Mourning Becomes Electra

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Mourning Becomes Electra, dramatic trilogy by O'Neill, produced and published in 1931. Based on the ancient Greek legend, its three parts are: (I) Homecoming; (II) The Hunted; (III) The Haunted.

I. At the close of the Civil War, Brigadier‐General Ezra Mannon, descendant of a Puritan family, returns to his New England home, where he is awaited by his wife Christine and daughter Lavinia. During his absence and that of her adored soldier son Orin, Christine has had a liaison with the clipper captain Adam Brant, son of Ezra's brother and a family servant, who intended to avenge his mother's disgrace, but instead fell in love with the sensual Christine. Mother and daughter hate each other, for Lavinia is the victim of an inner conflict between her Mannon heritage and the elements of her nature inherited from Christine. Herself in love with Brant, she suspects her mother's relations with him and forces from him the truth. Peter Niles, a childhood friend, loves Lavinia, but she tells him that she hates love and will never marry. When Ezra comes home, it is revealed that he hates his son Orin for possessing Christine's love, which he himself never attained. Pretending to give him medicine, Christine poisons her husband from a box which Brant supplied her, and which Lavinia discovers.

II. Orin returns, to find his father dead and his mother distracted and changed. He resumes an old affair with Hazel, Peter's sister, but Lavinia persuades him to join her revenge plot. They follow Christine to a rendezvous on Brant's ship, and, after she leaves, Orin kills Brant. When Christine learns of this, she commits suicide.

III. Lavinia and Orin go on a long voyage that takes them to the South Sea islands. By the time they return, Orin, harried by guilt and remorse, has grown to resemble his father, while Lavinia, freed of the puritan repressions, has the beauty and amorality of her mother. She wants to marry Peter and now encourages Orin's affair with Hazel, but Orin, preoccupied with writing a confession, breaks with his fiancée, makes an incestuous proposal to Lavinia, and shoots himself. Lavinia makes love to Peter, but he leaves her, repelled by her eagerness. She concludes, “Love isn't permitted to me. The dead are too strong!,” and enters the shuttered house, to spend the rest of her life alone with the memory of the Mannon dead.

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.