O’Neill’s journey

NO writer more than Eugene O’Neill exemplifies Yeats’ notion of the artist forced to choose “perfection of the life, or of the work.” After a suicide attempt at 23, the man who would eventually be considered the founding father of American drama resolved to turn himself into a playwright. He gave up the heavy boozing that was killing him (though self-destructive fires continued to rage within), poured himself into his writing at the expense of everything and everyone around him, and became in the end his plays.

Ric Burns’ emotionally stirring documentary “Eugene O’Neill,” which airs Monday on PBS as part of the American Experience series, tells this story without falling into hagiography. Written by the invaluable O’Neill biographers Arthur and Barbara Gelb with Burns, and narrated by Christopher Plummer, the film does exactly what you wish such works to do: establish a context that enriches your appreciation of the subject without gilding matters or denying the obvious.

As veteran critic Robert Brustein and others delicately point out in the film, O’Neill’s stature as the preeminent American playwright (an assessment that endures despite being heavily disputed from the beginning) doesn’t negate the fact that he wrote some very bad plays. Nor does it mean that he realized Yeats’ elusive artistic perfection, though “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” the nakedly confessional work he tried to suppress from public view, comes close.

Even the most ambitious dramatists would be reluctant to swap their biographies for O’Neill’s. Born in a hotel room in Times Square to a tyrannical actor father and a depressive, morphine-addicted mother, he was to rue on his deathbed the cruel symmetry of ending his days in a hotel room, at age 65 in Boston, from a progressive neurological disease, which made it impossible for him to write for nearly his entire last decade.

For a man whose phenomenal industry was a substitute addiction for the alcoholism always threatening to reemerge (a legacy of illness that claimed his brother Jamie at 45), this literary silence must have been a kind of living death. What’s unusual -- and serves as the documentary’s narrative focus -- is how O’Neill produced his best work at the sunset of his career, ultimately transforming his manifold sorrows into genuine tragedy.

Finding his voice

THE achievement came at a staggering price. Never at a loss for poignant precision, Tennessee Williams said that “Eugene O’Neill gave birth to the American theater, and died for it.” Lloyd Richards, the Tony-winning director and former head of the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, opens the film with the question: “What did it cost to be Eugene O’Neill?” For him, the answer is “a mother, a father, a happy marriage, children,” and “the many wives he tried to have because he didn’t know how.”

Traumatic repetition held sway in O’Neill’s personal life. Professionally, however, there was progress. After elaborate and often-botched experimentation in dramatic forms, huffing and puffing poetic bombast, and the slow metabolizing of a lifetime of family torment, he found his voice as a dramatist and, in turn, gave America its own.

Ironically, the further he went from the source of his creativity-inspiring wounds, the more he was pursued by them. In his hillside retreat on a 158-acre estate near Danville, Calif., O’Neill became haunted by memories of the seedy tavern and boardinghouse in New York where he took a fistful of pills in an attempt to kill the pain for good. Perhaps even more agonizingly, he recalled his family’s New England summer cottage, which, far from being idyllic, only made excruciatingly apparent his parents’ ineptitude for domestic happiness.

From 1937 to 1943, in that Northern California mountain hideaway, isolated with his third wife, Carlotta, he notably produced “The Iceman Cometh,” set in the old dive that almost stole his life, as well as “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” both of which attempt to come to terms with the awful familial wreckage. It was his most fruitful period (“A Touch of the Poet” and “Hughie” were also completed), which was fortunate as time was running out.

Not that he was a slouch before then. O’Neill, let’s not forget, was granted the Nobel Prize in 1936 (the only American dramatist to win the award) and had already amassed three Pulitzers (for “Beyond the Horizon,” “Anna Christie” and “Strange Interlude”). His fame was widespread enough to earn him mention in Cole Porter’s 1934 ditty “You’re the Top.” But, as the documentary makes clear, he wouldn’t hold the same canonical place without that final run of less equivocal masterpieces.

Burns has assembled a stellar who’s who from the theater world to attest to O’Neill’s rough genius; the most enlightening witnesses, not surprisingly, are playwrights. Though neither John Guare (author of such off-kilter comedies as “The House of Blue Leaves” and “Six Degrees of Separation”) nor Tony Kushner (whose “Angels in America” single-handedly reinvented political drama in our time) springs to mind as an O’Neill disciple, both acknowledge a profound debt that has less to do with style than seriousness.

In short, O’Neill made possible a cultural space in which American drama could be seen as the aesthetic equal of fiction and poetry. No longer would playwriting be associated with, as Guare remarks, the commercial triviality of “Ben Hur” or “The Count of Monte Cristo,” the play in which O’Neill’s father barnstormed the country to the detriment of his once-promising talent.

Throughout the documentary, the greatest single line of criticism about O’Neill is palpable though unacknowledged. It comes from Stark Young, who in a 1926 review of “The Great God Brown,” wrote that “what moved us was the cost to the dramatist of what he handled.”

In many respects, this is borne out in Burns’ film, which finds its pathos not in the brief readings by actors of O’Neill’s words but in the story of the man who penned them. The performances (an assortment of crucial monologues), with the exception of Plummer’s trenchant portrayal of James Tyrone expressing regret for selling out as an actor, are not well modulated (Al Pacino offers a hammy Hickey in a scene from “The Iceman Cometh”) or well filmed (unseemly close-ups undermine Robert Sean Leonard as Edmund recounting his one fleeting moment of cosmic content at sea in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”).

More resonant is the scholar Edward Shaughnessy’s contention that what we find irresistibly compelling in O’Neill is the artistic reckoning with family suffering that never found healing when there was the chance.

Kushner, unfailingly brilliant though prolix, cuts to the heart when he praises O’Neill for his steadfast recognition that there are “great complexes and abysses of meaning underneath the surface of life, and that our job as artists and people is to dig or go deep” and not flinch from what we find.

By diving into O’Neill’s dark depths, Burns’ documentary reveals the terrifying sacrifices behind an artist’s deceptively serene monument.