The Hairy Ape

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Hairy Ape, The, expressionist play by O'Neill, produced and published in 1922. It is symbolic of the perversion of human strength by technological progress.

In the cramped forecastle of a transatlantic liner, Yank—brutal, stupid, and profane—is the recognized leader of the stokers, who are the ultimate products of a society subservient to machines. When Mildred Douglas, daughter of the ship's owner, makes a slumming visit to the stokehole, she is shocked by the lurid atmosphere, and faints at encountering Yank's unashamed brutality. Although he is completely adapted to this environment, he now discovers that there is a world in which he does not belong, and “the Hairy Ape,” as his friend Paddy calls him, becomes sullen and morose, beginning to think of his position. In New York on Easter Sunday, he swaggers in dirty dungarees up Fifth Avenue, trying in vain to insult the aristocratic strollers, who politely ignore him. Arrested, he is sent to Blackwell's Island, where the prisoners, misunderstanding his rebellion, advise him to join the I.W.W. Rejected by the labor organization, he goes to the zoo to see the ape, the only creature with whom he can now feel kinship. When he liberates it, to help him wreak destruction, the beast crushes him to death.

Hairy Ape, The (1922), a play by Eugene O'Neill. [Provincetown Theatre, 120 perf.] Richard “Yank” Smith ( Louis Wolheim) is an apelike coal stoker on a luxury liner. Mildred Douglas ( Mary Blair), do‐gooder daughter of the line's president, visits the boiler room and faints at the sight of the brutish man. Her behavior causes Yank to question his worth and his place in society. He leaves the ship to stroll up Fifth Avenue, where his boorish behavior lands him in jail. Cell mates urge him to join the “Wobblies,” but the union refuses him. Confused and upset, he heads for a zoo. After asking a gorilla, “Where do I fit in?” he attempts to release the animal. But the beast, like everyone else, misunderstands him, and kills him. One of O'Neill's most popular early plays, the innovative Provincetown Players production was welcomed by Alexander Woollcott as “a bitter, brutal, wildly fantastic play of nightmare hue and nightmare distortion.” It has enjoyed occasional revivals, including a dynamic mounting by the Wooster Group in 1997.