Mourning Becomes Electra

Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), a trilogy by Eugene O'Neill. [Guild Theatre, 157 perf.] In The Homecoming, the New England wife Christine Mannon ( Alla Nazimova) has been having an affair with Captain Adam Brant ( Thomas Chalmers) while her husband, Brigadier‐General Ezra Mannon ( Lee Baker), is away fighting in the Civil War. Christine's daughter, Lavinia ( Alice Brady), who hates her mother and secretly loves Brant, suspects the truth and wheedles a confession from him. The Mannons' son, Orin ( Earle Larimore), has always been more favored by his mother and is berated by the General when he returns home. This resentment leads Christine to poison her husband and make the death look natural. But Lavinia discovers the poison and pleads to her beloved dead father, “Don't leave me alone! Come back to me! Tell me what to do!” In The Hunted, Lavinia tells Orin what has happened and convinces her brother that they must be revenged on their mother. They follow Christine to a rendezvous she has with Brant, and when Christine departs, Orin kills Brant. Christine, on learning of Brant's death, commits suicide. The tale concludes with The Haunted in which Orin is plagued with a growing sense of guilt and has come to blame himself for all the family deaths. Indeed, he has come to suspect that the love he had for his mother was not entirely natural and that it has been transferred to his sister. Unable to conciliate the furies that hound him, he kills himself. Lavinia once again must don her mourning. She orders the house shut up, knowing she will live there alone for the rest of her life. “It takes the Mannons to punish themselves for being born,” she concludes. The Theatre Guild performed the five‐hour resetting of the classic Oresteia in a single evening, with a dinner intermission between the first and second plays. Robert Benchley, writing in The New Yorker, called it “a hundred times better than Electra because O'Neill has a God‐given inheritance of melodramatic sense.” It was revived in 1971 by the American Shakespeare Festival and in 1972 by the Circle in the Square.