon family tree
The Greek Tragedians
The Trojan War presumably happened about 2800 years ago; stories about
the war and the people involved began to be told in the centuries that
followed; and long after, during the Golden Age of Athens (around 550
B.C.E), the fortunes of Agamemnon and his family became the subject of
plays by all three of the great Greek tragedians: Aeschylus, Sophocles,
and Euripides.
Aeschylus’ Oresteia. The Oresteia is the only surviving trilogy from the
ancient Greek theater and the first play in recorded history. Because he
wrote a trilogy, Aeschylus was able to give us more of the story than
his followers, although his characterizations are less rich. The
Oresteia begins the night of Agamemnon’s murder and stops when Athena
pardons Orestes and placates the demonic Furies, turning them into the
protective Eumenides. Aeschylus celebrates the origins of Athenian
democracy and simultaneously founds the art form of drama.
Sophocles’ Electra. Sophocles, whose Oedipus Rex inspired Aristotle to
acclaim him as the greatest of all tragedians, wrote a play that begins
with the homecoming of Orestes and ends the moment he drags Aegisthus
offstage to kill him. No Agamemnon, no Athena; Sophocles focuses on
Electra and her inability to forgive or forget. She personifies the
virtue of loyalty to one’s family, and is a beautiful and tender woman.
Operagoers know Sophocles’ play as the source of Richard Strauss’s
Elektra.
Euripides’ Electra. Euripides was the latest of the three tragedians.
His wicked sense of humor and disrespect for tradition make him the
prototypical modern artist. In his version, Clytemnestra has married
Electra off to a peasant, and the girl resents the indignity of living
on a farm much more than she does the fact that her mother killed her
father. In Euripides, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are more interesting
individuals, and the play closes with a deus ex machina: the Gemini
twins appear and bring about a magical happy ending.
Eugene O’Neill
America’s first great playwright was born in New York City in 1888. His
father was a famous actor, and as a child O’Neill traveled around the
country with his parents. He went to Princeton, but was suspended for
throwing a beer bottle through a window of the home of the then-college
president, Woodrow Wilson. At the age of 21 he set off to see the world.
First he went on a gold-prospecting expedition to Honduras; he didn’t
find any gold, but did manage to catch malaria. Then he shipped as a
seaman to Buenos Aires, worked at various occupations in Argentina, and
tended mules on a cattle steamer to South Africa. He returned to New
York destitute and found a job as a reporter on a newspaper in New
London, Connecticut. But an attack of tuberculosis sent him to a
sanitarium for six months, and by the time he recovered his health he
had decided to become a playwright. He was 24 years old.
During the 1920s, O’Neill had a new play on the New York stage
practically every year. His subjects included Marco Polo, the Ancient
Mariner, Lazarus, Ponce de León, and more contemporary characters as
well. He asked questions about faith and about fate; a contemporary of
Sigmund Freud, O’Neill wrote about the dark forces that seem to compel
human behavior; and his advanced dramatic techniques often left
realistic theater far behind. O’Neill’s major works include: The
Emperor Jones (1920), Desire Under the Elms (1924), Strange Interlude
(1927), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), Ah, Wilderness (1933), A Moon
for the Misbegotten (1945), The Iceman Cometh (1946), and the posthumous
Long Day’s Journey Into Night. He died in 1953 and was survived by his
third wife, Carlotta Monterey O’Neill.
Play Becomes Opera
Mrs. O’Neill allowed Marvin David Levy to make an opera from Mourning
Becomes Electra when it became clear that he was not planning on simply
setting the play to music. For one thing, Mourning Becomes Electra is
not one play, it is a trilogy of three plays, totalling thirteen acts.
The play, which takes its structure from the Oresteia of Aeschylus,
takes all day to perform, and setting it to music would slow that down
considerably. That wasn’t what Levy had in mind: he wanted to build on
O’Neill’s structure, but didn’t want to use the playwright’s exact
words, which have in fact been criticized as overwritten. Instead, Levy
and his librettist, Henry Butler, intended to create a libretto that
replaced O’Neill’s excesses with simple, minimal language. Mrs. O’Neill
saw the good sense of this.“If all you offered to do was cut and paste
the plays,” she told him, “I would never have permitted you to touch
them. I expect you to create something new.”
Levy explains what attracts him to O’Neill’s play: “I realized this
harrowing picture of tormented lives is one of the few American
contemporary tragedies that can evoke pity, fear, even awe, in today’s
audiences. It deals with nothing less than the struggle between the
life-force and death in our own age, when little gives life a
satisfactory meaning. For O’Neill, there were no divinities to dispense
absolution to a doomed house of Mannon; modern society lay victim to the
pervasive curses that stemmed from the effects of materialism,
Puritanism, alienation, and repression of all that is natural—a
death-in-life, rendered in terms of Freudian psychology. Unlike that of
Atreus, the Mannon curse could not be lifted. It could only be confirmed
at the end.”
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