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    The Hairy Ape
    The Hairy Ape
    The Hairy Ape
    Ebook69 pages55 minutes

    The Hairy Ape

    By Eugene O'Neill

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Although one of his lesser known one-act plays, "The Hairy Ape," written in 1922, followed the success of his first two Pulitzer Prize-winning plays. This drama follows the disturbing dehumanization of Yank, a ship's fireman and a representation of the lower class. He feels superiority from his brute strength until he meets Mildred, the well-intentioned daughter of an extremely wealthy steel magnate. She initiates Yank's uncertainty and disillusionment concerning his place in society and humanity, leading to his bitter anger and ultimate demise. While the character of Long introduces hints of socialist ideas in the play and Paddy wistfully recalls the days before machinery, these commentaries serve to enhance the powerful conviction of the terrible human toll of industrialization. "The Hairy Ape" was received largely as thought-provoking entertainment in O'Neill's day, and it continues to provide readers today with an insightful view of a pivotal time in American society, ultimately exploring human nature and a society that would endanger and disassociate many of the hard-working people within it.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateJan 1, 2013
    ISBN9781596742994
    The Hairy Ape
    Author

    Eugene O'Neill

    Eugene O’Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the US the drama techniques of realism, earlier associated with international playwrights Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, and August Strindberg. The tragedy Long Day’s Journey into Night is often numbered on the short list of the finest US plays in the twentieth century, alongside Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

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    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      A fabulous piece of symbolism. I wonder how it plays in this day and age. The dialect is a little much, but it certainly helps put Yank apart, emphasizing that he doesn't belong.
    • 2/5
      Setting: This anti-technological play is set on a ship and in New York during the industrial age.Plot: Yank, a stoker on an ocean liner searches for belonging and ultimately dies.Characters: Robert Smith (protagonist)- "Yank" attempt to think; Paddy- Irish, represents past connections with nature; Long- British, socialist; Mildred (antagonist) anemic, Yank's subconscious, falseSymbols: cage, statue of the thinker, the charactersCharacteristics: Divided into 4 scenes of realism and 4 scenes of surrealismMy Reaction: I felt that O'Neill's comments about the dehumanization caused by industry ring true, but I don't think he realized that it was a perversion of religion that oppressed the worker and that socialism took away individualism
    • 4/5
      Story as Old as Time

      Universally themed dramas retain their force and impact years after they first appear as they reflect the core emotions and thinking of each generation that see and read them. These themes reach across time and nationalities because they tackle what seem to be intractable issues. Such is the case with Eugene O’Neill’s nearly one hundred year old play The Hairy Ape. In modern terms, readers and audiences can focus in four important aspects of the play reflecting issues we struggle with today: the one percent vs. everybody else (top deck vs. stokehold), the meaningfulness of work (the pride of Yank), the expression of masculinity (Yank’s strength), and our place in the world (Yank’s existential quandary).

      The play opens in the stokehole of an ocean liner, where workmen feed the furnace while they banter crudely among themselves. In particular one, Yank, talks about this strength and the fact that he and his companions are what power the ship, the force, if you will, that moves the world. Yank is confident, strong, prideful, and superior to those around him.

      Then from above deck Mildred, daughter of the Steel Trust tycoon, who has just told her aunt of her interest in social work, descends into the stokehold. Upon seeing the men and Yank, she calls them and him filthy beasts, Yank a hairy ape, and faints. Afterwards, Yank rages and seems to be battling with the incident as an existential experience.

      Three weeks later, after returning to the New York port, Yank still struggles with his encounter with Mildred and his anger. On Fifth Avenue, he accosts churchgoers, punching one of them. He lands in jail for 30 days, there encountering prisoners who tell him about the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies). Upon release, he seeks them out, but they reject him because of his violent proclamations, especially his wish to blow up the Steel Trust run by Mildred’s father.

      Next, he visits the zoo, where he encounters a caged ape, explains that they are seen as one and the same. He releases the ape. The ape attacks him and tosses him in the cage. Before dying, Yank utters these words: “He got me, aw right. I'm trou. Even him didn't tink I belonged.”

      Not only does The Hairy Ape demonstrate there’s nothing much new in 21st angst, but stripped of its setting, reimagined in our own lives, it mirrors and explains the frustration felt by many today. It’s a story that’s been retold many times since and some might say acted out in the politics of our day.

    Book preview

    The Hairy Ape - Eugene O'Neill

    THE HAIRY APE

    BY EUGENE O'NEILL

    A Digireads.com Book

    Digireads.com Publishing

    Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-3349-9

    Ebook ISBN 13: 978-1-59674-299-4

    This edition copyright © 2011

    Please visit www.digireads.com

    CONTENTS

    CHARACTERS

    SCENE I

    SCENE II

    SCENE III

    SCENE IV

    SCENE V

    SCENE VI

    SCENE VII

    SCENE VIII

    THE HAIRY APE

    A Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life In Eight Scenes

    CHARACTERS

    ROBERT SMITH, YANK

    PADDY

    LONG

    MILDRED DOUGLAS

    HER AUNT

    SECOND ENGINEER

    A GUARD

    A SECRETARY OF AN ORGANIZATION

    STOKERS, LADIES, GENTLEMEN, ETC.

    SCENE I: The firemen's forecastle of an ocean liner—an hour after sailing from New York.

    SCENE II: Section of the promenade deck, two days out—morning.

    SCENE III: The stokehole. A few minutes later.

    SCENE IV: Same as Scene I. Half an hour later.

    SCENE V: Fifth Avenue, New York. Three weeks later.

    SCENE VI: An island near the city. The next night.

    SCENE VII: In the city. About a month later.

    SCENE VIII: In the city. Twilight of the next day.

    SCENE I

    The firemen's forecastle of a transatlantic liner an hour after sailing from New York for the voyage across. Tiers of narrow, steel bunks, three deep, on all sides. An entrance in rear. Benches on the floor before the bunks. The room is crowded with men, shouting, cursing, laughing, singing—a confused, inchoate uproar swelling into a sort of unity, a meaning—the bewildered, furious, baffled defiance of a beast in a cage. Nearly all the men are drunk. Many bottles are passed from hand to hand. All are dressed in dungaree pants, heavy ugly shoes. Some wear singlets, but the majority are stripped to the waist.

    The treatment of this scene, or of any other scene in the play, should by no means be naturalistic. The effect sought after is a cramped space in the bowels of a ship, imprisoned by white steel. The lines of bunks, the uprights supporting them, cross each other like the steel framework of a cage. The ceiling crushes down upon the men's heads. They cannot stand upright. This accentuates the natural stooping posture which shovelling coal and the resultant over-development of back and shoulder muscles have given them. The men themselves should resemble those pictures in which the appearance of Neanderthal Man is guessed at. All are hairy-chested, with long arms of tremendous power, and low, receding brows above their small, fierce, resentful eyes. All the civilized white races are represented, but except for the slight differentiation in color of hair, skin, eyes, all these men are alike.

    The curtain rises on a tumult of sound. YANK is seated in the foreground. He seems broader, fiercer, more truculent, more powerful, more sure of himself than the rest. They respect his superior strength—the grudging respect of fear. Then, too, he represents to them a self-expression, the very last word in what they are, their most highly developed individual.

    VOICES. Gif me trink dere, you!

    'Ave a wet!

    Salute!

    Gesundheit!

    Skoal!

    Drunk as a lord, God stiffen you!

    Here's how!

    Luck!

    Pass back that bottle, damn you!

    Pourin' it down his neck!

    Ho, Froggy! Where the devil have you been?

    La Touraine.

    I hit him smash in yaw, py Gott!

    Jenkins—the First—he's a rotten swine—

    And the coppers nabbed him—and I run—

    I like peer better. It don't pig head gif you.

    A slut, I'm sayin'! She robbed me aslape—

    To hell with 'em all!

    You're a bloody liar!

    Say dot again! [Commotion. Two men about to fight are pulled apart.]

    No scrappin' now!

    To-night—

    See who's the best man!

    Bloody Dutchman!

    To-night on the for'ard square.

    I'll bet on Dutchy.

    He packa da wallop, I tella you!

    Shut up, Wop!

    No fightin', maties. We're all chums, ain't we?

    [A voice starts bawling a song.]

    "Beer, beer, glorious beer!

    Fill yourselves right up to here."

    YANK. [For the first time seeming to take notice of the uproar about him, turns around threateningly—in a tone of contemptuous authority.] "Choke off dat noise! Where d'yuh get dat beer stuff? Beer, hell! Beer's for goils—and Dutchmen. Me for somep'n wit a kick to it! Gimme a drink, one of youse guys. [Several bottles are eagerly offered. He takes a tremendous gulp at one of them; then, keeping the bottle in his hand, glares belligerently at the owner, who hastens to acquiesce in this robbery by saying:] All righto, Yank. Keep it and have another." [YANK contemptuously turns his back on the crowd again. For a second there is an embarrassed silence. Then—]

    VOICES. We must be passing the Hook.

    She's beginning to roll to it.

    Six days in hell—and then Southampton.

    Py Yesus, I vish somepody take my first vatch for me!

    Gittin' seasick, Square-head?

    Drink up and forget it!

    What's in your bottle?

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