The Straw (play)

The Straw is a play about a young lower-class woman named Eileen Carmody who is diagnosed with tuberculosis. She is sent to Hill Farm Sanatorium for treatment and while there meets a patient named Stephen Murray. Stephen Murray is a writer and Eileen helps him pursue his career. While doing so, Eileen falls in love with Stephen Murray and ends her engagement to Fred Nicholls, a man she has known since childhood. Eileen's case of TB gets worse while Murray's case of TB gets better and he is able to leave Hill Farm. Eileen confesses her love and the love is not returned. Months later Murray returns to Hill Farm to find Eileen in worse condition than when he had left. In attempt to make her well, he pretends to love her and wants to marry her. In doing so, he has an epiphany and realizes that he truly does love Eileen.

In several of Eugene O’Neill's plays, the underlying moral and motivators have been questioned. These theories and ideas often represent what these characters are dealing with inside and out. Dealing with The Straw specifically, there are arguments created in "The Straw as an Unexpressionist Play" on page 77 that say, "Characters O’Neill introduces are intensely penetrated sufferers who are ensnared between two forces: inner self and outside force. To O’Neill this ‘self’ is the end result of the unrelenting ascendancy of both nature and society. Hence, there could be an aura of determinism imminent in his works which ushers his characters to their doom." As readers we can control our preliminary thoughts onto what the outcome for our characters will be, but referring back to "The Straw as an Unexpressionist Play" the ultimate fate is already to be determined by underlying factors. In The Straw, our characters are said to rely on each other because during this time they are all they have, but on page 77 of "The Straw as an Unexpressionist Play," the author adds, "This is not just a veracious in his drama. Indeed, O’Neill's own agitated life assisted him to act as a responsive and tender-hearted companion to traverse with his creations to the heart of the abyss to come up against the demon and stand against it."[1]

Eugene O'Neill is infamous for his novelistic dramas and the difficulty of recreating his stage directions. The directions given throughout his collection of plays have been considered hard to recreate.[2] These stage directions also made it quite difficult for O'Neill to find common ground with the producers who wanted to buy the play. Looking closer at The Straw, O'Neill's objections can be documented in a letter to George C. Tyler, who had begun the process to buy the play. The argument started because of Tyler's commentary about the coughs throughout the play. These details, however, were crucial to O'Neill. O'Neill was actually diagnosed with tuberculosis, the disease that is dealt with heavily in the play, so these seemingly irrelevant details were what really created the reality of the play for O’Neill. O'Neill tells Tyler, "It is a play of the significance of human hope and the T.B. background of the action is as important as the action itself in bringing out my meaning. Secondly: There are only about three coughs in the whole play and not one spit. A careful reading of the script will show you this statement Is true. Thirdly: As I took great care to impress upon Mr. Westley, I regard weighing the scene as one of the very best, technically and artistically, that I have ever written and, outside of a few cuts in the dialogue which may prove necessary, I will not consent to change it."[3] He goes on to tell Tyler that he believes he is not thinking of his play when directing it, but some other play he has created. O'Neill's ends his letter to Tyler with, "I have no hope that it would be produced elsewhere in any immediate future; but I do know that I can get it published in book form, and I would rather have it judged that way than have my whole meaning misinterpreted……..You sincerely think one way about this play. I just as sincerely believe another, and that you are absolutely wrong, root and branch."[3] It is clear that Mr. O'Neill feels passionately about his plays and wants to make sure that they are depicted precisely how he feels they should be, but there have been few to explore this idea. Although the resources dealing with The Straw are scarce, in Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts by Dowling, it is revealed that Eileen Carmody, the female lead in The Straw, was based on a fellow Irish American patient that O’Neill met during his own time spent in the sanatorium, Catherine Mackay. On page 99 in Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts, it says, "O’Neill's portrayal of Eileen in his stage directions faithfully describes the actual Mackay: "Her wavy mass of dark hair is parted in the middle and combed low on her forehead, covering her ears, to a knot at the back of her head. The oval of her face is spoiled by a long, rather heavy, Irish jaw contrasting with the delicacy of her other features," and her shape is "slight and undeveloped" (CPI, 729 as cited in Dowling, 2014, p. 99) This can lead us readers to assume that The Straw was constructed in a biographical type of way, thus helping understand O'Neill's desires to maintain his stage directions. Just like Stephen Murray in The Straw, O'Neill also spent a brief time in the sanatorium while suffering from tuberculosis and went through many of the same symptoms as Murray. It can also be noted that O'Neill, before his professional playwriting career, wrote for the newspaper, just like Murray. To solidify the idea that O'Neill was in some ways creating a biographical context, I would like to draw attention to the closing that O'Neill used in a letter to one of his doctors from a sanatorium. Throughout the letter he shares health updates about himself and closes with, "If, as they say, it is sweet to visit the place one was born in, then it will be doubly sweet for me to visit the place I was reborn in – for my second birth was the only one which had my full approval".[4]

• The full text of The Straw at the Internet Archive