O'Neill And German Expressionism

WHEN BERTOLT BRECHT TOLD AN INTERVIEWER THAT "People like Georg Kaiser and his follower O'Neill have successfully applied quite new methods which are good and interesting even if their ideas don't coincide with my own," he had obviously not heard about O'Neill's protestations that he "did not think much" of Kaiser's plays, because they were "too easy" and "would not have influenced me." Despite his negative declarations concerning Kaiser, O'Neill's attempts to objectify inner experiences by means of the forms of a stylized theater have much in common with the techniques of the Continental expressionists. Many American critics, however, took O'Neill's remarks at face value and dismissed the possibility of his affinity with the German expressionists by merely quoting his denials. The adjective "expressionistic" has, of course, been applied to several of O'Neill's plays, but the tendency has been to minimize his ties with the Germans and to emphasize his indebtedness to Strindberg. John Gassner's observation that "O'Neill derived his expressionist technique directly from Strindberg and not from the late central European expressionists" is characteristic of the current evaluation of O'Neill. One looks in vain for Kaiser's name in the indexes of recent books on O'Neill, and even Robert Brustein, who lists nine modern playwrights—from Andreyev to Wedekind—as the sources of O'Neill's inspiration, omits any mention of Kaiser. Yet failure to account for the influence of the German expressionists in general and Georg Kaiser in particular makes it difficult to evaluate O'Neill's development as an experimenter with dramatic form.