Summary
First Part: Act One
The scene is Professor Leeds’ library in his New England home, cozy and ordered and redolent of intellect and superiority. A maid’s voice is heard, and she lets Charles Marsden into the room. He is 35, tall and thin, meticulous, and the embodiment of an Anglicized New Englander. His manner is cool and poised, with “quiet charm” and “a quality of appealing, inquisitive friendliness” (62).
When he enters, he looks around the familiar space and smiles affectionately. [We are privy to his and all characters’ thoughts, which O’Neill renders in a slightly smaller typeface than the spoken words.] Marsden remembers the first time he came here with his father, who has been dead for a time, and thinks of the professor’s own wife, now dead six years, and their daughter Nina, the latter whom he has known since she was young though she is now a grown woman. There is a sexual cast to these thoughts, which lead him to a memory of boyhood and how his friends took him to a whore but he was ashamed and did not want to defile his Mother.
Leeds enters. He is 55, studious and intelligent, content in his own knowledge and position. He has a tendency toward the prim and provincial except in his attitude toward the Greeks and Romans. The two men shake hands warmly and begin to speak of Nina, who has recently lost her love, Gordon, in the war.
Leeds thinks how different she is now, and confides in Marsden that Nina is apathetic and full of senseless chatter. When Marsden mentions it is normal to be sad about Gordon, Leeds bursts out that he wants Nina to have a chance to forget the boy and to move on. Everyone loved Gordon, yes, but his memory seems to be haunting Nina and she’s adopted a terrible attitude toward her father of late.
Finally, he admits she seems to actually hate him, and tells the shocked Marsden that he told Gordon privately not to marry Nina before he went off to war; it would be better to wait because he may be killed and leave her a widow without any resources. They should wait until he has a position in the world, Leeds asserted, and Gordon agreed that it would not be fair to Nina. Now, unfortunately, Nina seems to suspect her father said something to Gordon, as she acts like he deliberately tried to destroy her happiness. Marsden is saddened to hear this and asks if Nina has said anything explicitly and Leeds replies no. He thinks how he hopes that when Nina comes in she does not make a scene.
Nina enters. She is 20, handsome rather than pretty, athletic, and possessive of an expression that is “strained, nerve-racked, hectic” (69). She barely acknowledges Marsden, which hurts his feelings, as does the allusion she makes to his not fighting in the war, which happened because he was not considered physically fit. Her cool attitude suddenly vanishes, though, and she greets him happily before turning to her father.
She announces that she is planning to go away immediately or she will go crazy. He is stunned to hear this and first puts on a severe, condescending tone with her. Nina inwardly rolls her eyes at the “Professor of Dead Languages [who] is talking again” (71), and her role as the obedient child-student. Leeds argues that she is in ill health and that she should stay at home where she has shown some improvement. Nina is unswayed, thinking of how dead his words are, dead like ashes from a tomb. She tells him his protests are useless, to which he replies that he cannot afford to support her.
In response she first thinks she should not tell him everything, and says aloud that she has had six months’ of nurse training and plans to work at a sanatorium for crippled soldiers, a place she heard about from a doctor friend of Gordon’s. This is unbelievable to Leeds and Marsden, the latter who privately thinks of how distasteful it is for her to be around men in their beds.
Nina remains calm and says she has thought of it all, and Mary the maid will take care of her father. It is important that she go away and finish the process of becoming herself. When Leeds tells Marsden she is a sick girl, she says in a slow and strange fashion that she is not sick—she is too well. She must give the sick men her health, she must atone for her treachery to Gordon. Against her own inclinations, she explains to the confused men that she owes it to Gordon because before he went away he wanted to sleep with her and even though she knew deep down he was going to die and never return, she did not give in and remains “Gordon’s silly virgin” (74).
Marsden is repelled and Leeds horrified. Nina continues, saying she is lonely and not pregnant and filled with self-loathing. She knows her father told Gordon not to marry her, and Leeds crumbles and admits it. He says he tried to persuade Gordon for her sake and almost believed that was his reason for doing so, but knows he was jealous of their love and wanted her to stay at home with him and have her love until his end of life.
Nina listens and says she forgives him, but she must go. He now relents, to Marsden’s disbelief, and says solemnly that she should go. Happy, she asks Marsden girlishly to help her.
Leeds stands alone, hoping this will finally rid of Gordon’s ghost. He still feels cold and alone, though, and knows he is fated to die in the same way.
Act Two
It is early fall over a year later, again in the study. Everything is still orderly but the shades are drawn and the room is melancholy. Marsden looks as if he is mourning, seated at a chair in the center of the room.
His thoughts center on how the professor died, lonely and missing his daughter. He wonders if Nina will feel any grief over her father’s death. Nina and Marsden had seen each other twice at the hospital, where she was pleasant to him, but she never answered Marsden's letters and those to her father, which he saw, were superficial. He cannot help but wonder what she has been doing with men this past year, and does not know what he himself wishes to do with her. Kiss her? Hold her?
Nina’s voice is accompanied by a man’s voice, which vexes Marsden. She is dressed in a nurse’s uniform, poised in pose but still beautiful and highly strung in appearance. Looking around the room, she thinks of how her father was dead long before he died, at least to her since all men died when Gordon died.
Marsden wonders why she is not crying and wishes for a moment that she would cry on his shoulder. He makes a snide comment about her not visiting Leeds and quickly apologizes, but she says she did not want him to see her. She goes upstairs with the doctor she brought, whom Marsden has not seen yet.
Another man comes in. It is Sam Evans, a blond, guileless young man aged 25. Marsden thinks him an overgrown boy, but does begin to like his open manner. Evans says has known Nina since she’s been at the hospital. He knew Gordon and loved him. He was in the infantry but did not see action. Evans’s thoughts tell us he loves Nina.
When he mentions the doctor, Ned Darrell, Marsden presses for more information. Evans says Darrell is a true doctor, meaning he only cares about medicine and not people. He also shares that Nina seems to be holding onto the war too much in her nursing of all the crippled men.
Eventually Evans gets up enough courage to share that it seems like Marsden is a father figure to Nina and that he wants to marry her. Evans loves her deeply, he proclaims, and knows she loves Gordon but that he can give her a good life. Cynically, Marsden thinks that if Nina were to marry this simpleton she would certainly have to have an affair, and hopefully with him. He cuts off these thoughts and tells Evans he will try to convince Nina to marry him. Evans leaves to get some medication.
Edmund, or “Ned”, Darrell enters. He is 27, short and wiry, intense, and very handsome. He has “come to consider himself immune to love through his scientific understanding of its sexual nature” (86). The two men regard each other. Darrell thinks Marsden’s novels are superficial and Marsden sneeringly wonders if Darrell is a Freudian. Darrell’s goal is to get help for Nina. He tells Marsden that she is a great girl but has had too many destructive experiences and is diving too deeply into perilous waters. He does not want to tell Marsden too much about how promiscuous Nina has been, but he alludes to it by saying she has been pretending to love these war victims but has only succeeded in furthering her guilty conscience.
They both think she should not go back to the hospital, and Darrell says he wants Marsden’s help getting her to marry Sam Evans. After all, Marsden is like an uncle to her—a comment which rankles Marsden internally. Darrell explains that Evans is a good man and marrying him would let her have children and focus on that; they would give her “normal outlets for her craving for sacrifice" (89).
Marsden is uncomfortable and awkwardly jokes that maybe the doctor loves Nina. Darrell laughs and says no, she always belongs to Gordon. Marsden agrees and says he would not want to compete with a ghost.
Suddenly Nina arrives at the doorway. She looks strange, and says in a flat voice that her father is indeed dead. Her soullessness is disconcerting. She wonders aloud that she has seen the lies in words, and how life “is just a long drawn out lie with a sniffling sigh at the end” (91). Marsden thinks she sounds hard, like a whore and a cruel bitch. But then he feels guilty and thinks his Mother would be disappointed in him.
Nina laughs at the doctor and reminds him of when she kissed him and startled him. He is good-natured about it; it did not affect him. Nina rambles on about not believing in God and wanting all her words to just tumble out rather than being dammed up.
Darrell leaves and Nina tells Marsden dully that she needs to talk to him. He trembles and she scornfully asks why he is afraid. She sneers that the great mistake was made when God made man in his image–He should have made woman in His image, and death would have felt the way life felt, like a reunion with pain and power and agony and love. She cries out that she wants to believe in something, to feel something. She can’t even feel anything for her dead father, she sobs, and curls into Marsden. He is aroused but thinks of her as a little girl.
She cries that she is comforted by him and has wanted that security for so long now. She asks him how she ought to punish herself. When he asks for what, she says she has been a silly slut and has slept with multiple crippled men to atone for her sin. They meant nothing to her and they were all the same, and she knew she was torturing them but did not care. Marsden’s thoughts are cruel and condemnatory.
He eventually tells her she ought to marry Evans and have children. She drowses into him, and tells him he has been kind to her and she will comply. Evans returns and sees that Nina has fallen asleep. Marsden tells him he has reason to hope and he is elated.
Analysis
Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude is an intense play. The characters are roiling with emotion, sexual tension and violent urges are just under the surface, big questions like heredity and eugenics and drives permeate the narrative, and, of course, the presence of the characters’ actual thoughts with the use of the aside does not allow the reader/viewer even a moment’s respite. Esteemed playwright Tony Kushner explains that this work is “perhaps the crest of what can now be understood as a period of intense grappling with strict limitations of theatrical form, its punishing economy of time and cash and audience attention.” Novelist Mary McCarthy had a similar take, calling O’Neill one of those American authors who “know how to exhaust a subject; that is, alas, their trouble. Their logical, graceless works can find no reason for stopping, but go on and on, like elephants pacing in a zoo.” It certainly isn’t an easy play, but there is a lot to discuss.
The first thing to consider is the aside, also referred to as the interior monologue, which makes itself manifest almost immediately when Marsden visits Professor Leeds in his office. The use of the aside does a couple basic things. First, it provides us with information we need to figure out who the characters are, what their history is, what their relationship to each other is, etc. In this first scene, for example, we learn from Marsden’s thoughts that he used to be a student of the Professor, that the Professor’s wife is dead, and that his daughter Nina is a young woman now. We can also learn the truth of various matters (which usually leads to dramatic irony), such as the Professor’s feelings of guilt regarding his advice to Gordon before he went away. Second, we can learn who these characters are, what motivates them, what their history includes, what they really think about things, etc. With Marsden, we immediately get the sense that this is a man uncomfortable with his sexuality, and we are provided insights into his feelings about Gordon and Nina.
Scholar Egil Tornqvist has written extensively about this theatrical device, which he calls a “thought soliloquoy” when the character is alone on the stage and “thought aside” for audible thinking when a character is not alone on the stage in order to avoid some of the erroneous associations with “aside” or “interior monologue” or “stream-of-consciousness,” seeing the device as a way to bridge the gap between the novel and the play. He explains that “given his [O’Neill’s] zeal to lay bare the mechanisms underlying human interaction, O'Neill must have felt envious of his novelist colleagues, who could deal freely with human thoughts and feelings in long descriptive passages of great subtlety. For novelists, as well, the possibilities for expressing the subconscious drives in man had been enormously increased with the introduction of the stream-of-consciousness technique. It was presumably this psychoanalytically-inspired literary method which, as employed in Ulysses, incited O'Neill to try something similar in drama. In Strange Interlude he was to attempt no less than a fusion of two literary genres, the novel and the drama.”
One of Tornqvist’s queries is whether or not the “audible thinking (the thoughts and emotions of the characters) represent a conscious or unconscious level?” He decides that it is mostly conscious, as the way unconscious thoughts were traditionally expressed were in “seemingly incoherent, largely associate way[s].” However, we are still able to pick up certain deeper things from the asides, such as Marsden’s Oedipal complex and homosexuality.
Despite the frequent invocation of Marsden, Nina is the real focus of this play, which O’Neill called his “woman play.” Critic Kurt Eisen notes that “All the men in the play are fatally bound to her, and through her to each other. The action centers on her; in the first act she makes this clear when she tells her father, ‘No, I'm not myself yet. That's just it. Not all myself. But I've been becoming myself. And I must finish!’ (647). From this perspective all the men in the play exist mainly to help her achieve this self-realization.”
In the first act she is struggling with who she is, trying to break away from her father, assuage her guilt over not sleeping with Gordon, and figure out how she is going to atone. Her father wants to keep her in the house, taking care of him in his old age; Marsden wants her for his own; and she wants something she cannot have. Her sexual drive is too strong to mute, so she channels it towards the young, wounded soldiers that replace Gordon in her mind. But this is no feminist act of sexual liberation, as she seems to derive no physical pleasure from it and indeed seems tortured in her mind. She turns to Marsden as a new father figure for help, decides to marry and have a child with Sam, and ultimately seems unwilling to ask herself who she is and what she wants. There are no other notable women in this play—the Leeds mother is long gone, Mrs. Evans is a tool of the plot, Madeline is a convenient foil to reinforce Nina’s dotage—and Nina shows no interest in defining herself outside of men and patriarchal expectations. Even the child she has later in the play is male, his drives and needs subsuming her own. Ultimately, O’Neill’s “woman play” does not have many positive things to say about women.
