Even if Eugene O'Neill's plays did not succeed, they would be interesting, because they are, to a greater degree than most plays, not about men but about man, and since they are about man they are also inevitably about God.  But O'Neill brought a great talent to the great questions, so his plays do succeed, though perhaps not completely, and they are more than interesting.  Three of them, chosen with little knowledge of the others so perhaps not chosen well, add up powerfully to an intriguing attempt at an answer:  The Hairy Ape,The Emperor Jones,(both one-act plays) and Lazarus Laughed (much longer) do not overlap or even necessarily imply each other, but they fit together surprisingly well.

If The Hairy Ape and The Emperor Jones had to stand alone, without Lazarus Laughed to balance them (if O'Neill's youthful pessimism had not been tempered by experience), O'Neill's message would be thoroughly cynical.  Both plays are studies of tormented personalities, which break under stress.  Both are studies of single characters, characters which are universal but not flat, and individuals without losing their identity as symbols.  The "hairy ape" is a stoker on a steamship in a "world he never made" who finds out as the play progresses that had he had the opportunity he would have made a vastly different world. The Emperor Jones shows a Negro being stripped of his pretensions in quick, tortuous steps by fear, and fear leaves him a far from pretty sight.  Both men are dead at the end of their journeys, and O'Neill has constructed the plays so that their ends are foregone conclusions, inevitable from their beginnings.

The emperor in The Emperor Jones is a Negro ex-porter named Brutus Jones.  The name is an obvious attempt to indicate that unlike Caesar, this emperor carries his assassin within him.  Brutus was a porter until he killed a man in a crap game, and was then on a chain gang until he killed a guard.  He escaped and went to the West Indies, where, through a combination of luck and ingenuity, he gained absolute control of an island in less than two years.  He levied oppressive taxes and sent the money to a foreign bank.  He knew that he could not keep the game going indefinitely and counted on timing and speed to get him off the island before the axe could fall.

The axe is just at the top of its swing as the play opens, and it has done its work as the play ends.  Since the hands on the handle turn out to be his own, Brutus' speed does not get him out from beneath it.  The natives have decided to kill him before the play starts, and they do so in the last scene, but the being they kill is no longer a man, much less an emperor.  Fear has torn him apart.

Much of O'Neill's point in The Emperor Jones is revealed in the stage directions.  Jones' disintegration is a gradual process, complete within the play, from beginning to tumultuous end.  The stage directions give three outward indications of his inner progress:  a drumbeat increases steadily in volume and rapidity, his clothes disappear, and at the end of each scene he enters the forest differently.

Brutus has convinced the natives that he can only be killed by a silver bullet; he has had one molded for his own gun so that he can go out in style if worst should come to worst.  The natives, once they decide to rebel, attempt to whip up their courage and ward off the big magic of the silver bullet by beating s tom-tom.  As the first of eight scenes ends the drumbeats are coming at a normal pulse-rate, seventy-two per minute.  The stage directions, at appropriate moments during the first five scenes (when Brutus' fear becomes suddenly focused), say simply that it becomes louder and faster, but at the end of scene six it has become "triumphant"; as scene seven closes it has a "baffled but revengeful power"; and as scene eight opens it "seems on the very spot, so loud and continually vibrating are its beats."

The disappearance of Jones' clothing and his manner of entering the forest provide more obvious indications of his deterioration.  He loses his clothing like this:

Scene one)     He is wearing a panama hat and a gaudy light blue and scarlet uniform with brass buttons and gold braid and chevrons.
Scene two)     There is no change.
Scene three)   His hat is gone and his uniform is torn in several places.
Scene four)    He gets rid of his coat and spurs.  He is naked from the waist up.
Scene five)    His shoes are ruined; he discards them during this scene.  His pants are in tatters.
Scene six)     His pants are no longer more than a breech cloth.

Scene one)  ". . . with studied carelessness, whistling a tune, he saunters out of the doorway."
Scene two)  "He plunges boldly into the forest."
Scene three)   ". . . he plunges wildly into the underbrush .  .  . "'
Scene four)  ". . . and Jones leaps away in mad flight .  . .'
Scene five)  ". . . he rushes off, crying with fear--"
Scene six)  "His voice reaches the highest pitch of sorrow, of desolation."
Scene seven)  "Jones lies with his face to the ground, his arms outstretched, whimpering with fear."

In the dance there is a last and desperate hope.  He can surrender to the evil.  But this hope must end in death, for the "forces of evil demand sacrifice."  The head of a huge crocodile rises from the river and moves toward the remains of an emperor.  Jones prays, and is rewarded with the thought that he has one bullet left--the silver one--and he uses it on the crocodile, symbolically killing himself.  As the scene ends he is lying on the ground "whimpering," supremely pathetic.  In the last scene Jones is killed by the natives, who have molded silver bullets.  During the night, it turns out, he has made a complete circle in the forest, and has ended where he began.  The play ends with the words of a cockney Englishman, upon hearing that Jones was killed with silver bullets, "Gawd Blimey, but yer died in the height o' style, any'ow!"  The statement is so far from true that it is pathetically humorous.

Brutus Jones starts out as an absolute monarch and is completely broken,  The disappearance of his clothing and the progress of his visions indicate that the process is not disintegration, but rather a paring away of everything superficial.  O'Neill is not saying that fear is a destructive force, that under its influence we fall apart.  He uses fear to reverse the process of civilization, to expose man and the darkness of his heart.

The main character in The Hairy Ape is a stoker named Yank.  He is the king of the forecastle, the "most highly developed individual" in a group of men whose appearance suggests Neanderthal man.  They are totally physical, and brute force and animal nature have reached their peak in Yank.  He feels secure in the knowledge that he is on the bottom; the fact that he needs no one beneath him suggests to Yank that he is the vital cog in the machinery.  If he stopped, everything would stop.  He "belongs."  But his self-image is shattered when a lady in white, daughter of one of the men who owns the ship, visits the stokehole and calls him a beast.  He can no longer persuade himself that he belongs and, yearning for revenge, he tries to find a way to blow up her father's steel mills.  He is unsuccessful and, with no hope of regaining his old identity and little hope of finding a new one in the world of men, he goes to the zoo to return to the apes, and again he is rebuffed.  The ape kills him and puts him in the cage.

The controlling image in the play is one of steel; there are references to it in every scene.  The stokers are described as "imprisoned by steel"; the bunks in the forecastle resemble the "steel framework of a cage"; the stokehole has a steel floor, steel walls, steel furnaces, and is always filled with metallic sounds.  Yank says that "de whole ting" is steel and that he is steel.  At the bottom, he holds "de whole ting" up, like an Atlas supporting the world; without him everything would stop.  He gets an intense satisfaction from belonging.  But the ship (all steel) is owned by a man named Douglas (father of Mildred, the lady in white), who "makes 'arf the bloody steel in the world."

It is when Mildred calls Yank a "beast" (later translated by the stokers into "hairy ape") that he begins to lose faith in his indispensability.  Perhaps the whole steel structure would not fall down if he stopped working.  He has been struck at the very roots of his pride, and so, accompanied by Long, a socialist, he leaves the ship to seek revenge.  Long leads him first to Mildred's "clarss," a group of "marionettes," totally affected, who show that they have escaped the jungle no more than Yank as they rave over the "monkey fur" in a store window.  Yank attacks them but they do not even notice him.  He points to a skyscraper and again claims to be steel, but even Yank himself is no longer convinced.

He is finally dragged off to jail and imprisoned in steel, where he hears about the Industrial Workers of the World, who are supposedly bent on wrecking society.  When he gets out of jail Yank offers them his services (to blow up the Douglas mills) but here too he is rebuffed.  They are interested in legal action, and Yank is too bitter (idealistic?) to want a reform any less than total.  As the I.W.W.  "Wobblies" kick him out of their office, they too call him an ape.  So Yank has been robbed of his place in the steel society, and will not be given a chance to tear down that society.  All forward routes are blocked, so for lack of another choice, he turns backward, and goes to the zoo and a real "hairy ape," also imprisoned in steel.  Yank asks to join the ape's brotherhood, to join the ape in a wrecking spree, a spree that would end only when the two were shot (again by steel).  But Hank is to be disappointed one final time.  He is less ape than he is man, and the ape crushes him and puts him in the cage, again imprisoning him in steel.  But this time he is dead, and O'Neill intimates that he "at last belongs."

Man's plight here is even more tragic than it is in The Emperor Jones.  He is neither totally physical nor totally spiritual, and the middle ground is no more than a painful, uncertain limbo.  Yank envies the ape: "Sure, you're de best off!  Yuh can't tink, can yuh?  Yuh can't talk neider.  But I can make a bluff at talkin' and tinkin'--a'most get away wit it--a'most--and dat's where de joker comes in.  (He laughs.)  I ain't in oith and I ain't in heaven, get me?  I'm in de middle tryin' to separate 'em, takin' all de woist punches from bot' of 'em.  Maybe dat's what dey call hell, huh?"

Yank is pictured several times in "the attitude of Rodin's 'Thinker,'" trying desperately to grasp something he knows is there, but cannot quite reach.  In the first scene he asks, "What's tinkin' got to do wit' it?"  When he later says that he is trying to "tink" the stokers react with mocking laughter.  Yank first totally rejects the spiritual, and then when he tries to attain it he fails.

Long's socialist answer is not O'Neill's.  O'Neill has no faith in social reform, and even Yank realizes that a few more meals and a few more dollars will not cure what ails him.  ("Gimme a dollar more a day and make me happy!") The steel society is rotten at its roots.  O'Neill mourns with Paddy, an older stoker, the passing of the days when men belonged to their ships, and got their pleasure out of moving them.  The work was hard, the pay was lousy, and the food was terrible, but a man could take pride in his work and pleasure in his closeness to the working of the world.  But that feeling is impossible now, and money does not replace it.  Yank discovers that "Dis ting's in your inside, but it ain't in your belly.  Feedin' your face . . . dat don't touch it.  It's way down--at de bottom."  Yank's problem, like Brutus Jones', is a spiritual one.  Without a place in the steel society, a society that is hollow anyway, Yank does not have the means to find his own identity.  He can go neither forward nor backward, and his death--as was Jones'--is inevitable.

All of this leaves man in a position which is more than merely ridiculous.  He does not fit in an artificial society, but once stripped of the trappings of that society, he turns out to be evil, and surrendering to that evil necessitates death.  Guided by neither instinct nor reason, the only way he can "belong" is to die.  There are no alternatives.

At least there are none in The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape. Lazarus Laughed gives an alternative which negates both plays without making them untrue.  The basis of the truth of both is the absence of God and the resulting fact of death--they carry those assumptions to their consequences.  The basic statement in Lazarus Laughed is that there is no death, and without death there is no fear. Lazarus Laughed would be extremely difficult to stage.  The stage directions call for a huge cast and several hundred costumes, masks, and wigs.  The main character must laugh nearly continuously, and he must not seem silly.  And he must in-spire nearly everyone else to laugh.  He must also constantly repeat statements like "Death is no more!" and "There is only life!" and "Fear is no more!" and "There is only laughter!"  The mood O'Neill is reaching for requires poetry, and his talent, big as it is, is simply not poetic.  Like most authors he paints better hells than heavens.

Printed, though, where it is possible to ignore the stage directions and skip the repetitions, the play is fascinating.  It begins just after Christ has raised Lazarus from the dead and ends with Lazarus' second death at the court of Tiberius Caesar.  During the time that Lazarus has the unique opportunity of being alive knowing what it is like to be dead, he spends most of his time laughing with joy.   When he is asked why he is laughing and what he has found out, he replies that there is no death.  He is pressed for clarification and asked for details, and only replies (with some variation, of course) that there is no death.  Everyone in the play is impressed, in varying degrees, with the significance of what he is saying, but no one really understands him.  A few seem for a while to understand, and they become like him, but as soon as he is out of sight they forget.  He is misinterpreted and maligned and finally tortured--and still he laughs.

O'Neill, having explored the implications of a Godless universe, here explores the implications of the opposite assumption.  If the story of Lazarus is true, then there is a God.  So O'Neill expands the Lazarus story, and uses it as a framework for the idea that since a materialistic, mechanistic society is based on the assumption that there is no God, death is considered final in such a society, and the fear of death is the most powerful weapon in the hands of that society's rulers.  If there is a God we have eternal life whether we want it or not ("There is Eternal Life in No . . . and there is the same Eternal Life in Yes!  Death is the fear between!") and in that case a mechanistic society can only exist because the people who have found out that there is no death are almost never in a position to report their discovery.  Those people who believe that there is no death have taken from the rulers' hands their most powerful weapon and are thus the most dangerous people in a mechanistic society.

The true nature of a mechanistic society is hidden from those within the society (they cannot believe in Satan if they do not believe in God) so it is possible for a while to be extremely dangerous without being recognized--the society denies the existence of the alternative, so it cannot recognize it when it appears.  And this is Lazarus' position.  He knows that there is no death and that society is based on believing in death.  But since, within the society, death is an assumption rather than a doctrine, the people within the society do not recognize the importance and the danger of Lazarus' denial of death.  So for a time they regard him as a hero.  He must eventually be killed for being out of control, but first he will have a chance to personify the alternative.

And personification is the best he can do.  He cannot convince.  ("The greatness of saviors is that they cannot save!  The greatness of Man is that no god can save him .  .  . ")  Lazarus can repeat loudly and often that there is no death (as can O'Neill), and the strength of his personality will persuade many to act as if they believed.  But once he and his strength are gone, neither the exclamation points nor the repetition will compel belief.  Belief requires a leap, a personal, intentional, irrevocable leap, and all Lazarus can hope to do is to be a good enough personification to persuade someone to take the leap.

Lazarus is of course a type of Christ, and his mission is Christ's mission.  His eternal soul must perform well enough within the bounds of his human body (which can be killed and inevitably will be killed) to show as many people as possible that there is a God.  God, when He created man, bound himself to respect man's freedom, which in practical terms means that God promised to stay out of sight.  Until the time comes when God reveals himself, and it is no longer possible to believe otherwise, those people who believe in God must be the light of the world.