. ..... ..... - - - k . A - . , ., Page fight THE MICHIGAN DAILY' Sunday, May 26; 1957- aSndo v .v 26,1957 THE MICHIGAN DAILY EUGENE O'NEILL e'gun in 1951, the study this year investigated political participation and encountered odd situations With 'Journey's' Success, He Enters A New Phase Of Popularity and Interest By SARAH DRASIN Daily Staff Writer SITH THE staggering success of his gargantuan play, Long Day's Journey Into Night, which recently was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, Eugene O'Neill, dead now' for nearly four years and consid- ered dead as a playwright for many years before, has recaptured his place as "the" American play- wright of our day. This fact is not only acknow- ledged by audiences who have lived through the great emotional ex- perience of seeing the four hour Journey, but by authors and critics themselves, who, after thinking OTNeill's day had passed, have sud- denly come to realize that it is indeed not over, nor will it be over for some time to come. One of those who never .lost faith in O'Neill's power and magic, however, is Edwin Engel, assistant professor of English at the Univer- sity. Shortly before O'Neill's death, he wrote a critical w o r k on O'Neill's plays, "The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O'Neill," Har- vard University Press, 1953. To him, as to a good many others, Eugene O'Neill is and always has been, "without a doubt America's foremost playwright, far surpass- ing any of his contemporaries and ranking with the greatest of our time - Ibsen, Stindberg, Chekov and Shaw." THE SCANDINAVIAN countries have an abiding interest and admiration for O'Neill, Prof. Engel points out, and on the strength of this he will travel there next fall to deliver a series of lectures on O'Neill. Prof. Engel's own interest in the playwright began in the early 1930's at the University of LAN Z headquarters sold exclusively at COLLI NS \ v S . , ' - f1 * 4 e f.RVED.S.EAT'. ';i;;;r' . II'TUrRPgETEO ttI E-LEG-4NT I-ALIM td " COTTo NY 15Pomet-IA V.'...4iIGH SquA1ftE as;':: :. N'ECKLINE TbuCHEO "4 d AT ThE S14ou1bERS OR TAEd ON WLBER.TY Sizes S-)5 Z9 <;:_ STATE and LIBERTY Chicago, "when all sorts of excit- ing things were being done. O'Neill was a 'hot' product then and all drama held a fascination for me. I would sometimes see three or four plays a week to try and sati- ate this fascination. O'Neill held a great attraction for me then, and his attraction, I believe, is just as great for others as- well." He notes that a revival of another of O'Neill's plays, Moon for the Misbegotten, is now on Broadway, following demands for O'Neill after Journey's success. Determining what went into making O'Neill what he was and still is, is a "most confusing" task, according to Prof. Engel, and "not something you can try to explain in so many pat words. His life was a long set of traumatic experiences and from it came a man in search of something." A brief sketch of his life makes it easy for us to imagine the, agonies O'Neill must have suffered. Born a Roman Catholic, the con- ditions of his life and personality soon tore him from actual belief in Catholicism. Yet he craved reli- gion as a balm for his troubled mind. All through his life he was haunted by his apostasy in conflict with his need for religion. IN HIS relationship with his fath- er, famous actor James O'Neill, he found another great conflict. Though admired on the stage, the senior O'Neill was despised by his' son for his tight-fistedness and for an attitude which the younger O'Neill felt destroyed his mother. For his mother, he felt a great sense of closeness and sympathy, mixed with guilt feelings shared with the guilt which O'Neill felt was his father's. He suffered from a deeply troubled conscience on these ac- counts and alternately searched for an answer to this suffering and- punished himself. These personal agonies O'Neill transformed almost intact to the plots of plays, and as the title to Prof. Engel's book sug- gests, his heroes are indeed haunt- ed. Once on the stage, they take on another dimension, universal- ity. The tides of O'Neill's troubled life are "transmuted" into the tides of universal life, and O'Neill's struggles become the struggles of every man: "life versus death, love versus hate, faith against scepti- cism and the confusion of illusion and reality." It takes little effort to see how the lifestream of O'Neill's agon- ized real life flows into the tor- think he was welterweight cham- pion of the world in the 30's." After interviewing is. completed, results are coded and punched on IBM cards. A group containing a card for each respondent is called a deck. Several decks are made containing different combinations of questions. For one -interview it was necessary to code 11 IBM cards. Some of the simpler cards can then be run through a sorter. This machine separates the cards ac- cording to any combination of col- umns and drops them into slots. For instance, the cards might be divided into two groups, those who voted for Eisenhower and those who voted for Stevenson in the last election. CARDS CAN also be run on a . collator so that those cards in one deck that correspond with those in another deck on a speci- fied question can be collected to- gether. Part of the student's parti- cipation in the program is develop- ing his own analysis of the survey data. For this he evolves several hypothses and makes a deck, using questions applying to them. He See AREA, Page 17 CENSUS TRACTS-An aerial map of Detroit is used to pick area rando of city blocks and then particular respondents are drawn from these oi 'l x::r>:::;. . LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT-A scene from the Broad- way production at the Helen Hayes Theatre, featuring Florence Eldridge, James Robards, Jr., Bradford Dillman and Fredric March. It was directed by Jose Quintero. ABOVE-Joseph Adelson, Elizabeth Windsor, Margaret Rose and Philip Prince take a few minutes off in Survey Research Center's basement coffee room. BELOW-Patricia Heiss punches IBM cards on a special machine that checks punches already recorded on the cards. If there is a disagreement, bells start ringing, and the cards must be hand checked with tally sheets. ) tured lives of the characters of whom he writes, and, indeed, of whom he is one. In the plot of Long Day's Journey Into Night, it is almost universally agreed that O'Neill has portrayed quite ex- actly his own life. In Journey, as in O'Neill's real life, the father is a famous actor, but a tyrant, hated by his son. The mother, like all the mothers of O'Neill's plays, and like his own mother, is the object of the hero's love, supposedly driven to dope addiction by the father's tyranny. "BUT HERE, unlike his former attempts to find the answer to his own life problems in his play," Prof. Engel points out, "he has come to some sort of a realization -a realization about his mother and about himself." From the beginning of O'Neill's writing, we can see this revelation taking place. The deep preoccupation with his mother was first revealed in De- sire Under the Elms, written in 1923, Prof. Engel explains. After the position of O'Neill's feelings, he seems to make a concerted at- tempt from then on to find the answers to it, to salve his haunted conscience and find his own peace. All through his following plays, the themes of a woman-a mother most often-a haunted hero and a search prevail. Strange Inter- lude, written in 1928, is about a woman who is "all things to all men-daughter, mother and mis- See THE RISE, Page 16 I.II Store Bikes this summer for only $400 U U Please the graduate with a lasting gift. Chester Rob- erts' tradition of fine gifts is your assurance of care- ful selection. Shop now, for the key of remembrance at . . C32 ESout RQeESes 312 South state street 9a~ute4 - TWO DAYS FREE SERVICE STUDENT BIKE SHOP. 1319 South University BEST WISHES FOR A SUCCESSFUL FUTURE We are happy to have been able to bring yOu the finest pleasure in smoking. It is our intention to continue to offer a complete pipe smoker's service in the years to come. You can't afford to Smoke less than the Finest. PIPE CENTER 118 East Huron - Opposite County Bldg.