The following descriptions are taken from the text of the play.
Eben Cabot – He is twenty-five, tall and sinewy. His face is well-formed, good-looking, but its expression is resentful and defensive. His defiant, dark eyes remind one of a wild animal's in captivity. Each day is a cage in which he finds himself trapped but inwardly unsubdued. There is a fierce, repressed vitality about him. He has black hair, moustache, a thin, curly trace of beard. He is dressed in rough farm clothes.
Simeon Cabot and Peter Cabot – [They are] tall men, much older than their half-brother [Simeon is thirty-nine and Peter thirty-seven], built on a squarer, simpler model, fleshier in body, more bovine and homelier in face, shrewder and more practical. Their shoulders stoop a bit from years of farm work. They clump heavily along in their clumsy thick-soled boots caked with earth. Their clothes, their faces, hands, bare arms and throats are earth-stained. They smell of dirt.
Ephraim Cabot – [He] is seventy-five, tall and gaunt, with great, wiry, concentrated power, but stoop-shouldered from toil. His face is as hard as if it were hewn out of a boulder, yet there is a weakness in it, a petty pride in its own narrow strength. His eyes are small, close together, and extremely near-sighted, blinking continually in the effort to focus on objects, their stare having a straining, ingrowing quality. He is dressed in his dismal black Sunday suit.
Abbie Putnam – [She] is thirty-five, buxom, full of vitality. Her round face is pretty but marred by its rather gross sensuality. There are strength and obstinacy in her jaw, a hard determination in her eyes, and about her whole personality, the same unsettled, untamed, desperate quality so apparent in Eben.
Young Girl
Two Farmers
The Fiddler
A Sheriff
Synopsis
Act 1, Scene 1
The play opens at the exterior of a farmhouse in New England. It is sunset on an early summer day in 1850. Eben Cabot enters and walks to the edge of the porch. He rings a bell to call in his half-brothers, Simeon and Peter, who emerge soon after Eben goes back inside. The two brothers begin to talk about gold in the west and the risk of leaving everything they have worked for here. Eben sticks his head out the window as the two brothers speculate over their father's disappearance to the west, saying that he hasn't left the farm in 30 years or more. They decide they can't go west until their father dies. Eben reveals himself then by saying he prays his father were dead. With one last look at the setting sun and the promise of the west, the brothers retreat inside for supper.
Act 1, Scene 2
This scene opens at twilight in the kitchen of the farmhouse. As the three brothers eat dinner, Simeon and Peter reprimand Eben for speaking ill of their father. Eben then unloads his hate for his father because Eben blames him for his mother's death. He denounces his father saying he is his mother through and through. Eben also reveals his grudge against his half-brothers for not helping or protecting his mother. He then leaves to visit Min, his local prostitute. As Eben leaves, his brothers remark on how like his father he is.
Act 1, Scene 3
Eben comes home late and wakes his brothers. He informs them that their father has remarried a 35-year-old woman and is on his way home. When Simeon and Peter realise the farm will go to her, they decide to go west. Eben desperately wants the farm because it belonged to his mother and he wishes to honor her memory. He offers to buy his brother's shares of the farm for $300 each. They tell him they will think about it, waiting to decide until they see their father's new wife and can see the money in person. However, as soon as Eben leaves the room, they decide to stop working the farm.
Act 1, Scene 4
The brothers reveal to Eben they won't be working on the farm anymore, so Eben goes to milk the cows while Peter and Simeon get drunk. Eben returns to the house after seeing his father and his new wife on the horizon. Peter and Simeon decide to leave the farm and sign the papers for Eben. They walk outside; taunt their father, Ephraim, and his new wife, Abbie; and then leave for California. Abbie begins to explore the house and runs into Eben. They are attracted to one another but fight over the future possession of the farm. The scene closes with harsh words between Ephraim and Eben.
Act 2, Scene 1
This scene takes place outside the farmhouse two months later. Abbie catches Eben on the way to visit Min, his choice prostitute. She tries to seduce him, but he has only a mind for owning the farm and leaves her. Ephraim enters and is transformed. He is now gentle and is coming around to the idea of Eben owning the farm. Abbie gets upset at possibly losing the farm to Eben and claims he was lusting after her. Ephraim wants to throw Eben off the farm, but Abbie convinces him that Eben is needed to do the farm work. She then suggests they have a son, and Ephraim promises to give her the farm if she does.
Act 2, Scene 2
Ephraim and Abbie sit in their bedroom talking about having a son. Ephraim tells the story of how he made the farm when he was only 20 years old and the terrible loneliness he has experienced with his wives. Abbie has no interest in his story, and he leaves. Abbie then goes to Eben's room and kisses him. He kisses her, but then, confused, pushes her away. However, caught in her power, he agrees to court her in the parlor that has been closed since his mother's death.
Act 2, Scene 3
Eben meets Abbie in the parlor where Eben talks about his mother, beginning to cry. Abbie comforts him, saying that she could be a new mom to him and asks him to kiss her. Eventually Eben gives in and admits he loves her and has since the first hour he met her.
Act 2, Scene 4
Abbie bids Eben goodbye as he heads for work. She makes him re-swear his love and then goes to get some sleep. Eben runs into his father and asks for their feud to be over. He believes his mother's soul is now at rest because he has taken revenge on his father and goes off to work laughing.
Act 3, Scene 1
Ephraim throws a party for the birth of what he considers his new son. Abbie sits in a chair, pale and unmoving. She keeps asking where Eben is. The party guests keep hinting that they know the son is Eben's but neither Abbie nor Ephraim catch on. Abbie goes upstairs and finds Eben, they kiss, and she says the baby looks just like him. Ephraim goes outside for air, and with a feeling that something's not at rest, goes to sleep with the cows.
Act 3, Scene 2
Ephraim runs into Eben later that night and tells him he will not have the farm now that Ephraim has a son. Eben becomes convinced that Abbie has been using him and confronts her about it once Ephraim goes inside and Abbie comes out. He says that he is going to leave, that he doesn't love her, and that she is a lying whore. Hysterical, she asks that if there is any way to prove that she didn't have a son with him to steal the land from him, would he ever love her again? He says yes, but that she isn't God, so there is no way. She promises that there is and Eben goes inside to get drunk.
Act 3, Scene 3
It is the morning after the party and Eben sits in the kitchen with his bag packed. Abbie comes downstairs and tells him what she has done to prove she loves him and wasn't lying. She has killed their son. Enraged, Eben condemns her and runs out to get a sheriff to take her away. Abbie faints.
Act 3, Scene 4
Ephraim wakes up, and Abbie tells him she has murdered the baby and that it wasn't his. He becomes detached and says he is going out to work. Before he leaves, Ephraim says she should have loved him and he would have protected her no matter what. Eben comes back and professes that he still loves her but that he told the sheriff. He demands to take some fault for murder. Abbie doesn't want him to, but he blurts it out the moment the sheriff arrives. The two get taken away together.
Influences
Desire Under the Elms was inspired by plot elements and characters from the Euripides play Hippolytus.[1] In it, Phaedra, Theseus' wife, attempts to seduce his son, chaste Hippolytus. After this fails and Hippolytus threatens to reveal her unfaithfulness, Phaedra commits suicide. Theseus finds a letter that Phaedra carried accusing Hippolytus of raping her. Enraged, Theseus (using one of three wishes that his father Poseidon promised him) curses his son with banishment or death. After Hippolytus is fatally wounded by an encounter with a bull, Artemis arrives to reveal the truth to Theseus, and Hippolytus dies after absolving his father.
The characters Eben, Abbie, and Ephraim roughly correspond with Hippolytus, Phaedra, and Theseus respectively. Both plays are driven by a love triangle between a father, a son, and a stepmother, and the tragedy arises from misguided actions made by the stepmother. In Phaedra's case it is her lust of her husband's son and the falseness of her letter. O'Neill takes this one step further in Desire Under the Elms and makes Abbie's misguided actions the begetting and murder of her child.[2]
In Desire Under the Elms: In the Light of Strindberg's Influence, Murray Hartman also saw strong parallels between Desire Under the Elms and the work of August Strindberg, writing "At any rate, there is hardly a plot element in the play that cannot be traced to one or more sources in Strindberg." He details several elements of O'Neill and Strindberg's biographies that are similar, and how they manifest in Desire Under the Elms, in addition to naming several specific works of Strindberg's, such as The People of Hemsö, The Bridal Crown, and The Son of a Servant. Specifically, he points out very similarly confused relationships with the writers' respective mothers and contentious relationships with their fathers. He also writes, "The basic situation, where the young son has seen his beloved mother worked to death by a hard father and then has had to bear the usurpation of her position by an aggressive stepmother, has its origin in The Son of a Servant." This can be seen in Desire under the Elms through Eben's opinion that Ephraim worked his mother to death and largely drives the plot.[3]
Sri Ram Centre Theatre (Mandi House, New Delhi, India, 2010) – A RAS production. Directed by Deepak Ochaney and Gajraj Nagar, starring Mukul Saran Mathur as Ephraim Cabot, Sanjeela Mathur as Anna Putnam, six performances.
Broadway (2009) – Transfer of the Goodman production; opened April 27, 2009 at the St. James Theater, 32 performances.
This play was adapted by Balwant Gargi (under the name "Balde Tibbe") in Punjabi for the Department of Drama and Dramatics at Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, Bangladesh, as the second-year final production of 2015. It was held on 26 November 2016 and directed by Reza Arif.
Shaw Festival, (2021) - Desire Under the Elms was initially scheduled as a part of the festival's 2020 season, but the season was eventually cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the production was moved to the fall of the 2021 season. Directed by Tim Carroll, set by Judith Bowden, lighting by Kevin Lamotte, and costumes by Joyce Padua.
Related Research Articles
Theseus was a divine hero in Greek mythology, famous for slaying the Minotaur. The myths surrounding Theseus, his journeys, exploits, and friends, have provided material for storytelling throughout the ages.
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the U.S. the drama techniques of realism, earlier associated with Chekhov, Ibsen, and Strindberg. The tragedy Long Day's Journey into Night is often included on lists of the finest U.S. plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. He was awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. O'Neill is also the only playwright to win four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama.
In Greek mythology, Hippolyta, or Hippolyte, was a daughter of Ares and Otrera, queen of the Amazons, and a sister of Antiope and Melanippe. She wore her father Ares' zoster, the Greek word found in the Iliad and elsewhere meaning "war belt". Some English translations prefer "girdle". Hippolyta figures prominently in the myths of both Heracles and Theseus. The myths about her are so varied it is thought that they may be about different women. The name Hippolyta translates as "she who unleashes the horses", deriving from two Greek roots meaning "horse" and "let loose".
In Greek mythology, Phaedra was a Cretan princess. Her name derives from the Greek word φαιδρός, which means "bright". According to legend, she was the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë, and the wife of Theseus. Phaedra fell in love with her stepson Hippolytus. After he rejected her advances, she accused him of trying to rape her, causing Theseus to pray to Poseidon to kill Hippolytus, and then she killed herself.
In Greek mythology, Pittheus was the king of Troezen, city in Argolis, which he had named after his brother Troezen.
Hippolytus is an Ancient Greek tragedy by Euripides, based on the myth of Hippolytus, son of Theseus. The play was first produced for the City Dionysia of Athens in 428 BC and won first prize as part of a trilogy. The text is extant.
In Greek mythology, Hippolytus is the son of Theseus and an Amazon, either Hippolyta or Antiope. His downfall at the hands of Aphrodite is recounted by the playwright Euripides. Other versions of the story have also survived.
Phèdre is a French dramatic tragedy in five acts written in alexandrine verse by Jean Racine, first performed in 1677 at the theatre of the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris.
In Greek mythology, Antiope was an Amazon, daughter of Ares and sister to Melanippe, Hippolyta, Penthesilea and possibly Orithyia, queens of the Amazons. Two sisters, Orithyia and Antiope, co-ruled the Amazons. Antiope may have been the wife of Theseus and mother to his son Hippolytus of Athens, but differing sources claim this was Hippolyta.
Phaedra's Love is a play by British playwright Sarah Kane. It was first performed in 1996 at London's Gate Theatre, directed by the author. The play is a modern adaptation of Seneca's Phaedra. The play explores the brutal nature of love, social relations, nihilism and belief through the example of an affair between a queen and her stepson.
Hippolyte et Aricie was the first opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau. It was premiered to great controversy by the Académie Royale de Musique at its theatre in the Palais-Royal in Paris on October 1, 1733. The French libretto, by Abbé Simon-Joseph Pellegrin, is based on Racine's tragedy Phèdre. The opera takes the traditional form of a tragédie en musique with an allegorical prologue followed by five acts. Early audiences found little else conventional about the work.
The Bull from the Sea is a novel written by Mary Renault, first published in 1962. It is the sequel to The King Must Die and continues the story of the mythological hero Theseus after his return from Crete.
Phaedra is a Roman tragedy written by philosopher and dramatist Lucius Annaeus Seneca before 54 A.D. Its 1,280 lines of verse tell the story of Phaedra, wife of King Theseus of Athens and her consuming lust for her stepson Hippolytus. Based on Greek mythology and the tragedy Hippolytus by Euripides, Seneca's Phaedra is one of several artistic explorations of this tragic story. Seneca portrays Phaedra as self-aware and direct in the pursuit of her stepson, while in other treatments of the myth, she is more of a passive victim of fate. This Phaedra takes on the scheming nature and the cynicism often assigned to the nurse character.
Desire Under the Elms is a 1958 American film version of the 1924 play Desire Under the Elms written by Eugene O'Neill. The film was directed by Delbert Mann from a screenplay by O'Neill and Irwin Shaw. The cast included Sophia Loren as Abbie, Anthony Perkins as Eben, Burl Ives as Ephraim, Frank Overton as Simeon, and Pernell Roberts as Peter. The film was nominated for Best Black and White Cinematography at the Academy Awards and Laurel Awards in 1959. It was also entered into the 1958 Cannes Film Festival.
Phaedra is a 'concert opera' in two acts by Hans Werner Henze. Its first performance was given at the Berlin State Opera on 6 September 2007. The work is a co-commission and co-production with the Berliner Festspiele, Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels, Alte Oper Frankfurt and the Vienna Festival.
Welcome to Thebes is a 2010 play by Moira Buffini. It premiered on 15 June 2010 in a production at the Olivier Theatre of the Royal National Theatre in London directed by Richard Eyre.
Hippolyte, tragédie tournée de Sénèque is a French translation of the Latin play of Seneca, called Phaedra. Its Belgian translator, Jean Yeuwain, takes some liberties with the original. It was first published in 1591.
The Phaedra complex is an informal, non-scientific designation to the sexual desire of a stepmother for her stepson, though the term has been extended to cover difficult relationships between stepparents and stepchildren in general.
War Goddess is a 1973 adventure film directed by Terence Young and starring Alena Johnston, Sabine Sun, Rosanna Yanni, Helga Liné, and Luciana Paluzzi. It was a co-production between Italy, France, and Spain.
Cawdor is a narrative poem by Robinson Jeffers. In 1909 Big Sur, a desperate young woman named Fera, trying to save her father, agrees to marry a much older man named Cawdor only to fall for that man’s son, Hood, sending the two men on a deadly trajectory of jealousy and confusion.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
