Subversive Theatre

The following is an essay on "Theatricality and Humanism" in Eugene O'Neill's THE HAIRY APE by Erika Rundle of Mount Holyoke College. It is reprinted from eOneill.com.

The Hairy Ape's Humanist Hell:
Theatricality and Evolution in O'Neill's
"Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life"

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Notes/Works

"We [will] pass on to some as yet unrealized region where our souls, maddened by loneliness and the ignoble inarticulateness of flesh, are slowly evolving their new language of kinship."

Eugene O'Neill, "Strindberg and Our Theatre," 1924

On 7 September 1921, the first theatrical adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' best-selling novel Tarzan of the Apes (1912) opened on Broadway at the Broadhurst. It was a curious undertaking for the new playhouse, which had raised its curtain several years earlier in 1917 with a production of George Bernard Shaw's Misalliance, hailed for its portrayal of the "new woman." In 1918, just months after Shaw's polemic drama closed and the nineteenth amendment gave women the right to vote, serialized filmic adaptations of the Burroughs novels began to be made. With the advent of Tarzan and Jane, the gender stereotypes Shaw sought so earnestly to expose on his pulpit stage returned with the seductive mass appeal of the cinematic melodrama. The first entry in the series, Tarzan of the Apes, proved wildly popular, and the Tarzan craze quickly became an international phenomenon. By 1921, the year Eugene O'Neill began adapting his 1917 short story "The Hairy Ape" for the theater, Adventures of Tarzan (a fifteen-picture serial) had "completely sold out in the United States, Canada, Australia, Central and Western Europe, Asia, South America, Central America, Mexico, the Indies, the Pacific Islands, and the Philippines" (Essoe 43). Needless to say, playwright and producer George Broadhurst's American adaptation of the British play Tarzan of the Apes, a success in London and a hit in the provinces, seemed like a sure thing.

English actor Ronald Adair, a former heavyweight boxer and eighteen-year veteran of the vaudeville circuit, was brought to New York to play Tarzan. Greta Kemble Cooper, of the famous Kemble-Siddons acting dynasty, played the aristocrat Lady Alicia Clayton�Tarzan's fully civilized cousin�to great critical acclaim, boosting the show's respectability. Audiences who paid to witness the assimilation of a bellicose and silent savage into the rarefied world of the British elite had found Burroughs' parable�a thinly-disguised panacea for American anxieties in the wake of Darwin�mirrored by a theatrical economy in which the lovely Miss Cooper brushed shoulders with Adair, an actor whose animal magnetism and physical prowess placed him in league with the various animals, real and costumed, who populated the stage . . . not to mention the wings.

Not surprisingly, the anonymous New York Times critic thought the "best scenes" of Tarzan of the Apes were

those in which . . . Adair . . . shows the gradations of the savage's education in the English language. Mr. Adair's labored pronunciation of the first simple words, coupled with an acrobatic skill that enables him to scramble up trees and occasionally swing from one limb to another�these entitle him to first rank in a cast that is long and various (22).

The only other actors singled out for praise are Cooper and the "two [uncredited] performers who represent apes," whose "capering about and infinite jabbering" (22) helped reinforce, through a racially-coded performance of simian chaos, the superiority of their uncostumed�and thus effectively white�brother, whose submission to the protocols of English grammar, which required a different kind of mimicry altogether, gave the audience such pleasure. In spite of these spectacles, the reviews were mixed overall, the critics' chief complaint being that this ambitious play, in four acts and ten episodes, "tells [its story] episodically and not always convincingly" (22). A Playbill blurb laments that while "there were real lions and monkeys onstage . . . the Ape Man managed to swing from tree to tree for only thirteen performances."

According to Gabe Essoe, author of Tarzan of the Movies, "Tarzan's failure in the legitimate theater contrasted heavily with the box office success of the serial. . . . [T]he critics raged at the play insisting that it should have been left `to the films, as it is unsuitable behind the footlights'" (44). The desire for such an outlandish story to be dramatized "convincingly" was just as much the result of the realist expectations the early silent entries in the Tarzan filmography created and achieved, title cards and all, as the current domination of Broadway by domestic realism. For Tarzan's success as a fantasy character in novels and films had already begun to transform his apocryphal journey from nature to culture into a master narrative of American masculinity, white racial superiority, and Western political hegemony in an increasingly global economy shaped by the forces of modernity.

The footlights reviewers found so unsuitable for this jungle tale represented the danger of foregrounding, literally and figuratively, Tarzan's fictional nature. In the theater, audience members would be confronted with the limits of verisimilitude, spoiling the masterful illusions cinema was able to uphold through the suturing of disparate images, naturalizing what would otherwise appear artificial at best, at worst�kitsch. An alternative to the lure (and trap) of realism in the face of such demanding dramas was performed just a few months later, however, when Broadway audiences encountered an "ape man" who could satisfy the manifold requirements of the "legitimate theater," if not help to create them.

Like Burroughs, O'Neill was concerned with the social ramifications of Darwinism, but his musings on adaptation and selection as mechanisms of survival (or extinction) garnered their representational power from the history of theater itself, calling upon both classical and modern modes and practices rather than relying on the racist fantasies of imperial domination so prevalent in early cinema, as Burroughs had done. The Hairy Ape: A Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life in Eight Scenes opened in New York at the Playwrights Theater in March 1922, to predominantly good reviews, and quickly transferred to Broadway in April, playing at the Broadhurst's "twin"�the Plymouth�for 127 performances.

Written in a mere three weeks in December 1921, O'Neill's play tells the story of the stoker Yank, who, in the author's words, "has lost his old harmony with nature, the harmony which he used to have as an animal and has not yet acquired in a spiritual way" ("Eugene O'Neill Talks" 61). The play unfolds in eight scenes, the first four on board an ocean liner bound for England, and the second four in New York City upon the ship's return. The play merges the genre of the station drama, particularly in its incarnation as German expressionism,1 with a Darwinian journey of transformation, as the brutish but sensitive Yank searches for a way to adapt to the economic and cultural realities of 1920s New York.

However, "The Hairy Ape is not merely an allegory of individual self-consciousness," writes Gerald Siegmund, "but in its cultural references and stereotypes, such as the allusions to Edgar Rice Burroughs's early twentieth-century Tarzan stories, it is also an allegory of American masculinity and . . . self-image in relation to the Old World" (168). It is no coincidence that the action of the first half of the drama unfolds in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, a liminal territory halfway between the "New" and "Old" worlds, signifying an American identity in limbo, still coming to terms with its past�and imagining its future. O'Neill's choice of the name "Yank" for his alienated protagonist, who, when pressed, can barely bring to mind his given name�Robert Smith�makes this symbolism only too clear.

The play's title itself suggests the kind of taxonomic confusion under which Yank exists: in addition to his given name and nickname, he is violently named (and then renamed) in a crucial scene where his antagonist, the young steel heiress Mildred Douglas, calls him a "filthy beast," and another foil, the melancholy sailor Paddy, rephrases the insult in zoological terms, coining the troubling moniker "hairy ape." The rest of the drama consists of Yank's attempts to come to terms with these interpellations and their implications and consequences. By staging the power of the "imperialist gaze," the authoritative look that categorizes difference according to hierarchies of race, class, and species, O'Neill evokes the practices of nineteenth-century ethnographic display, where Yank/Robert Smith becomes at once a "savage" (nonwhite, nonwestern, and nonhuman) and an actor (surrogate, symbol, and sacrifice), shackled to the violently constitutive performances such roles have traditionally required.

In his classic study of O'Neill, Contour in Time, Travis Bogard writes that The Hairy Ape "deals with what may loosely be called `anthropological' subject matter, expressed in terms of a search for the origins of life and making reference to atavistic remnants of primitive man appearing in modern society" (242).2 Accordingly, Theatre Magazine columnist Carol Bird, in her 1922 omnibus review entitled "Enter the Monkey Man," felt compelled to ask the following questions:

Are we experiencing an atavistic throw-back? Are we reverting to primordial instincts? Is civilization boring us, and do we long for things primitive? Are these suppressed desires creeping out in even our entertainment? Certain recent Broadway plays seem to reflect a tendency to glorify life as it was lived in, say�Cave Man days? Indeed, we have almost become Darwinian in our playtaste. Monkey-men are jibbering their way into the theatrical stronghold. [. . .] Like "Tarzan," for instance! [. . .] And the latest of all these, "The Hairy Ape" (102).3

Unlike the historically derogatory representation of race and ethnicity on stage, which limited the performance of the "human" to white men only,4 the ape-man, a theatrical figure whose species difference both fascinated and repelled, seemed poised, as Bird wrote, to "crowd the orthodox stage hero from the boards." This threat to the figure of the traditional leading man�so assuredly white it didn't even merit comment�was in truth a crisis of the representative power of the humanist myth. If minstrelsy had finally begun to lose its galvanizing power in the early twentieth century, the primitivist ape-man, who gestated on the vaudeville stages of the nineteenth century, had only begun to gain momentum.5 But rather than providing a degraded image of animality against which "humanity" could be read (as minstrelsy had provided an image of blackness against which whiteness became visible), O'Neill's "hairy ape" complicated the dualistic model of opposition exemplified by the black/white dichotomy with an evolutionary model that stressed continuity, reciprocity, and change.

If Yank, coded according to the most damning categories of race, class, and species, was, according to the playwright, "really yourself, and myself. [. . .] He is every human being" (Mullett 35), American drama had now begun to reflect an understanding of human identity as a series of transformations played out across the vast scale of evolutionary time rather than the static, discrete forms authorized by divine creation.6 Explicit in this understanding was O'Neill's typical critique of Christianity; more implicit, perhaps, but just as powerful, was his inspired re-vision of nineteenth-century popular performance practices, in which all forms of "humbug" were assembled in response to the quickly-receding myth of the Enlightenment subject, a movement inspired in large part by the principles of evolutionary theory. As one early critic observed in relation to The Hairy Ape, "O'Neill [found] himself for the first time under the mental and emotional cloud of late nineteenth-century science and the spiritual chaos it produced" (Skinner 105).

Bird's tongue-in-cheek assertions notwithstanding, reading The Hairy Ape as an evolutionary drama works in stark contrast with the preponderance of O'Neill criticism from 1922 to the present, which foregoes any serious discussion of species. In the 1920s, an era when American dramatic literature, infused with the new forms of post-war European modernisms and the imperatives of a diverse population struggling to define itself, had begun to work through differences of race, class, ethnicity, and gender in search of a distinctly American identity, O'Neill's play relied on an array of diverse and sometimes contradictory styles and structures, a fact that caused "many critics [to be] baffled or irritated" (Sheaffer 27) and has resulted in ongoing scholarly debates about its ultimate meaning. While all O'Neill's work enjoys continued relevance, and his plays frequent revivals, critiques of The Hairy Ape offer an unusually broad range of approaches and an unprecedented degree of dissension. Because the play is indicative of various intersecting paradigms�historical, metaphysical, and, particularly, theatrical�it yields different meanings under differing analytical circumstances and disciplinary lenses.

Some connections within the O'Neill oeuvre itself are obvious: scholars reliably trace a direct line from The Hairy Ape back to its ancestor The Emperor Jones (1920), finding in both plays an episodic progression/regression from rational to instinctual, and vice versa, dramatized through an expressionist idiom. Writing in 1953, Edwin A. Engel characterizes this internal movement as Darwinian, but offers a typical misunderstanding of speciation as a ladder-like hierarchy (rather than a "tree of life" diagram, or cladogram) and confuses ontogeny (individual development) with phylogeny (species development), a rhetorical move that skillfully advanced a humanist worldview under the guise of scientific fact:7 "Structurally, the two plays are similar, with the evolutionary ladder figuratively occupying the center of the stage. Here the plays part company, for The Emperor Jones depicts the protagonist's descent of the ladder whereas The Hairy Ape reveals his thwarted effort to ascend" (49).8 In addition to the humanist presumptions that frame the movements of "ascent" and "descent" in terms of their approach or retreat from a mythical summit of personhood, Engel's comparison also takes for granted the identities of O'Neill's protagonists. If these central roles are typically indicated through the plays' ironic�and therefore semantically expansive�titles, how can we conclude that The Hairy Ape, which operates on a figurative and literal level simultaneously, refers exclusively to a human character, or, for that matter, to any character at all? Engel's gesture toward a Darwinian reading of the play is reductive at best, misleading at worst, and symptomatic of a general, mid-century misapprehension regarding evolutionary paradigms.

When critics do engage seriously with the discourse of species, the elements of O'Neill's play that deal with primate kinship are usually compared with non-dramatic genres. Accordingly, The Hairy Ape has been categorized as one entry in a series of twentieth-century literary texts that purposefully confuse the figures of human and ape, including short stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann ("News About a Cultured Young Man," 1900), Franz Kafka ("A Report to an Academy," 1917), and, later, Aldous Huxley's Ape and Essence (1948).9 While these European writers used satire and science fiction to underscore social hypocrisy, more proximate intertexts may be found in the work of Jack London and Rudyard Kipling (authors with whom O'Neill was familiar and of whose work he was fond), whose investment in Darwinism allowed them to project western social hierarchies onto subaltern cultures through the figure of "nature" and under the cover of action/adventure and young adult genres.10 Other scholars have located an affinity with the folk songs and stories of Paul Bunyan and Joe Magarac, bear-like men whose brute strength is set against the power of industrial labor; these were contiguous American types who triumphed over a modern and increasingly urban world through sheer physical prowess and rugged individualism, the same qualities that benefited Tarzan in the jungles of Burroughs' mythical "Africa."11

But while O'Neill's drama (and the character of Yank), can be context-ualized within these literary and folk genealogies, the heritage�and future prospects�of the "hairy ape" are, I will argue, inherently theatrical and thoroughly Darwinian. O'Neill, in fact, is the driving force at the forefront of a new genre that melds these two concerns in form as well as content, creating what I call a "primate drama," a twentieth-century American hybrid of classical and modernist structures that treats the subject of evolution, both explicitly and implicitly, through the disciplines of performance.12 Scholars and critics trying to fit The Hairy Ape into a pre-existing literary or theatrical tradition have relied almost exclusively on humanist assumptions to make their case; in the primate drama, however, these epistemological "givens" are replaced by attention to performance and evolution as posthuman constructs.13 The myriad essays that explore the play of difference in O'Neill's text�whether focused on race, class, gender, or their conflation, whether revealing essentialist or deconstructive strategies, or both�produce readings bent on recuperating "humanity" as a foundational aspect of the play.14

The two exceptions to this trend are significant, and my work in this context is indebted to them. Una Chaudhuri's groundbreaking analysis of The Hairy Ape mobilizes a series of historical and cultural intertexts inspired by the interdisciplinary field of critical animal studies. Chaudhuri focuses on the final scene of O'Neill's drama, which is set in a zoo, an institution whose history merges the concerns of theatrical spectacle and scientific classification. She reads this "zoo story" as an "encounter of difference," tracing the intertwining modernisms of zoo and stage as they merge in early twentieth-century New York, and arguing that the climax of O'Neill's play is "a classic piece of `boundary work'" that uses "animality to configure human subjectivity in performance" (140).

The only other writing that focuses on the discourse of species appears in Reading Zoos, where Randy Malamud offers an extended reading of the trope of the cage in The Hairy Ape, and associates the play with a number of (mostly literary) texts that examine human-animal relations from a zoological perspective. While Malamud does not understand O'Neill's drama in relation to theatrical modernisms, per se, or theater history in general, as Chaudhuri does, his analysis, supported by Foucault, is concerned primarily with the human-animal interface that takes place in zoos, and the visual and taxonomic discipline this scopic regime enacts upon its participants, both human and nonhuman.

In light of Chaudhuri's and Malamud's work, and the theatricalized ape-man figure Bird so astutely recognized as a zeitgeist of post-WWI American drama, I propose a new approach to O'Neill's play, one that necessitates attention to species (and other ontological categories) as an animating force in the play's themes and structures. Central to my argument are the vexed interrelations among three intersecting figures: the stoker Yank; Rodin's sculpture The Thinker, evoked repeatedly in O'Neill's stage directions; and the gorilla who appears in the final scene. My discussion of the play will therefore alternate among these constructs�man, statue, and ape�as they participate in and perform a critique of humanism. Taking into account both text and performance, I will explore how the play connects its concerns with spectatorship and authority (that is, with the politics of theatricality) to questions of difference in American society, and how these themes intersect with an "animal difference." This approach will also allow me to ask how popular conceptions of evolutionary theory, and their intersection with secular and religious cosmologies as well as various movements in theatrical modernism, have shaped the world of the play. Finally, informed by the field of animal studies as well as classical dramatic theory, I will ask and answer anew two deceptively simple questions: What is the play's genre? Who is its protagonist?

II.

When O'Neill set about adapting his short story "The Hairy Ape" for the stage, he dispensed with its original ending, in which Yank joins the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), refusing to offer a simple solution to what he saw as the universal condition of humanity: "The subject here is the same ancient one that always was and always will be the one subject for drama, and that is man and his struggle with his own fate. The struggle used to be with the gods, but it is now with himself, his own past, his attempt `to belong'" ("Eugene O'Neill Talks" 61). This struggle is clear already in the early sea plays. In The Moon of the Caribbees and Bound East for Cardiff, written during the same years (1916-17) that O'Neill was at work on his short story "The Hairy Ape," characters named Yank and Paddy first appear. As concerned as these early dramas are with race and ethnicity, especially in the representation of Irishmen struggling to define themselves against various thinly-sketched black characters, the plays' themes are predominantly Romantic: love, death, memory, desire.

Within this framework, however, O'Neill occasionally inserts the concept of animality, an identity many of the characters in the sea plays must work to resist. The first use of the "hairy ape" epithet is found in The Moon of the Caribbees, where O'Neill introduces the discourse of species as a corollary to other, more established themes. Initially, this concern with "the animal self" overlaps with other potential identities, but later emerges fully formed as the title of the final "sea play," The Hairy Ape. In the earlier play, Paddy himself is called an "'airy ape" by another sailor, Cocky, but in the latter he deflects this insult onto Yank, reversing the initial conditions of his own "naming" by reproducing the "imperialist gaze" of the racist and sexist Cocky, who characterizes the Caribbean women on board the Glencairn as "bloody organ-grinder's monkey[s]" (532).15 This mode of representation destabilizes previous understandings of "belonging" in the sea plays, reorganizing long-standing kinship models along the lines of species difference rather than those of race, ethnicity, or gender. Moreover, by invoking a vaudeville tradition involving a monkey who is forced to perform in order to survive,16 Cocky activates the links between species, performance, and slavery, themes that are fully elaborated in The Hairy Ape.

The unstable and itinerant distinctions O'Neill continues to draw between man and beast, therefore, become central to The Hairy Ape, a play that features many of the same characters we meet in the sea plays, a representative array of what O'Neill now terms, perhaps ironically, "the civilized white races." As such, these stokers seem to constitute a classical choral entity, or group character, for the stage directions in the very first scene explain that "except for the slight differentiation in color of hair, skin, eyes, all these men are alike." O'Neill replaces the measured chanting of the Greek chorus of citizens with "a confused, inchoate uproar swelling into a sort of unity," and tells us "the men themselves should resemble those pictures in which the appearance of Neanderthal man is guessed at. All are hairy-chested, with long arms of tremendous power, and low, receding brows above their small, fierce, resentful eyes" (121).

The simian qualities hinted at in the earlier plays are now in full force, as are O'Neill's interventions in the representational practices of natural history, in which evolutionary movement is regularly illustrated as a linear, teleological progression from ape to Neanderthal to modern (male, white) human (see Fig. 1). Rather than reproducing the humanist logic of such schemas, however, O'Neill immediately complicates the fixity of the two-dimensional "picture" by theatricalizing it, allowing these intermedial species to move outside the realm of scientific knowledge and into a rhizomatic field (see Fig. 2) of historical and cultural associations, where they are linked not only with apes, but also with slaves and actors� in other words, with the intersecting fields of science, history, and theater.

Figure 1: Example of a typical linear illustration of human evolution, in which a teleological "progression" from ape to man is implicit. Illustration: D. L. Cramer, 1979. Jacket cover from The Origin Of Species by Charles Darwin. Used by permission of Gramercy Books, an imprint of Random House Value Publishing, a division of Random House, Inc.

Correspondingly, O'Neill moves the setting for this evolutionary drama out of the ordered confines of the museum, with its static displays and dioramas, and into the realm of theater, where the observed may not only return the look, but control it�or at least attempt to. The plot of The Hairy Ape, in fact, revolves around the very act of looking; O'Neill analyzes the constitutive gazes of actors and their audiences on a number of public "stages," from the immediate stage upon which the play will be performed to a series of synonymous spaces within the drama itself. As David R. Roediger has noted regarding this aspect of the play, "looks both frame and capture relations of power. . . . Not merely the symptom of imperial exploitation, the imperialist gaze is a shared social activity" (37), suggesting the possibility that it may be reversed, reframed, or even disguised.

The stark, expressionist style in which O'Neill casts the play's visual logic is symbolic of this gaze, where the power to see and be seen is translated through the architecture of captivity. In the very first scene, Paddy complains that the stokers are "caged in by steel from a sight of the sky like bloody apes in the Zoo!" (127), working like "slaves" in the stifling-hot grid-like structure of the forecastle, where, covered from head to toe in black soot, they display "the bewildered, furious, baffled defiance of a beast in a cage" (121). By scene 3, the stokers are "outlined in silhouette in the crouching, inhuman attitudes of chained gorillas" (135). O'Neill's stage directions extend the initial metaphor of captivity and forced labor toward an enslaved and explicitly named species, foregrounding the final scene in which an "actual" gorilla will appear (and then disappear), moving O'Neill's critique away from the realm of metaphor and into an evolutionary paradigm. The playwright's dramatic tropes emerged as strong elements of the initial production design, as well, in which, as J. L. Styan reports, "the coal-blackened stokers moved in deadly unison like slaves, and to complete the expressionistic picture, they shoveled rhythmically" (107).

As soon as the animal chorus becomes marked by the "soot" of their labor, these beasts take on the burden of history for O'Neill, who blackens them to indicate their position as slaves, linking the intertwined constructs of race and animality with their respective social institutions: slavery and zoos. Through these conflations, O'Neill is not only able to use abolitionist views to critique a discourse of species that enslaves animals, but also, according to Roediger, to enact "a vicious parody of the blackface tradition of theatrical performance. [. . .] Minstrelsy and vaudeville blackface made comedy out of the ability of white performers and their audiences to find fraternity based on the ease with which blackening could be put on and taken off" (39).

More than one critic has remarked on the strange absence of African-American characters in The Hairy Ape.17 Might this suggest that O'Neill intended the ironic positioning of these "civilized white races," blackened by soot and working like slaves chained in the belly of a ship, to refute the kind of racist essentialism that allowed stage traditions such as minstrelsy to prosper? The fact that the ocean liner is sailing east toward England in the twentieth century, rather than West from Africa toward the United States, as did the slave ships in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is itself an ironic turn, solidifying the movement it purports to reverse by extending the concept of slavery beyond its historical instantiation into a larger field of contemporaneous cultural practices�one of which is theater itself.

O'Neill frustrates the "ease" of minstrelsy's theatrical economy by linking the categories of slave and actor to the figure of the ape, demonstrating the many ways in which imperialism masks its objects as inhuman. The "vicious parody" Roediger identifies inheres in the chorus's inability to remove the soot completely: despite "soap and water scrubbing . . . around their eyes . . . the coal-dust sticks like black make-up, giving them a queer, sinister expression" (138). These "civilized white races" are now marked by the racist legacies of manual and theatrical labor, neither of which can be erased. The blackface, therefore, in addition to acting as a mask that (re)essentializes the supremacy of the "white look," takes on the primitivist quality of an animal hide, reifying the dominance of the human species against the black skin of the African gorilla while moving the performance out of the comic tradition of minstrelsy and into the imperialist practice of ethnographic exhibition, where "savage pantomime" (Goodall 82) masqueraded as scientific fact and distinctions among apes, humans, actors, and slaves were as fluid offstage as they were on.

Paired analogies between apes and slaves, zoos and prisons accumulate as the scenes progress. Scene 6 takes place on Blackwells Island in New York City, in a prison whose architecture recalls the steel bars and cubicles of the forecastle, and anticipates those of the zoo. O'Neill begins this scene with Yank's exclamation to his fellow inmates (who produce "a terrific chorus of barking and yapping" [153]), " . . . I tought I was in a cage at de Zoo" and later, "I'm a hairy ape, get me?" (150). As one critic noted, "The jail is an animal kingdom which Yank acknowledges by referring to the jailer as a keeper" (Keane 32). The striking visual and thematic metaphors O'Neill erects build to a climax, when, in the penultimate scene, a policeman pushes Yank offstage, telling him, "Go to hell," and he reappears in the final scene at "the monkey house at the Zoo" (160), where the additional paired analogy of cage and stage is achieved, and literalized in Yank's final words: "In de cage, huh? (in the strident tones of a circus barker) Ladies and gents, step forward and take a slant at de one and only�(his voice weakening)�one and original�Hairy Ape from de wilds of�(He slips in a heap on the floor and dies)" (163).

Yank's narration of his own demise through the impersonation of the circus "barker" gains its representative power not only from a tradition of ethnographic display that found native people caged alongside wild animals,18 but from the accrued force of O'Neill's many allusions to nineteenth-century performance practices, scattered throughout the play. As Roediger reminds us, "The zoos, world's fairs, and natural history museums gathered [. . .] Africa's and Asia's animals, and sometimes humans, classifying and displaying them, creating hierarchies and spectacles" (38).

In this sense, Yank's self-reflexive death, in which he internalizes the "imperialist gaze" in a last-ditch effort at self-determination, is prefigured in the text by an absence of speech: the em-dash in the middle of his last sentence signals this interruption. This silence coincides with would have been the word "Africa," and on this note, the play ends, transferring Yank's invitation to an imagined zoo/circus audience onto the actual theater audience, bringing their powerful positions as spectators to the fore while tempting them to complete his unfinished sentence. This act moves the already complicit spectator into the exploitative role of circus barker, thereby revealing his or her own interpellative power within the apparatus of the "legitimate" theater.

Through this dramatic aporia�in which "Africa" is theatricalized against its textual absence�O'Neill is able to indicate the entire imperialist structure upon which Yank's death is premised, and upon which the play's powerful critique of humanism rests. Furthermore, by linking the zoo with the circus, O'Neill strengthens his critique of the humanist project, "within which," explains Chaudhuri, "the zoo eventually emerged as an exemplary site of serious, even scientific public knowledge about the natural world." But as the action of the scene makes clear, "the origins of the zoo lay in impulses and practices that were virtually indistinguishable from those underlying the use of animals in circuses: namely, acquisitiveness, exoticism, sensationalism, and cruelty" (137).

Against these oppressive, horizontal landscapes, O'Neill juxtaposes the strict vertical hierarchy of the ocean liner. In the opening scene, a stoker named Long, who harbors socialist dreams of unionizing the workers, repeatedly classifies the stokehole as a kind of "hell." The bottommost deck of the ship, populated by the enslaved primates, is indeed a fiery and torturous prison of never-ending labor, from which there appears to be no escape, despite the political ideals or nostalgic dreams of its inhabitants. Every setting that ensues (with the exception of the promenade deck) is classified as another version of "hell"; the word expands in meaning with each new iteration, until its utterance is ritualized through Yank's repeated interjections "What de hell!" and "T' hell wit' it!" which punctuate his last monologue.

The second scene takes place at the apex of this layered structure, with "the beautiful, vivid life of the sea all about�sunshine on the deck in a great flood, the fresh sea wind blowing across it." Here we meet Mildred, the "discontented" and anemic daughter of a steel magnate, reclining on the top deck of the ship with her spinster aunt. They are, O'Neill tells us, "incongruous, artificial figures, inert and disharmonious, the elder like a gray lump of dough touched up with rouge, the younger looking as if the vitality of her stock had been sapped before she was conceived" (130). While the stokers are a robust mix of ethnic types, a representative group of recent European immigrants, the fully assimilated passengers and officers on the upper decks are in fact so pale that their whiteness functions as a ghostly mask more than any kind of racial essence (see Fig. 3). As Mildred's aunt remarks, in response to her niece's interest in "excavating old bones," a euphemism for exposing her family's humble beginnings, "Yes, you are a natural born ghoul. You are even getting to look like one, my dear" (131).19 The farther one progresses to higher decks, the more effete, bloodless, and cold the characters become; rather than approaching divinity, as we would expect in the vertical landscapes of the Romantic era, these humans are, in fact, becoming extinct.

Conspicuously clad in a white dress, Mildred's descent from the chill of the promenade deck to the heat and grime of the engine room�via a series of ladders that call to mind the operative metaphor of social Darwinism�sets the plot of The Hairy Ape in motion (see Fig. 4). Once again, the stokehole is equated with hell, but for Mildred, who flirts with the "handsome, virile" Second Engineer, threatening to "drag the name of Douglas into the gutter! . . . [f]rom which it sprang" (134), the possibility of such punishing heat promises a thrilling return to her "common" roots, a genealogy she has thoroughly romanticized:20

With this exchange O'Neill begins our descent into the expressionist landscape, from the aesthetic "heights" of the promenade (bright, cold, feminine, inert, and ghostly) to the supernatural depths of "hell" (dark, hot, masculine, laborious, and beastly).21 These dualisms, so typical of the humanist worldview, do not remain static for long, however. The haunting presence of Mildred's puddling grandfather, working to purify "impure" metal (a commentary on the importance of racial and ethnic "purity" in nineteenth-century America�and a clue to Mildred's buried ancestry), expands the meaning�and movement�of "descent" toward a more evolutionary (and therefore rhizomatic) signification, recontextualizing Mildred's preoccupation with her "inheritance" and "stock" as genetic, rather than economic, concerns�ones that must be "put to the test."

Furthermore, by invoking the legend of the salamander, O'Neill equates social assimilation with environmental adaptation and ultimately survival, transforming the spatial hierarchies of the ship into "natural" habitats where experiments such as the one Mildred proposes may be conducted. As Sylvia Terrill Peel explains,

Mildred's obsession with her family's past is what motivates her interest in social work, reflecting a "trace" of "sincere" interest in "discover[ing] how the other half lives" (132), much like the colonial "ethnographers" whose travels were funded under the auspices of research or exploration, but in fact constituted opportunities for adventure, acquisition, and exploitation. Mildred's own trace of sincerity turns continually toward various social "poses" in which her interest is feigned rather than truly engaged, an attitude she projects retroactively onto her grandfather: he "played with," rather than worked at, "boiling steel." It is Mildred herself, in fact (a mere two generations away from the blue-collar world of her grandfather), who is an expert at "playing with" social customs, at taking on certain poses in order to maintain her mobility within the vertical hierarchy. "You are quite free to indulge any pose [. . .] that beguiles you," her aunt allows, in reference to Mildred's social work, to which she replies:

In Mildred's initial complaint, O'Neill continues to shift between economic and genetic metaphors, cleverly alluding to an interspecies performance practice (horseracing) in which the two concerns are interdependent. Mildred's melodramatic protest that breeding has dam(n)ed her is enacted when she descends to the stokehole, and her histrionic narrative reaches its symbolic end�in hell. But when pressed by her Aunt to embrace her artificiality rather than lament it, Mildred transforms instantaneously from ill-fated racehorse to bloodthirsty leopard, from cynical self-pity to the far more fitting pleasures of survival. This allows O'Neill to compare two particularly theatrical, and interrelated, phenomena: camouflage and the pose.

As techniques that function within the play in ways similar to the dramatic mask�where racial "essences" surface in defeat�these forms of imitation, as Margot Norris argues in Beasts of the Modern Imagination (1985), belong "to the realm of Nature rather than culture, to the inhuman as well as the human" (53). In Darwin's description of protective adaptation in insects, he observes that "resemblance is not confined to colour, but extends to form, and even to the manner in which the insects hold themselves. The caterpillars which project motionless like dead twigs from the bushes on which they feed, offer an excellent instance of a resemblance of this kind" (qtd. in Norris 53). Norris remarks that "the implications of this discovery are enormous," and names Darwin as "the author of a theory of imitation that reverses the Aristotelian aesthetic by showing life itself to be mimetic under certain conditions" (53).

By asserting that imitation's "practice might be organic, unconscious, and involuntary, that its teleology might be political rather than aesthetic, and that it may serve as a pivot of historical change" (53-54), Norris offers a posthumanist viewpoint that is just as (if not more) relevant to modern drama as it is to her own subject, the novel. By bridging the gap between the adaptive mechanisms of nature and those of culture, the multivalent forms of natural and artificial selection O'Neill has woven throughout this scene can now be "read" through a language of performance that challenges the poetics of humanism.24

Once Mildred's genetic viability is impaired ("would that my millions were not so anemically chaste!" [134]), wealth provides the kind of camouflage needed to survive in the "jungle" of Fifth Avenue, a safety zone that Mildred nevertheless quits for "New York's East Side" and "Whitechapel"�the urban equivalents of the ocean liner's engine room. But by donning a white dress that functions as costume rather than covering, and descending down the ladder of social evolution toward her ancestral habitat, Mildred approaches the "cage" in which her camouflage will cease to function, and her pose will finally�and literally�collapse. As she enters the stokehole,

Before she faints into the arms of the engineers, Mildred whimpers, "Take me away! Oh, the filthy beast!" (137). (See Fig. 5.)

All of the tropes O'Neill has set into motion intersect in this crucial moment of misrecognition, when the hellish stokehole is transformed from a zoo, where "spectators . . . regard unimpeded, imperiously, omnivorously, masters of all they survey" (Malamud 229), to a "contact zone," where social actors function "in terms of copresence, interaction, [and] interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power" (Pratt 7). If the "imperialist gaze" Roediger describes is indeed "a shared social activity" (37) as its presence in a contact zone would suggest, we can conclude that the scene of (mis)recognition between Yank and Mildred�framed by "asymmetrical relations of power" that determine the direction and impact of their gazes�is reciprocal, interactive, and "interlocking."25

Yank himself begins this exchange of looks as a snarling, murderous, and growling gorilla (O'Neill will use these very same words to describe the gorilla in the last scene) but is soon "turned to stone" as he "glares into [Mildred's] eyes," anticipating his subsequent appearance as Rodin's sculpture The Thinker. When finally startled out of this interpellative freeze-frame,26 he becomes simply "bewildered," and remains that way until the very end. Similarly, Mildred's scopic predation, prefigured by her feline self-description, is arrested by the power of Yank's "ferocious" gaze, which reduces her skillful linguistic parrying to a "low choking cry" and causes her dramatic pose (which had heretofore sustained her performance of self) to "crumble." In a clich�d style straight out of nineteenth-century melodrama, she faints, like those Victorians who shuddered at the prospect that their own ancestors were, indeed, apes.

The intersecting perspectives of this "contact zone" can now be identified as those of science, history, and theater, allowing the "imperialist gaze" of the spectator (Mildred, and by implication, the actual audience) to be reversed, as it is in the final scene at the zoo. The theater itself is now the crucible in which these powerful looks are forged, and the platform upon which O'Neill's critique of humanism rests. By showing us that the binaries he erects in earlier scenes are not, in fact, essences, but rather positions�which are, like the ship itself, in constant motion�O'Neill opens up the forced perspectives of humanism to reveal the rhizomatic fields of performance and evolution, in which the possibilities of becoming constantly restructure our view.

In Yank's case, his interpellation by Mildred (and Paddy) reverses his previously undifferentiated relationship to labor and thus to his own body, evidenced in the coal-dust's original, positive signification: "[Paddy] can't breathe and swallow coal dust, but I kin, see? Dat's fresh air for me! Dat's food for me! I'm new, get me? Hell in de stokehole? Sure! It takes a man to work in hell. Hell, sure, dat's my fav'rite climate" (128). Rather than revealing the traces of Yank's hard-earned labor, the soot now signals his subaltern position. His sense of "belonging" in the world of steel, heat, and speed is now as impossible as Paddy's dream of "belonging" in a seafaring utopia.

As members of the chorus intone at the beginning of scene 4 (directly after the stokehole encounter), in response to Yank's "To hell wit' washin'":

Here the discourses of race and species are once again linked to each other and to the theatrical mask. In the corrective shift that occurs between these two choral entries, Yank's potentially powerful relationship to Mildred (whose own leopard "spots" are unobservable) is quickly reconfigured as powerless and degrading. Unlike the chorus, "Yank has not washed either face or body. He stands out in contrast to them, a blackened brooding figure" (138). The coal-dust cannot be washed away because it is no longer a material substance; Yank's "blackened, brooding figure" signifies his categorical exclusion from the human.

As Homi K. Bhabha explains in his essay "Of Mimicry and Man," "Black skin splits under the racist gaze, displaced into signs of bestiality, genitalia, grotesquerie, which reveal the phobic myth of the undifferentiated whole white body." The "discriminatory identit[y]" of the "Simian Black" to which Yank has been reduced, therefore, is "constructed across traditional cultural norms and classifications" to achieve one of the "strategic objectives" through which colonial "mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference" (92, 90, 86). This mimicry (which Bhabha develops within the field of postcolonial theory) is related to the imitative practices of camouflage that Norris claims have a political, rather than aesthetic, teleology, something Bhabha terms a "partial representation"�or "metonymy of presence"�that "rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence. . . . Mimicry is like camouflage," he writes, "a form of resemblance that differs from or defends presence by displaying it in part, metonymically" (89, 90).27

In the aftermath of Yank's "split skin," Paddy and Long seek to understand and name the powerful discourses through which the stoker's interpellation has been produced:

The structuring ideologies of the "contact zone" are here explicitly voiced by the stokers themselves: Long and Paddy focus on their perceived roles as captive, performing animals, and cast Mildred and the Second Engineer as slave owner and circus barker, respectively, reifying existing power differentials. Yank's slowly dawning realization of his own place in the vertical hierarchy, however, causes him to spurn Mildred (and the accompanying "myth of the undifferentiated whole white body") with sexual and racial slurs (elsewhere in this same scene he calls her "a skinny tart" and "a white-faced bum" [141]), and finally to cast her as a ghost, effectively dehumanizing her, as she has done to him.

In order to "show [Mildred] who's a ape," Yank attempts to master, if not dominate, the new symbolic environment (humanism) in which he must survive. Rather than passing off the furry mantle to another actor, as Paddy does so cleverly in this scene, Yank attempts to counteract Mildred's animalizing gaze. After the dramatic shock of misrecognition, the humanist dream of transcendence is what motivates Yank's actions. In fact, as soon as Mildred's pose "crumbles," his own futile impersonation of the humanist ideal begins. The next time we see Yank, he "is seated forward on a bench in the exact attitude of Rodin's `The Thinker'" (138).

O'Neill's choice of The Thinker as a model for Yank's predicament is incisive, far transcending the merely illustrative function drama critics have traditionally assigned it. "Reduction of The Thinker to a visual clich�," writes Rodin scholar Albert E. Elsen in 1985, "may have also discouraged consideration of its history. . . . Although the sculpture was considered innovative at its creation, its pose and theme have come to be regarded as banal" (Thinker, 3). This was indeed the opinion of Travis Bogard, who (mis)read The Thinker as an inessential supplement to an already fully developed trope within the drama:

This last claim, in particular, is problematic in light of O'Neill's philosophical target. The concept of "thinking" detached from its overdetermined pose would add little to the playwright's critique of humanism, for it is the social, historical, and theatrical construction of this thinking figure that O'Neill stages, rather than its ideological reification. The origins and history of The Thinker intersect in crucially important ways with both the form and content of O'Neill's play; without this rich intertext the drama would lose much of its critical force. The Hairy Ape, in fact, would have been largely "unthinkable" without the foundation of complex associations carried within Rodin's signature work.

The statue we now know as The Thinker (see Frontispiece) was originally conceived as part of a larger project commissioned by the French government in 1880. Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) was selected to create a huge, bronze portal for the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, which was then in its initial planning phases. (The museum, it turns out, was never actually built.) Rodin's imposing structure, eventually entitled The Gates of Hell (see Fig. 7), was based on Dante's Divine Comedy. Rodin decided to focus solely on the Inferno section of the epic, the landscape and characters of which he originally sketched as bas relief panels after the Renaissance tradition of Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise (Elsen, Gates 35). (See Fig. 8.)

Rodin's subsequent architectural models, however, show a change "from literal illustration of episodes from The Inferno to a very personal and modern view of hell," one which sought to "naturalize, or even democratize . . . aristocratic art" (Elsen, Thinker 52, 38). Looking at The Thinker in the context of The Gates of Hell makes it very clear that O'Neill's architectural approach to The Hairy Ape (particularly in the first four scenes) was deeply indebted to Rodin's sculptural treatment of Dante's drama, causing one critic to declare the play "a vision of the poet's Inferno" (Skinner 105).28 In The Gates of Hell and The Hairy Ape, both Rodin and O'Neill were crafting modern responses to their medieval predecessors, while rejecting Christian notions of salvation and sacrifice. Rodin re-envisions Dante's Hell in a particularly continental, Romantic mode, "as a metaphor rather than as dogma" (Elsen, Gates 217), with the thinking individual presiding over the scene in serious contemplation. O'Neill reanimates this Hell in the depths of twentieth-century urban industrialism and American capitalism, where the static authority The Thinker had previously embodied is recontextualized and eventually undermined.

Despite these important differences, the two works nevertheless share certain formal aspects. Elsen's description of Rodin's work as "sculptural drama," which "meant energetic relationships, such as vigorously contrasting axes and movements" (Thinker 12), seems perfectly suited to O'Neill's visual dramaturgy, where, in the original production at least, the vertical and horizontal landscapes of The Hairy Ape feature stark contrasts and striking poses evocative of Rodin's otherworldly portal.29 Close-ups of the tympanum in which The Thinker is placed (see Fig. 9) further stress the depth and theatricality of the scene. From this perspective, the rectangular structure of the limen begins to resemble a proscenium, a pictorial frame in which the contrast of light and dark and the angular, twisted forms evoke expressionist stage pictures such as the tableau vivant in Fig. 6.

Just as "thematically and compositionally The Thinker was to represent the center" of The Gates and become its "most crucial figure" (Elsen, Gates 71), Yank's relationship to the stokers "represents . . . the very last word in what they are, their most highly developed individual" (121). Fittingly, both O'Neill and Rodin position their physically imposing males in contradistinction to a chorus of tortured souls, from which they emerge as protagonist, mirroring the historical emergence of the actor himself from the classical Greek chorus and further developing the metaphor of cage and stage. Also visible at this level is the row of sculptural heads on the cornice, which early commentators read as "tragic masks" of "Rodin's passionate drama" (qtd. in Elsen, Gates 123, 125, 155),30 furthering a theatrical understanding of The Gates that prevailed when "statues were still reviewed as if they were actual human beings or characters in a play" (Elsen, Thinker 89).31

Rodin worked on The Gates of Hell throughout the 1880s, and although the entire structure was assembled only after his death (and the door itself never mounted as a functional element of any building), certain figures and groups, such as The Kiss, Ugolino and His Children, and The Shades, were enlarged and recast to stand on their own. It is in this way that The Thinker was fragmented from its original context and exhibited alone, beginning in 1888�the year Eugene O'Neill was born.32 A group of Rodin's friends and supporters, including many of Paris's leading artists and intellectuals, raised money to commission a bronze casting that would later become a public statue, erected on an engraved pedestal in front of the Pantheon in 1906 (see Fig. 10). Upon Rodin's death in 1917 (the year O'Neill began his short story "The Hairy Ape") another casting of the statue was brought to Rodin's home in Meudon, where it became his gravestone, and the new caption on the pedestal read simply, "Rodin."33 (See Fig. 11.)

Once The Thinker morphed from sculptural detail to public statue, it generated as much critical controversy and interpretive activity as perform-ances of The Hairy Ape would nearly two decades later, and for many of the same reasons. In the early years of the twentieth century, France underwent a labor crisis that resulted in violence and instability caused by increasingly large strikes and public protests. "The timing of the inauguration of Rodin's Thinker," writes Elsen, "came at the very crest of national social and political upheaval, and it is not hard to understand why the conservatives were generally opposed to The Thinker and the Socialists supportive" (Thinker 108), seeing in Rodin's art a refusal to distinguish between physical and mental labor.

Rather than "the intellectual impoverished by exhausted heredity," wrote the Socialist Deputy Pierre Baudin in 1904, The Thinker "is a strong man, muscled, balanced and calm, who is afraid neither of solitude nor of his annihilation. . . . He thinks to be resolved, to will and to act" (qtd. in Elsen, Thinker 129). This view of thinking as a physical action was supported by "the impression that the man is figuratively putting his back into the process of thought" (Elsen, Thinker 4). The problems many early commentators had with the statue purportedly revolved around its pronounced nakedness, as well as its intervention in an entrenched class struggle where the very definition of labor was at stake. But underlying the aesthetic and political critiques were categorical exceptions to the representation of rationality in the context of a virile body, where it risked being read as instinctual rather than divine, animal rather than human: "Go before this thinker, and first look at the face: it is a brute, a sort of gorilla; he will represent a worker in all that is vile and gross; this could be an effigy of Caliban" (qtd. in Elsen, Thinker 134).

The very same conflations of class and species that O'Neill critiques in The Hairy Ape are here mobilized by a loyalist critic in service to the French empire. If The Thinker is a theatrical descendent of Caliban, his suppression would require a performance of sacrifice to secure the dominance of the Enlightenment subject over and above the evolving primate. If "the modern sculptor, beginning with Rodin, enacts rather than depicts," and the "noble mission" of public sculpture, like that of the theater, is "to educate, elevate, and delight" (Elsen, Thinker 116), The Thinker's transubstantiation from statue to effigy was inevitable, at least in the context of the Pantheon. Clearly, the presence of the figure at the center of this charged symbolic space defied accepted views of history as well as neoclassical decorum; The Thinker's ascendance was, for some, the equivalent of a coup d'�tat, if not a coup de th��tre. "When the author of pithecanthropus dishonors the portico of the Pantheon," wrote a Municipal Councilman in 1908, we "do not hesitate again to dupe the public" (qtd. in Elsen, Thinker 130).

Indeed, what relationship to the Pantheon, the architectural crown of the French Enlightenment, could this "primitive man, the image of a cave man . . . more like an animal than a human being" (qtd. in Elsen, Thinker 130) possibly have? It was one thing for The Thinker to watch over the grave of his iconoclastic creator, but the Pantheon, the crypt upon which France's national glory rested, could provide no appropriate context for a Thinker late of Hell; the statue was repeatedly attacked in the press and literally hacked apart by an axe-wielding madman, who resented its "mimicking gesture" (Elsen, Thinker 100). In 1922, the year The Hairy Ape premiered in New York, the French government removed the statue "under the pretext that [it] disturbed the deployment of official ceremonies" (qtd. in Elsen, Thinker 137).

While The Thinker's intersection with a discourse of species in the streets of Paris is perhaps not as explicit as it would become when transposed into O'Neill's play, reactions to Darwin's theories were as vehement in France as they had been in England; his influence extended far beyond the world of science to include the realms of art and performance. "Partly because of Darwin," writes Elsen, "atavistic themes were popular in sculpture," and thus "The Thinker was seen as representing prehistoric man" (Thinker 130, 129). At stake in the controversy over the statue's meaning was nothing less than the sovereignty of humanism in a world grappling with the exigencies of modern life and the competing historical worldview offered by evolutionary theory. The presence of Rodin's Thinker at the center of the Pantheon, the city's most public neoclassical stage, upheld the decorum of the French Enlightenment with, as one commentator put it, all "the glory of Michelangelo of the gorillas" (qtd. in Elsen, Thinker 135).34

Despite the controversies that surrounded the statue's origins and early history, numerous casts of The Thinker were disseminated around the world to various museums and universities. Rodin's sculpture quickly became one of the most recognized�and parodied�images in the canon of Western art.35 Once removed from its freighted context in the Pantheon, the statue's most obvious identifying markers were its gender and species, which made it especially susceptible to the claims of humanism, where the naked male body acted as a universal placeholder for all of humankind. (Recall Fig. 1.) As the art critic Camille Mauclair wrote in 1898, referring to The Thinker, "Freed of clothing that would have made it slave to a fixed time, it is nothing more [. . .] than the image of the reflection of man on things human" (Elsen, Thinker 62-63), a figure whose race and ethnicity (differences O'Neill stresses in his own characters) have disappeared under the impenetrable surfaces of bronze. Universalizing claims such as Mauclair's were supported by Gustave Geffroy's earlier, authoritative assertion in 1889 that The Gates signified "a collection of the unchanging aspects of the humanity of all countries and all times" (Elsen, Gates 154).

Concurrent with this powerful humanist rhetoric, which ultimately overshadowed other interpretations as the century progressed, was the residual effect of the portal's theatricality�especially as it intersected with nineteenth-century pictorialism and its attendant techniques�which caused the critic Roger-Mil�s, writing about The Gates at the same time as Geffroy, to combine (one must assume, unwittingly) the universals of humanism with the contingencies of performance, creating a cognitive dissonance that reflected the sculpture's phenomenological instability: "the episodes are timeless; the actors have cast off their costumes" (Elsen, Gates 154). As the central character in this humanist cosmology, The Thinker continued to betray traces of a beastly theatricality, ones O'Neill was quick to identify and exploit.

Similar to The Thinker's mobility beyond the Gates of Hell, Yank's departure from the vertical hierarchy of the ocean liner allows him to traverse a number of horizontal landscapes, where O'Neill repositions him in the posture of Rodin's statue. The significance of this pose contrasts markedly with Yank's behavior in the very first scene of The Hairy Ape, where the concept of "thinking"�and its binary, "drinking"�are first introduced, without any reference at all to The Thinker. Yank signals both his initial suspicion and nascent interest in this activity with a "cynical grin": "Can't youse see I'm tryin' to t'ink?" The chorus of stokers echoes this sentiment, "repeating the word after him as one with the same cynical amused mockery." The stage directions further indicate that the "chorused word [Think!] has a brazen metallic quality as if [the stokers'] throats were phonograph horns. It is followed by a general uproar of hard, barking laughter," after which the stokers launch into the chanted mantra "Drink, don't think!" Yank capitulates "good-naturedly" with "a gulp from his bottle" (124).

This whole episode is repeated in scene 4, directly after Yank's first appearance in the "exact attitude" of The Thinker, while he is still on the ship and surrounded by the stokers, who once again mock him. Yank retorts, this time "resentfully," "Lemme alone. Can't youse see I'm tryin' to tink?" (138). The word "think" is then repeated by the chorus, with "a brazen metallic quality as if their throats were phonograph horns." This time, however, Yank, "springing to his feet and glaring at them belligerently," affirms his claim: "Yes, tink! Tink, dat's what I said! What about it?" After this outburst, O'Neill's stage directions indicate that he "sits down again in the same attitude of `The Thinker'" (139).36 As soon as Yank assumes the "attitude" of intellectual labor, he�and it�are mocked, not only by the animalized "pack," but by the mechanized, mass-produced voice of industry itself.37

While Yank moves toward the seductive promise of a particularly Western, rational conception of homo sapiens, the stokers' familiar voices, once so distinctive in their emotional speeches and songs, disappear into the melting-pot of mechanical reproduction�a sonic image of disembodied ratiocination. The simian stature of these "barking" choruses is now supplemented by their mechanized speech, suggesting that in addition to being caged and enslaved, the chorus is also automated, embodying the concept of the soulless "animal_machine" put forth originally by Descartes and taken up with enterprising facility in the age of Enlightenment, when the first mechanical animals were fashioned as entertaining devices that could be made to work without wages.38

Throughout the play, in fact, O`Neill shows the communicative properties of human speech transforming into the instinctual cries of animals or the functional drone of machines. By staging the insistence of nonhuman expression over and against the abstraction of the linguistic sign, which was at that time the gold standard of human difference, O'Neill not only protests the dehumanizing effects of industrial capitalism, but reminds us that signification itself transcends the realm of the human. Moreover, the chorus's repeated tableaux, whose theatrical illusionism was the "equivalent to the cinematic stop-frame" (Roach, Player's 73), also supported a mechanistic vision of the human body to counter the Romantic immanence of The Thinker.

In scene 6, set in a prison on Blackwells Island, the impossibility of Yank's project begins to emerge. When the scene opens, Yank is still "crouched [. . .] in the attitude of Rodin's `The Thinker,'" but now his "face is spotted with black and blue bruises" and a "blood-stained bandage is wrapped around his head" (150) the result of his Fifth Avenue encounter with the police. (See Fig. 12.) The resonance of these bodily markings with O'Neill's previous signs of racial and cultural degradation is only too clear. In addition to their symbolic status, Yank's "spots" are now actual wounds; the masking function of the coal dust has been trumped by the vivid expressions of the suffering human body, which contrast with the sedimentary aspect of the statue.

Likewise, the figurative cage in which Yank has heretofore existed is replaced by an actual prison cell, where this transgressive body is disciplined, contained, and framed. Yank's first lines in this scene reflect these connections, and introduce the problem of speech that will be elaborated in the following scene:

With this last question, which one may imagine rhetorically redirected to Broadway theatergoers still offended by their familial proximity to the chimpanzee, O'Neill broadens the reach of his evolutionary argument to include the audience. Metaphorically, however, the ensuing dialogue between Yank and the prisoner-apes contains repeated allusions to their status as animals caged in by the dual constraints of capitalism and Christianity, which render them both inhuman and enslaved.

When Yank relates his humiliation at the hands of a "skoit," his fellow prisoners recognize Mildred Douglas's name, and explain to Yank that her father is "the president of the Steel Trust." One of the prisoners suggests Yank "join the Wobblies" (152) and proceeds to read from an editorial written by a Senator in the Sunday Times, condemning the IWW as "that devil's brew" (152) who

O'Neill again addresses audiences who would be familiar with such arguments, as intense debates over the evolution/creation controversy had been raging in the press for years. The fundamentalist preacher William B. Riley's book The Menace of Modernism (1917) had activated a whole new generation of fierce anti-Darwinists, who connected evolution with anarchy and intellectuals, and claimed it was corrupting schoolchildren.39 In his many tours across the United States, Riley, along with William Jennings Bryan, turned evolution into a political touchstone. O'Neill's invented editorial was written with the rhetorical vehemence common to orators such as Riley and Bryan, who would later become the lead prosecutor in the Scopes "monkey trial" in 1925.

To Yank, however, these ideas constituted real news, and even though he "can't read much," he "sits, the paper in the hand at his side, in the attitude of Rodin's `The Thinker.'" Moments later he "jumps to his feet with a furious groan as if some appalling thought had crashed on him . . ." (154). As if evidence of the pose's power, Yank is able suddenly to parse the conflicting philosophies behind the Senator's words and see his own place in the structural realities of humanism, in which the tenets of evolutionary movement are once again manipulated into a social context where the powerful ironically retain their status as "God's masterpiece." This revelation defuses Yank's anger against the comparatively inconsequential Mildred and refocuses it onto the institutional power of the capitalist. If Mildred's father is the symbolic patriarch of a hypocritical society that scorns the worker at the same time it benefits from his animal strength, Yank can use that strength against his oppressor. He now embraces the designation "hairy ape" and begins to bend open the bars of his cage. Soon "his position is parallel to the floor like a monkey's" and, as the curtain begins to fall, the "bar bends like a licorice stick under his tremendous strength" (154).

Under the false impression that the IWW is a clandestine terrorist organization, Yank pays a visit to their "cheap, banal, commonplace, and unmysterious" (155) headquarters, "convinced" that its ordinary appearance "is all camouflage" (156). Hoping to interest the members in his scheme to "blow it offen de oith�steel�all de cages�all de factories, steamers, buildings, jails�de Steel Trust and all dat makes it go" and then "tell [Mildred] de hairy ape done it" (158), Yank presents himself as being "wise to de game": "Can't youse see I belong? Sure! I'm reg'lar. . . . Aw, forget it! I belong, see?" (157). Mistaking Yank's newfound identity as a "hairy ape" for the flimsy disguise of an undercover agent, the mocking chorus of bureaucratic functionaries throws him out on the street at the command of their Secretary, who extends Mildred's dehumanizing insult from the realm of the body ("filthy" and "hairy" refer mostly to Yank's physical appearance) to that of the mind, suggesting Yank's definitive exclusion from the realm of discourse: "Oh hell, what's the use of talking? You're a brainless ape" (159).

After Yank's rejection by the Wobblies, O'Neill places him one last time in the Thinker pose, but the foundations of the humanist ideal it represents (grounded as they are in language) begin to crumble under the pressure of his angry growl. This soon turns to primate "gibbering" and nostalgia for a lost reality in which man and machine were undifferentiated:

When the violent strength Yank associated with his primate self fails to help him achieve a sense of belonging, we find him once again absorbed in thought, but this time O'Neill lets Yank approximate the Thinker pose only briefly, amending the statue's contemplative stance to gibber, ape-like, at the moon, thereby destroying any illusions of humanist propriety still ascribed to the pose.41

In Bogard's critique of the Rodin trope, he assumes The Thinker's "evolutionary significance" inheres in the representation of "mind triumphing over brute force," thus reifying the concept of "mind" while animalizing the figure's powerful body under the mythical sign of the brute:

Bogard's references to evolutionary movement are typical of humanist misunderstandings that conflate biological descent with ideas of social progress, and substitute linear schemes (the ladder metaphor) for rhizomatic models. The fact that Yank doesn't seem to fit squarely into any one of the pose's layered iterations�sculptural, theatrical, human, or animal�suggests that O'Neill reads identity as an always incomplete and fragmented process, a function of continuous, open-ended evolution rather than a series of fixed increments along a line of pre-established ontological positions.

Furthermore, when Bogard asserts that "Rodin's bronze [. . .] is far from pessimistic, and considering the course Yank is to follow, questions may be raised as to the appropriateness of its ironic use" (246-247) he implies that it is Yank's "failed" search for transcendence, rather than the myth of humanism motivating it, that warrants pessimism. This persistence of the humanist ideology�its conflation with the "real"�allows Bogard not just to overlook, but to dismiss entirely an essential underpinning of O'Neill's argument. It is the reader's, viewer's, or even critic's insistence on clinging to this ideological pose, despite its ill fit, that results in primitivist misreadings such as Bogard's, for what O'Neill stages in the final scene of The Hairy Ape is nothing less than the death of the humanist ideal itself.

The fleeting (and soon corrupted) image of The Thinker is, in fact, the only remaining vestige of this ideal in the entire play, and its waning performativity is matched by Yank's relinquished simulation�if not the statue's own history. In the modern world of The Hairy Ape the human subject is already extinct; New York is now the home of animals and automatons, actors and effigies, whose histories might be forged through a "new language of kinship," as O'Neill himself once imagined.

Julia Walker calls attention to the importance of posing in The Hairy Ape in a series of essays that combines psychoanalytic, economic, and theatrical analyses.42 She connects the character of Yank with Eugene's father, the actor James O'Neill, and fashions a complex argument claiming that the playwright's Oedipal and class anxieties are worked out through a "fantasy master narrative" of his father's ultimate demise, played out through Yank's "tragic life" (Walker, "De New," 24). While the biographical claims of Walker's argument are at times tenuous,43 she discusses quite convincingly the effect that changing turn-of-the-century acting styles had on James O'Neill's career and the manner in which these styles reappear in The Hairy Ape.

As the nineteenth-century Romantic technique of acting on "points" was replaced by the twentieth-century Delsarte method propounded in the United States by Steele MacKaye, James O'Neill's formerly successful bits of stage business, which included "assuming poses and postures to vividly illustrate images or metaphors in the dramatic text," had the potential to "degenerate into a form of hammy acting" (Walker, "De New" 21-22). Walker asks us to see Eugene O'Neill's frequent stage directions indicating that Yank assume the posture of Rodin's The Thinker as examples of "empty `points'" upon which Yank must stand, "emphasiz[ing] the rupture between gesture and meaning" that is evinced by Yank's failure to understand "a world structured upon ideas" ("De New" 26, 25). Because "Yank is stunted in his ability to think," writes Walker, his "pose is meant to ironically inscribe him as a purely material and sensuous being" ("Bodies" 75). Like Bogard, Walker takes O'Neill's repeated invocations of Rodin's The Thinker at face value, assigning to the statue a transhistorical significance that obstructs the critique of humanism implicit in its use. She, too, is subject to this forced perspective, in which the "mind" is a sign of the human and the "body" a degraded marker of animal sensibility.

"Modeled in soot if not in bronze," continues Walker, Yank's "inert physicality is juxtaposed against the formlessness of thought. This pose recurs . . . each time registering the futility of the pose to realize what it is meant to represent." Exactly what that is, Walker does not specify. Implicit, however, in the language of her claim that Yank will never "become the thinker that he attempts to `ape'" ("De New" 26), is the kind of humanist ethos that conflates mimetic power with the "fully human" while denying this action to others, who become less human the farther removed they are from the culturally-sanctioned mimetic style�in this case, realism. As we move from "human" to "nonhuman" the ideologically potent concept of mimesis devolves to the instinctual, reflexive, bodily practices of mimicry�a skill humans share with other species.

Furthermore, Walker assumes that Yank's Thinker pose is a conscious impersonation, and that his eventual inability to replicate the statue's "exact attitude" corresponds similarly to his inability to think. In obvious contrast to Mildred's purposeful social posing�which precipitates her Aunt's parting scream, "Poser! . . . I said Poser!" (134)�Yank's movement into the Rodin posture is not a part of the dramatic narrative. It is merely an indication that he is "tryin' to t'ink."44 At the level of the story, then, Yank's posture is icono-graphic. It only becomes symbolic to those outside the narrative whose received knowledge includes Rodin's statue and its accumulated meanings. Correspondingly, it is not Yank's failure to think that O'Neill represents, but rather his failure to pose�and to recognize posing in others. In Mildred's case, the pose is always a deceptive front�a mask that can "be put on and taken off" with "ease," as Roediger characterizes white performers' use of blackface. While Mildred might be called, more accurately, a poseur�someone who is always aware of her own performance�Yank's efforts to belong are doomed by their very innocence and sincerity. Not until his final lines does Yank embrace performance as a mode of being.

Therefore, while I disagree with critics who assert that Yank cannot and does not "think," and that this constitutes his tragedy, I find Walker's emphasis on the act of posing especially productive. Because she relies on examples of acting styles that support a biographical argument, however, she misses some of the other, more direct�and Darwinian�antecedents to Yank's unwitting pose, ones which intersect with Eugene O'Neill's pervasive references to evolutionary paradigms and popular performance practices. Similarly, when Bogard dismisses O'Neill's "quotation" of Rodin, he erases along with it a tradition of theatrical illusionism that thrived in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when actors attempted to replicate the poses of classical sculpture.45

The term "attitudes" was first used in the 1770s by Lady Emma Hamilton, whose beginnings as a domestic servant and scantily clad "goddess" illustrating various sexualized poses in London's notorious "Temple of Health" allowed her to advance in the world, eventually making her way into the realms of the aristocracy and marrying the elderly Lord Hamilton, who owned a large collection of classical sculpture. "As she rose in society, she became famous for her `attitudes'�pantomimic representations, in full costume and with props, of famous pictures and statues" (Altick 82, n344). Lady Hamilton's performance, seen by Goethe in 1787 while he was in Naples, was said to have inspired a scene in Elective Affinities (1809), which in turn helped popularize the practice in the nineteenth-century theater (McCullough 6-7).

In Living Pictures on the New York Stage (1983), Jack W. McCullough identifies Andrew Ducrow, an English equestrian who originally performed on horseback in the 1820s and later transferred his "animated statues" to the stage, as Hamilton's theatrical descendant, and names him the "forerunner of the poses plastiques so popular in circuses and variety theaters in the second half of the [nineteenth] century." In a show called "Grecian Statues," Ducrow "imitated a series of statue-like poses, in which he seemed to take on the appearance of marble, depicting Homeric heroes, athletes, and gladiators." The arrival of the tableau vivant (and its theatrical variants) to the New York stage was, McCullough claims, "in part, at least, a direct result of Ducrow's influence" (8).

The poses plastiques exhibited the same relation to sculpture that the tableaux vivants did to painting. By the mid-nineteenth-century they had been merged into a "technique of shifting poses," which allowed the traditional tableaux to "incorporate a method associated earlier with what were known as `attitudes'":

O'Neill's "interest [. . .] in deconstructing modes of performance" (Walker, "De New" 26) was clearly just as active in relation to these practices as it had been to other forms of display, such as natural history museums and zoos, that couched their sensationalism in pretensions to scientific authority or classical education. By undermining these pictorial and sculptural traditions in The Hairy Ape, O'Neill signaled his resistance to a number of authoritative discourses that were operative in the social ambitions of audience members and actors who sought to close the distance between themselves and the classical ideals they purported to admire or embody. Part of the allure of the poses plastiques was surely the impressive demonstration of skill needed to achieve such a likeness, but the statues chosen for display reflected a myth of the human that would have foundered were the subject not so elevated�yet the performer just as masterful. One need only compare these kinds of characters and poses with those of blackface minstrelsy to understand the inherently political nature of imitative relationships and their transitive power, which dematerialize race, class, gender, and species just long enough to reconfigure them according to the logic of the prevailing ideology.

In light of these traditions, and The Thinker's ambivalent relation to classical sculpture, O'Neill's choice of the Rodin statue is even more pointed. Just as the circus and variety actors camouflaged themselves as Roman heroes and Greek goddesses, hoping to improve their respectability (and in the case of Lady Hamilton, succeeding), O'Neill represents Yank as someone whose undeservedly inferior position in society might be camouflaged (at least initially) by the presumed cultural authority of The Thinker. But the felicities of resemblance that were so efficacious on the nineteenth-century stage (particularly in the era before Darwin's Descent of Man) are here undercut by O'Neill's insistent modernism, which displaces classical ideals along with realistic acting styles. When we add to this the fact that, until his very last moments, at least�when cage is transformed to stage�the character of Yank is most definitely not an actor, the full implications of O'Neill's intervention begin to take shape.

By subjecting an invisible, absorptive process such as thought (the linchpin of Enlightenment humanism) to the expressive conventions of the performing as well as the plastic arts, O'Neill calls attention not only to the differences between these modes of representation, but also to the many ways in which an essentially unverifiable act can become politicized. The apparently crucial differences between being human and acting human come down, then, to questions of style, and any claims to the contrary are repeatedly exposed in The Hairy Ape as phantoms of epistemology rather than faithful indicators of ontology.46

That these imitative struggles occur in a drama O'Neill designed "to run the whole gamut from extreme naturalism to extreme expressionism" (Bryer 31) suggests yet another complicating factor in the semiotics of the modernist stage, calling into question the perceived correspondence between form and being that allows humanist critics to separate the "essence" of a pose from its theatrical "realization." If the actor playing Yank is to attempt the "exact attitude" of a sculpture in which a number of traditional and modern styles converge, where would that representation fall along the broad spectrum O'Neill invokes? Which discipline, theatrical or sculptural, modifies the other? Is there a recursive movement between these modes of representation? And if so, how do these aesthetic contingencies affect the pose's ideological significance?

Bogard's conviction that the first four scenes of The Hairy Ape are primarily naturalistic and the final four primarily expressionistic is qualified by one exception:

The implicit suggestion that the Rodin pose is expressionist rather than "naturalistic" is curious in terms of what it suggests about character and intent, especially when one takes into account the later scene in which the gorilla appears as The Thinker. Whatever conclusions we might reach, however, are symptomatic of a reading that, even (and especially) in its acknowledgement of Darwinian influences, is primarily literary, and therefore makes little distinction between stage directions and dialogue. But as we've seen, O'Neill's Thinker (for clearly it is neither Rodin's nor Yank's) operates as a purely theatrical conceit, exceeding through performance the limits of text just as it exceeds the fixed materiality of its sculptural referent.

Nevertheless, Bogard's question about the pose's symbolic status reopens the problem of theatrical style not just in terms of acting or design, but in terms of the historical relation between aesthetics and ideology. Understanding Yank's (or the gorilla's) pose in relation to a specific theatrical movement such as naturalism, for example, takes on great import for the meaning of the play as a whole. In "Darwin's Passion: The Language of Expression on Nature's Stage" (1991), Joseph R. Roach revisits "Realism and Naturalism [. . .] not from the perspective of what they have become,

In what he describes as a "delicate recuperative project," Roach argues that the naturalism of Zola and Antoine be aligned with Brechtian "strategies of performance that historicize, criticize, and contest dominant and oppressive ideologies" (43). "For the naturalists," writes Roach, "the individual body becomes a site on which the representation of character will be rewritten by the defamiliarization of the ideal type. To this Darwinism contributed a newly authorized version of the body shorn of its theocentric symmetry, originality, and perfection" (52).

In The Hairy Ape, this "ideal type" is represented by the persistent humanism of Rodin's Thinker, which, despite its controversial character in turn-of-the-century Paris, ultimately came to represent a universally agreed-upon "symmetry, originality, and perfection." The Brechtian defamiliarization Roach reads back onto the naturalists is most apparent here in the context of the repetition and revision of Yank's "attitudes," which separate him from the choral group while simultaneously exposing the pretense of unity among actor, character, and image.

The full array of implications this gestus may have engendered onstage was recreated offstage by a striking image of the actor who played Yank (Louis Wolheim) in the Thinker pose (see Fig. 13). The special photographic process used by James Abbe seems to render its subject in the reflective hues of steel while the caption reads: "The Beast: An extraordinary cameo-like study of Louis Wolheim in his splendid characterization of `The Hairy Ape.'" This representation places actor, animal, machine, and sculpture under the umbrella of O'Neill's title, while omitting any mention of the character Yank or the intermedial figure of Rodin's Thinker. Finally, by making the Thinker pose the play's central gestus, O'Neill is able to demonstrate the social processes of individuation associated with humanist ideals of rationality, or, in Nietzschean terms, the Apollonian. This gest is repeatedly juxtaposed with a competing image, which I call "The Drinker," in which the stokers' communal reveries, as irrational as they are pleasurable, evoke Dionysian rituals. Through these opposing actions, O'Neill reveals the social conditions under which Yank and his fellow stokers labor, and the ideologies through which they are reproduced.

This "defamiliarization of the ideal type" achieved by the Thinker gestus is reinforced by the "rewriting" effect of the coal dust, which, as we have seen, functions simultaneously as theatrical mask, animal hide, and racial coloring. The surfaces of Yank's degraded social status are later supplemented by black and blue bruises and red blood stains, eruptions that heighten the contrast between Yank's suffering animal body and the harmony and containment promised by the Rodin figure.47 The ultimate defamiliarization of the humanist ideal in favor of the Darwinian primate body occurs when the gorilla takes on the Rodin pose, adding heft to Carol Bird's observation in 1922 that the "monkey man" was "crowd[ing] the orthodox stage hero from the boards" (102).

Because O'Neill does not ascribe the kind of na�ve optimism to Rodin's statue that his modern critics do,48 Yank's gradual abandonment of the pose (within the text, if not on stage) might seem to coincide with his growing apprehension of humanism just as easily as his ineffectual reproduction of it. Likewise, the gorilla's stance might be as instinctual as Darwin's "caterpillars which project motionless like dead twigs from the bushes on which they feed" (qtd. in Norris 53) or as strategic as Mildred's social posing. Whatever the case, any representational power the original statue may have had will be attenuated by its various theatrical reiterations. The Thinker's authoritative stance is now subjected to the transformational grammar of performance, where the power of articulation redounds to the actor who "takes on" the pose, rather than to the pose itself. O'Neill cunningly emphasizes the audience's agency in this expression through the pose's narrative absence, thereby leaving any interpretive practice�and its attendant political implications�up to the spectators themselves.

The act of "quotation" Bogard misunderstood as a facile reproduction of a self-evident concept is now exposed in all its complexity as the very seat of ideological power in The Hairy Ape. In O'Neill's modernist dramaturgy, history is submitted to the exigencies of the stage, where authorship in all its forms becomes contingent. The seemingly immovable fixtures of western civilization, such as the Rodin statue, are here resolved of their quiddity, reappearing as intermediate presences briefly inhabiting the stage, effigies of the human in a world where the laws of performance parallel the movement of evolution, and all is in a constant state of transformation.

O'Neill sets scene 8, The Hairy Ape's final episode, in the "monkey house at the Zoo," where the play's animating metaphors are literalized, and the power differentials established in the earlier scene of (mis)recognition between Yank and Mildred are reconfigured in an encounter between Yank and a gorilla. Architecturally, the zoo recalls both the stokehole and the prison, but the inhabitants of this version of hell are actual caged primates whose availability to the human gaze constitutes their labor, and it is Yank, rather than Mildred, who now wields the interpellative power of the spectator.

Accordingly, the gorilla is positioned similarly to Yank in earlier scenes; he, too, emerges as protagonist from an adumbrated chorus of primates, just as The Thinker did from the doomed souls of The Gates of Hell (recall Fig. 9):

Already, in the scene's initial stage directions, O'Neill has enacted a radical type of surrogation, replacing the human being at the center of the drama with an animal who seems to confirm early views of The Thinker as "a brute, a sort of gorilla." If, as Roach advises, "candidates for surrogation must be tested at the margins of a culture to bolster the fiction that it has a core" (Cities 6), the zoo will function as a testing ground where the possibility of continuity between primates, rather than their categorical separation, threatens to expose the fictive core of humanist ideology. Malamud rightly concludes that "the dramatic tension [in scene 8] derives from the question of whether or not the animal is, as Mildred suggested, Yank's peer, and if so, what exactly this means" (140).

This taxonomical confusion, which sharpens O'Neill's unfolding critique, is upheld not only by the dramatic text but also by the play's visual rhetoric, in which human and nonhuman are united in the stage image of the Rodin pose as well as the actualization of the cage/stage trope. Both scene 6 at the prison (recall Fig. 12) and scene 8 at the zoo (see Fig. 21) begin with essentially the same stage picture; the repetition of these two caged figures (man and ape) is interpreted by humanist critics, not surprisingly, as a kind of theatrical bluff, further evidence that Yank's ability to think is no more forthcoming than a gorilla's: "And if his audience holds out hope that Yank will in fact become the thinker that he attempts `to ape,'" Walker explains, "O'Neill not only dashes their hopes but mocks them when, in the final scene, not Yank but the gorilla assumes `The Thinker's pose" ("De New" 26). By confusing the idea of a thinking gorilla with O'Neill's stage image of the gorilla as Thinker, Walker demonstrates humanism's powerful ability to camouflage image as essence, performance as ontology, and, finally, human as ape (and vice versa).

Finally, Walker's conviction that Yank is "unable to think" finds corroboration in a reading of the gorilla as dumb brute, a conclusion that is not only contradicted by current scientific knowledge,49 but, more importantly, finds little support within the world of the play itself. O'Neill's many stage directions clearly include the animals as agents of (theatrical) discourse, beginning with his insistence that the primates' "chatterings" be "pitched in a conversational tone" (160) at least until Yank's entrance disturbs them. Compare this with the uniform rigidity of previous choruses, whose "metallic quality" (124) and "mechanical unawareness" (147) now contrast markedly with the apparent civility and camaraderie of the monkey house.

The gorilla himself seems to communicate effectively using various gestures and sounds: he "growls impatiently" and "proudly," he "roars angrily" and with "an emphatic affirmative" (162). In addition to expressing his own emotions, the gorilla appears to understand Yank's, which range from friendliness, sympathy, and admiration at their initial meeting, to bitterness, confusion, pain, and "furious exaltation" (162) as Yank thinks through his predicament. The gorilla reacts to Yank's words "as if he understood" and Yank seems to confirm this when he replies: "Yuh got what I was sayin' even if yuh muffed de woids" (161). This, too, was the impression Bird received from the original production. She reports that Yank "gets on speaking terms with a huge gorilla. When he asks the gorilla a question," she tells us, mixing up her terminology to distinguish between the two primates at the same time she connects them, "the big animal rumbles a reply, so, evidently, the beast and the human ape speak the same language" (102). By the end of the drama, the intricacies of this view will play themselves out to an ambiguous conclusion.

Stark Young's review of the performance for the New Republic expands Bird's impression of the gorilla as speaker and thinker to a commentary on the uncredited actor playing him, claiming that his or her performance in the final scene was not only "better than Mr. Wolheim," but "extraordinary, out of class with any animal motive I have ever known on the stage" (43). What these extraordinary animal motives may have been, in fact, is the question that underlies O'Neill's theatrical mise en ab�me, in which a presumably human actor (of unknown gender, race, ethnicity, class, or acting pedigree) costumed as a gorilla reenacts a gestic pose based on the posture of a statue whose history of reception reveals its own spectrum of categorical complexities and contradictions. All this representational confusion must then be sorted out by an audience of theatrical spectators who were, in 1922, primarily white, middle- or upper-class citizens familiar with Rodin's Thinker as well as the Bronx Zoo. What they surely weren't familiar with was O'Neill's cutting-edge theatricalism, which incorporated styles and structures from various European and American theatrical traditions; this generic and stylistic collage effectively destabilized an already fragile mimetic process, where any "truth" the modern stage might still be able to tell remained, like the primate actor, mysterious, magisterial, and masked.50

Just as audiences and critics attributed various entrenched qualities to the Rodin statue, so too would they draw conclusions about the "nature" of the gorilla, then (in 1922, though less so today) thought to be one of the most cruel and ferocious animals on earth�a mysterious being whose reputation had been fueled by nineteenth-century travelers' tales in which the largest and least understood great ape became a preserve for western stereotypes of Africa and Africans: dark, savage, powerful, and in need of domestication. The "gorilla's black skin suggested that it was related to the African," explains Bettyann Kevles in Thinking Gorillas (1980), and as such "gorillas inherited all the scorn, the fantasy, and the fear that white people heaped upon Africans" (7-8). The first gorilla specimen brought back to Europe from Africa in the 1850s by the French-American adventurer Paul du Chaillu (1835-1903) was gutted, stuffed, and posed in an aggressive, teeth-baring position, suggesting that it was about to attack and confirming what many presumed was a naturally violent predisposition.

Du Chaillu was a prolific, embellishing writer as well as an enthusiastic hunter and taxidermist, and his melodramatic descriptions of encounters with gorillas were largely responsible for the ape's notorious reputation abroad. "Friend Paul," as Du Chaillu liked to call himself in the presence of children and "savage men," actively cultivated his celebrity in London and New York and held public lectures in which he presented "Fighting Joe," the first gorilla he had killed. In addition to these exhibitions, which had more in common with circus sideshows than they did with scientific inquiry, Du Chaillu recounted his exploits in a series of illustrated books aimed at children who "believed in the horrid gorilla and in the encounters [Friend Paul] had with that huge monster" (Stories iii-iv).

These "encounters" emphasized the ape's incontrovertible monstrosity while at the same time acknowledging an unnerving sense of kinship. In Stories of the Gorilla Country, Narrated for Young People (1867), Du Chaillu's description of his confrontation with a silverback, once remarkable for its novelty, today seems like a B-movie clich�:

This lurid view of the gorilla persisted for nearly a century, and spawned an ever-expanding series of popular "primate dramas" in which the man-manqu� would star.

Explorations & Adventures in Equatorial Africa (1861), an earlier, more "scientific" volume for adults, complete with Latin nomenclature, a pull-out map of central Africa across which Du Chaillu has added the words "gorilla country," and an oversized frontispiece titled "The Gorilla" (see Fig. 14), nevertheless offers a similarly vivid description of the hunt under the curious heading "Actions of the Gorilla." Du Chaillu concludes that the animal "was like a very devil," but after the battle he admits to feeling as if he "had killed some monstrous creation, which yet had something of humanity in it" (434-35).51 That "something" appears to have been acknowledged by the conventions of Victorian era portraiture, where primate modesty (in the guise of foliage) shields the gorilla's "manhood" from our view.

This presentiment was taken seriously by another nineteenth-century American adventurer, Richard L. Garner (1848-1920), who believed, contrary to Du Chaillu, that gorillas were intelligent beings who possessed the capacity and desire to communicate. He traveled to central Africa in 1890, but instead of hunting the apes, he built a protective cage for himself (which he named "Fort Gorilla") and remained inside for months, waiting for a glimpse of the creatures. His field research, along with behavioral experiments using captive apes, resulted in three primatological studies, the last of which, Apes and Monkeys: Their Life and Language, was published in 1900. In the "Preface" to this volume, Garner reassures his readers that

By imbuing his quest for knowledge with an ethical dimension that not only demanded just treatment of apes but required man to reexamine his own relation to nature, Garner decried the narrative excess that had made Du Chaillu famous: "Seeing the same old stories repeated year after year, and knowing that there is no truth in them," he writes, referring explicitly to his predecessor, "I feel it incumbent as a duty to challenge them" (273). It is not a coincidence that these conflicting representations bookend the decades in which Darwin's work was first published and the discourse of species became even more entangled in already passionate debates about the scientific bases of race and ethnicity, complicating the ongoing imperialist projects of European nations. Du Chaillu's first foray into Africa occurred in 1856, three years before The Origin of Species appeared, while Garner's research, first published in 1892, four years after Darwin's death, augered a new century in which differences of all kinds, including species, would be re-examined in light of theories of natural selection. An early devotee of such theories, Garner praised Darwin in his first book, The Speech of Monkeys, claiming that he had "given to the world the most profound and conscientious work, and from the chaos and confusion of human ignorance and bigotry has erected the most sublime monuments of thought and truth" (127).

By the 1920s, these monuments were still largely under wraps. However, as the gorilla's genealogical proximity to man became more widely known and debated, and live gorillas were introduced into American zoos (the Bronx Zoo displayed two gorillas in the years between 1910 and 1915, both captured in the wild; they survived in captivity for only a short while�just long enough for O'Neill, an enthusiastic zoo visitor, to have seen them), their association with blackness, evil, and treachery slowly waned.52 Successors to Du Chaillu's sensationalism (primarily photographers, filmmakers, and zoological and museum curators), however, continued to outnumber more measured observers like Garner. It would take another half century for this received image of the gorilla�re-popularized by feature films such as King Kong (1933)�to transform itself fully. Inspired by George Schaller's 1959 field study of wild gorillas, the first of its kind, National Geographic "cover girl" Dian Fossey forcefully reshaped public opinion with her groundbreaking 1970 article "Making Friends with Mountain Gorillas," which revealed that gorillas were not only highly social and generally peaceful animals, but, in fact, strict vegetarians.53

In the meantime, stories of "great white hunters" like the American Ben Burbridge exemplified the contradictions surrounding the still mysterious figure of the gorilla. In his bestselling (and revealingly titled) 1928 memoir, Gorilla: Tracking and Capturing the Ape-Man of Africa (see Fig. 15)�which was preceded by his documentary film The Gorilla Hunt (1926), "reputed to be the earliest motion picture of great apes in the wild" (Hillman)�Burbridge recounts an early susceptibility to Du Chaillu's "realism," invoking his own "kindred primeval emotions sympathetic with these roving giant habitants of the African jungles" (186).

An enthusiastic participant in what has come to be known as the "camera-gun trope," Burbridge was, according to his own claims, the first man to capture live gorillas on film, a practice that transferred the violence of the hunt directly into the symbolic realm: "The wild man of the forest had been ensnared at last!" (214).54 He was also one of several hunters who professionally tracked and captured infant gorillas for eventual sale to zoos in Europe and the United States, providing these burgeoning public institutions with their first live specimens. While Burbridge fancied himself a dispeller of myths and advocate for the misunderstood primates, his reminiscences are fully ensconced in the melodramatic, imperialist language typical of such encounters. Here Burbridge describes his initial confrontation with a gorilla on Mount Mikenu in the Belgian Congo: "It was a strange introduction [. . .] white man and gorilla out there in the Congo forest. The ape, so manlike [. . .] impersonating the Stone Age in a meeting with steel. It was a vivid picture, tragic to a degree" (203). That "vivid picture" is nowhere more apparent than in the many photographs that accompany the volume. (Earlier works in this vein, such as Du Chaillu's, were illustrated by hand in a na�f style that masked their evidentiary quality.) Today, these images of a grinning, safari-clad Burbridge with his vanquished, scowling prey, positioned vulnerably for the camera (see Fig. 16) exude a nauseating similarity to the photos produced by American military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004.

Writing about the myth of human origins in early twentieth-century American visual culture, Donna Haraway declares that "behind every mounted animal, bronze sculpture, or photograph lies a profusion of objects and social interactions among people and other animals, which can be recomposed" to uphold the fictions of western humanism (27). Apparent enough in the Thinker's bronze exterior or Burbridge's sepia frontispiece, these fictions were institutionalized on a grand scale by Carl Akeley, the adventurer and impresario who founded the African Hall of New York's Museum of Natural History in 1938, and whose fame rested on the many animals he hunted, killed, and taxidermied in order to create his staged dioramas, altars to the representative power of pictorial naturalism.

Akeley killed his first gorilla, now on display as "The Giant of Karisimbi" when he visited Africa in 1921, the same year O'Neill wrote The Hairy Ape. Just as the freighted exchange of looks between Mildred and Yank, and later between Yank and the gorilla, mobilized relations of power in the contact zones of oceanliner and zoo, Haraway explains how the "imperialist gaze" of the hunter/collector/scientist (re)enacted the drama of humanist creation: "Akeley and the gorilla first saw each other on the lush volcanoes of central Africa. The glance proved deadly for both of them, just as the exchange between Victor Frankenstein and his creature froze each of them into a dialectic of immolation. But Frankenstein tasted the bitter failure of his fatherhood in his own and his creature's death; Akeley resurrected his creature and his authorship in [. . .] the African Hall of the Museum of Natural History" (31). The visceral, adrenalin-inducing practice of game hunting was here transmuted into the visual pleasures of public display in a proscenium theater where gorilla effigies (now understood, in Bhabha's parlance, as "colonial objects" [88]) posed a fantasy of natural history that camouflaged the presence of the hunter and taxidermist, just as it supplanted the continent of Africa and its indigenous primate cultures (see Fig. 17).

Masterful "recompositions" such as these, continues Haraway, reliably "produce a story that is reticent, even mute, about Africa" (27). Is it any surprise that O'Neill ends his "drama of protest" by emphasizing this very absence and the performances it engenders, dropping the entire problem like quarry at the unsuspecting feet of his audience, who must survey the silenced word, still under erasure in the text, as the curtain falls? Just as a theatricalized (and for the audience, now thoroughly visible) "Africa" becomes The Hairy Ape's defining absence, so too did it shadow American culture between the wars, when evolutionary theory threatened to reposition the "dark continent" as the sanctioned site (actual and symbolic) of human origins.

Remnants of these associations are still discernable in Bogard's interpretation of the play's final scene, where, he asserts, "O'Neill drops his hero back into darkness by suggesting that he can only belong to a force of simian brutality" (252). The darkness Bogard invokes stands in not only for the "simian brutality" he misattributes to the gorilla (a description more fitting for the various human beings in the play), but also for western (mis)perceptions of Africa and racist implications of blackness, which O'Neill repeatedly deconstructs by framing them in theatrical terms and linking them with the discourses of class and species.

It is clear that The Hairy Ape, with its intricate and provocative finale�perhaps the first time a gorilla was represented on stage in any context other than humor or horror�premiered during a crucial moment in America's quarrel with evolutionary theory, a time when science, entertainment, and politics conspicuously overlapped, and mention of "Africa" conjured powerful visions of both seduction and dread: the theatrical effects of a hidden and disavowed kinship. Reading O'Neill's play in the context of this history offers the same kind of illuminating perspective gleaned from public debates surrounding the initial reception of Rodin's Thinker. Just as the bronze statue came to represent romantic humanist ideals of immanence, its controversial, beastly origins buried beneath the gathering force of widely disseminated castings, the genus Gorilla suffered numerous (mis)castings of its own, accruing a reputation as monstrous as it was unfounded.

"Hunter, scientist, and artist all sought the gorilla for his revelation about the nature and future of manhood" (31), concludes Haraway. This was as much the case for O'Neill (and certainly Yank) as it was for Du Chaillu, Garner, Burbridge, or Akeley, though the playwright carried out his (re)search within the very fields of representation he was calling into question. What better place to enact this "revelation" than the theater, and what better setting than the zoo?

In 1938, the Irish poet and playwright Louis MacNeice offered the following definition: "The zoo is a cross between a music hall and a museum; it bristles with pathetic fallacies and false analogies. One never goes to the zoo without hearing someone say that something is almost human" (29, emphasis mine). Clearly, the authority of the "almost human" claim had varying consequences depending on the discipline in which it was enunciated. In the realms of positivism authorized (in part) by the increasingly market-driven research of the American university, Robert M. Yerkes's provocatively titled 1925 study, Almost Human, had, for better or worse, heralded the creation of the modern primate laboratory. "Few persons would be likely to argue that the exhibition of primates," writes Yerkes, "either trained or untrained,

For those institutions that fostered intimacy across the "infrahuman" spectrum (as Yerkes called it) rather than insisting on an objectifying distance, the "almost human" claim rested rather delicately on a sensational activity called performance, or "display." MacNeice's offhanded commentary on the zoo complicates Yerkes's earlier claim by proposing speciation as a public, performative practice, carried out behind the bars of both zoo and laboratory as a theatrical effect of humanist ideology, a place where those animals who are "almost human" demonstrate, by the very architecture of their cordoned copresence, the epistemological power of human categorization in the company of "our nearest kin" and its instrumentality in the production of (self-) knowledge (see Fig. 18).

If Mildred, therefore, visited the stokehole with a nostalgic desire to discover her familial ancestry but was shocked when she found a "filthy beast" in the place of her grandfather, Yank visits the zoo with the hope of encountering a fully authorized version of the "hairy ape," both evolutionary ancestor and theatrical kin. And just as the scene of recognition between Mildred and Yank was framed by "asymmetrical relations of power," the bond between Yank and the gorilla, staged in the multifaceted contact zone of the zoo�a site organized by the "spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, whose trajectories now intersect" (Pratt 7)�is similarly freighted, and shifts precariously as the misrecognitions resolve and congeal.

Almost as soon as Yank sets eyes on the gorilla (though the stage directions tell us the animal is seated in the Thinker pose�hardly a combative stance) he casts the caged primate as a powerfully masculine, racialized, and animalized type of human performer: a boxer.

An ethological reading of the gorilla's actions in this scene (were we able to rely on naturalist dramaturgy) would reveal his upright stance, swelled chest, and pounding fists as elements of a "display" brought on by sustained eye contact with a conspecific male, suggesting a challenge to the animal's social standing. The nine-step "chest-beating sequence" of the mountain gorilla, believed to be "one of the most complex ritualized displays among mammals" (Schaller 234) is performed by silverbacks responding to a threat (perceived or actual) to their status as alpha male.56 This "King of the Jungle" behavior has been restored so often in human cultural contexts that it functions, by now, as a clich� (humorous and/or horrifying) of masculine power, brutish and territorial�the opposite, perhaps, of the Thinker clich� as it has come to be understood in its own cultural contexts.

But if one primate's pose unfolds, subtly, from clich� to gestus as the action develops, might not the other's as well? While Yank's Thinker "attitude" resisted representation within the dramatic narrative, signifying only to the audience, the gorilla's pose offers itself up to Yank's newly sharpened sensibilities within the world of the play, presenting spectatorship itself as an ethical act in which the viewer (in this case, Yank) must acknowledge his own perspective (or lack thereof) in the creation of meaning. The kinds of "animal motives" the theater audience deduces from the gorilla's actions in this scene are as influenced by the terms the play itself establishes as they are by other, more familiar modes of animal representation, which range from realism and naturalism to comedy and caricature.

But because Yank's understanding of animal behavior (and natural history) is mediated by the zoo, "a site," argues Chaudhuri, "of boundary-blurring and identity crises, which facilitate[s] the demeaning classifications and oppressive identifications by means of which cultural power is wielded" (144), his interpretation of this initial encounter with the gorilla has more to do with his own preconceptions and desires than it does with any kind of scientific or dramatic knowledge. "The zoo," Chaudhuri explains, "inherits and extends the culture's double-coding of animals as objects of knowledge and objects of fantasy" (147) and, as we will see, Yank is just as susceptible to these humanist imperatives�replete with the "pathetic fallacies and false analogies" (MacNeice 29) that constitute this "double-coding"�as "de white-faced skinny tarts and de boobs what marry 'em" (161):

Tempted to cast the gorilla as "almost human," Yank chooses a model of primate kinship based in the confraternity of violent protest he had hoped to find and enjoy in the "brotherhood" of the IWW. His question, simultaneously pleading and cynical�"Ain't we both members of de same club�de Hairy Apes?"�when reread in the context of Bird's announcement of a new theatrical species (the hybrid "monkey-man"), anticipates the desperate performances with which this final scene will culminate.57 Through the "dead stillness" of their mutually interpellative gaze, Yank now perceives the gorilla's power (physical and cultural), and thus begins to contemplate his own, as a performative practice�one framed by the recently legitimized (and highly theatricalized) drama of the boxing ring.

"Prize fighting, though common enough in the early 1890s," writes Charles Musser, "existed outside the law in every state and territory of the Unites States. Fights were generally arranged clandestinely and conducted in out of the way places" (36). As Musser details in his annotated filmography of Edison shorts, early film production in the United States was inspired by popular performance practices of all kinds, from the muscular postures of strong man Eugene Sandow (an inheritor of Ducrow's poses plastiques) to exotic dancers and animal acts. It was a short journey from the burlesque stages of New York City to Edison's studios in West Orange, New Jersey, and thus we possess a rich visual index of turn-of-the-century theatrical tastes, documented through the pathbreaking technology of the kinetograph camera. While live boxing matches between human beings may have been officially prohibited, nonhuman animals were regularly set against one another in the ring. From the entrenched pleasures of cockfighting to the unique experience of boxing cats, live animals performed for human audiences seeking violent spectacle, or, at the very least, its illusion.

One of the very first "films" ever made is titled Monkey and Another, Boxing (1891). Nonhuman primates paved the way for a human entry, Men Boxing, which followed shortly thereafter, also in 1891. By the next year, Edison had made significant improvements to the kinetograph, such that the films he produced now qualified, according to Musser, as "the first modern motion pictures" (73, 75, 80). It is in this way that Boxing (1892) became the very first American movie. More films along these lines appeared in 1894, when Edison opened the Black Maria, the first studio devoted solely to film production. Boxing matches were among the most common film events, and boxers gained a legitimate appeal as cinematic subjects (they were, one might venture, the first American film stars) even as their charismatic presence in actual boxing matches remained illicit.58 Nonhuman animals (primarily felines and primates), however, prevailed at the theater as well as the film studio: In 1894, "Professor Welton's Trained Cats" attracted large crowds at New York's vaudeville houses; the feline pugilists were named after human boxing stars and matched against each other, delivering gloved blows. Similarly, "Alleni's Boxing Monkeys" could be seen for 10 cents at Huber's Museum on 14th Street (Musser 87-123 passim).59

After boxing was legalized in 1896 and could be performed in front of live audiences, Edison soon began to copyright and distribute boxing films, which played to large audiences across the country and around the world, culminating in an 1899 series featuring heavyweight world champion James J. Jeffries (Musser 505-509). In 10 years, boxing had metamorphosed from a back alley activity to become mainstream American entertainment. In the years preceding O'Neill's play, boxing moved from its initial association of masculinity and physical prowess with animality to a new obsession linking all these qualities with race.60 The first African-American heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, held his title from 1908-1915, causing outrage among fans looking for the "Great White Hope," a Caucasian boxer who could defeat him. When Johnson once again prevailed against the former champion, Jeffries, on 4 July 1910, race riots broke out across the country. Five years later, after Johnson was finally defeated, he entered the vaudeville circuit and worked as an entertainer for the rest of his life, much of it spent overseas, where his "unforgivable blackness" had forced him into exile.61

Boundaries between actor and athlete (and, at times, animal) were commonly blurred in this era, as stars of sport performed on stage in theatrical venues, as well as in front of the camera. Ronald Adair, the actor who played Tarzan in the ill-fated Broadway premiere of 1921, had boxed in vaudeville sketches as well as championship contests in London for years before he came to the United States to take on the role of the ape-man cum aristocrat.62 The Brooklyn-born Jewish actor Louis Wolheim (according to Bird, newly authorized to represent a "human being" on Broadway, though the role he landed would complicate her claim) played Yank in the Provincetown production of The Hairy Ape and reprised the role on Broadway and in cross-country tours. Wolheim started off his career in performance as a star football player and boxer at Cornell; his broken nose and rough appearance (maintained, in part, through a love of barroom brawls�"once, when Wolheim was fighting, it took four policeman to stop him") won him the lead role in O'Neill's drama, though they belied his academic credentials, which included a degree in math and a facility with languages: "He spoke French, German, Spanish, and Yiddish and had translated several plays" (Shafer, 26, 24, and passim).63

Representations of Wolheim in the role of Yank often emphasized the performative nature of his belligerence as well as his mindfulness, calling attention to both as culturally coded poses (see Fig. 19). This visual iconography linked man and ape to a history of popular American entertainment that figured race and species as differences that could be performed, projected, or deflected by a variety of actors, both human and animal. (Yvonne Shafer reports that one audience member imagined Wolheim had "been caught and tamed in the wilds of Pago-Pago, Samoa and imported especially to play his part" [24].) At the same time, entrenched dualisms of mind and body, intellect and instinct, were complicated by ongoing and highly publicized debates about the validity of evolutionary theory, placing primate kinship and its African origins at the center of humanist anxieties. Brute or Brother? The stakes involved in this false choice were at an all-time high.

Yank's deliberative answer to this question evolves in visual terms that slowly give way to a vanishing point. Homeless and abandoned, Yank begins to adapt by aestheticizing what was once his natural environment:

Yank's relationship to his labor and its products had begun as an insistent self-affirmation ("I'm steel�steel�steel!" [129]) and metamorphosed into a violent alienation ("Steel! It don't belong, dat's what! [154]). What had once been the core of his being was now the machinery of his oppression; steel was the material with which capitalists manufactured power in the form of "cages, cells, locks, bolts, [and] bars" (154). But near the end of his journey, as Yank looks out at the skyscrapers and oceanliners, he sees past their material substance and social significance to view them in the mode of landscape, where, rather than marring the beauty of sunrise, they enhance it. Moreover, Yank momentarily inserts himself into this modern landscape as figure, with the natural pleasures of sunshine, clear skies, and warm breezes transforming what was once an inhospitable environment to a fully-realized romantic scene.

That Yank works through his newly-mastered ability�only to reject it�in front of the gorilla's cage at the zoo is a pointed choice for O'Neill. As Malamud reminds us, the zoo is a place where "spectators [. . .] regard unimpeded, imperiously, omnivorously, masters of all they survey" (229). Yank concurs that this is "great stuff," and even comes to acknowledge Paddy's point of view as "de right dope," yet while he "gets it" he can't "get in it," he can't "belong." Once he arrives at the zoo, these representative strategies are no longer beneficial to his survival, for under their authority the gorilla (along with Yank himself) risks being framed as a colonial object. As Yank moves between scenes 7 and 8�from morn to midnight, from downtown to uptown, from sunrise in Battery Park to twilight at the Bronx Zoo�he begins to replace the static perspectives of landscape with the mobile and potentially liberating practices of performance, transforming the taxonomic logic and pictorial organization of the zoo into the three-dimensional, intersecting gazes and exchanges of power that operate in a contact zone.

It is within this experimental dynamic that Yank learns the epistemology of the cage, its power to create (or mirror) knowledge through the mechanics of enclosure:

Despite his confusion, Yank's analytical abilities (and the ethical conclusions he draws from them: "It's all wrong, ain't it?") are moving him toward a fully-fledged, adaptive strategy for "belonging." When he witnesses the ideological framing properties of humanism literalized by the zoo, he is able finally to understand the symbolic nature of his own framing; for the first time, Yank is able to view himself from Mildred's perspective, and even to exceed it, making sense of her fear while pointing out its misplaced cause: "She wasn't wise dat I was in a cage, too." Here Yank begins to operate in the contact zone as a mobile, autonomous agent, able to anticipate, manipulate, and perform exchanges of power. He is about to become an actor.

As a scientist, Yerkes was convinced that "both zoological parks and circuses have the great advantage of [. . .] affording abundant opportunities for companionship and display. The great apes," he declared, "have an innate love of acting. They delight in attracting attention and with visitors before them they are at their best" (226). This claim, which offers a conveniently simplistic view of acting, is at odds with MacNeice's more cynical evaluation of zoo animals' relation to the cage/stage: As "professional animals," he writes, "they have been removed from the flux of life, from making their own living in the jungle, into a steady and one-sided existence where their job is merely to be on show. Consequently, like professional actors, they often become very dull" (31).

Ensnared in the contradictions of colonial exhibition, the primates' compulsory (and we must assume, professional) performance enacts a variety of theatrical speciation that fosters the kinds of misrecognition so typical of the "imperialist gaze":

Following this outburst, in which Yank becomes conscious of his own cultural hybridity ("I belong wit 'em�but I don't, see? Dey don't belong with me, dat's what"), he explains to the gorilla that "Tinkin' is hard" as he "passes one hand across his forehead with a painful gesture" (162), a far more conventional index of the vicissitudes of thought than the Rodin posture�one that might, in fact, appear on the naturalist stage.

Here O'Neill overtly changes the way Yank has been represented since his assignation with Mildred; his action, once peripatetic, is now primarily verbal�thinking is translated from formal pose to active discourse in Yank's long, speculative monologue, while the gesture that accompanies it exists within, rather than alongside, the dramatic narrative. In its final appearance on stage, the Rodin posture is merely derivative, "much the same" rather than "exact." Just as audience members and critics had stumbled upon the trap of humanism embedded in the extra-dramatic Thinker pose, Yank must now struggle to recognize and interpret the various poses performed by the gorilla (from his asymptotic Thinker to the "attitudes" of the chest-beating sequence) in the significatory abyss of the laboratory/zoo/circus/theater, where essences give way to roles, animals become actors, and experience is continually reframed as performance.

Remarkably undaunted, Yank "goes on gropingly," developing what Chaudhuri calls "a construction of the animal as fundamentally and blessedly territorial, unalienable, beyond the reach of the debilitating geopathologies of modern human beings" (146).

Yank moves from a fantasy of the gorilla's glorious past as "King of the Jungle," exempt from the corruptions of civilization, to a realization of his own distance from the humanist ideal. His incipient self-image as someone who can only "make a bluff at talkin' and tinkin'" and "a'most git away wit it�a'most!" is reminiscent of a figure known in postcolonial studies as the "mimic man." Bhabha develops the idea of colonial mimicry and the "metonymy of presence" it produces around this very figure, which originates in V.S. Naipaul's novel The Mimic Men (1967): "We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World" (146). Like the hybrid ape-man, a theatrical type that originated with Caliban, these figures, according to Bhabha, "are the parodists of history" in its official appearance as an authorized text. And like Yank in his final performance, "they inscribe the colonial text erratically, eccentrically across a body politic that refuses to be representative, in a narrative that refuses to be representational" (88).

While linking the "form of difference that is mimicry" with the phrase "almost the same but not quite," Bhabha reapplies this concept to the discourse of race as the amended "almost the same but not white" (89). Here we see the effects of the "colonialist gaze" (in Bhabha's terms) that reifies the distance from white to black, male to female, master to slave, human to nonhuman, while purporting simply to measure it. The uncanny echo of Yank's anguished "a'most!" with Yerkes's "almost human" slogan suggests a related "metonymy of presence" within the forms of difference produced by humanism, especially those that legislate primate kinship: almost the same but not quite human. This is the discursive subtext of the "hairy ape" epithet.

By referring to himself as "de joker," a multivalent term that brings to mind not only the postcolonial "mimic man," but also a number of theatrical antecedents�from early clown and slave figures to the stock characters of harlequin and trickster�Yank announces his entrance onto the stage of humanist subjectivity. As the joker�a "wild card" character who can masquerade as, or mimic, any other card in the deck�Yank embraces the power of impersonation, or camouflage, the instinctual posing that allows for adaptation and survival in a changing environment. The unmediated "brute force" he had previously and unsuccessfully relied upon to protect and define him has now been supplanted by the notion that power�of all kinds�must be performed in order to take effect.

By the end of the drama, Yank understands that performances of self are necessarily partial and, by definition, strategic: "Mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind its mask" (Bhabha 88). Only the mask itself is essential.

For the rest of the monologue, Yank's primitivist fantasy of the gorilla as "de champ of de woild" (stoker shorthand for "The Heavyweight Champion of the World") structures his plan for revenge. But because he feels excluded from linear paradigms of history that signify "progress" ("I ain't got no past to tink in, nor nothin' dat's comin', on'y what's now"), Yank turns to an episodic model of action, one where it is "always now": performance. Convinced of his pre-rational, pre-literate, jungle-bound "belonging" with the gorilla ("Sure! Yuh get me. It beats it when you try to tink it or talk it�it's way down�deep�behind�you `n' me we feel it. Sure! Bot' members of dis [the "Hairy Apes"] club!"), Yank "laughs" and then continues "in a savage tone":

By transforming the static frame of zoological display into the action-filled arena of the boxing ring, Yank imagines the two primates performing their mute indignation to adoring spectators and great acclaim, as men like Jack Johnson had done. But although Johnson, the child of former slaves, achieved unprecedented celebrity as "the first African American pop culture icon" (Early) the price for economic freedom was a constant restaging of his own exclusion from the humanist ideal. Just when his fame threatened to reverse the racist effects of such performances, Johnson was convicted in 1913 under the Mann Act (also known as the "White Slave Traffic Act") for transporting a woman across state lines for an "immoral purpose," an absurd charge often used to censure miscegenation. Rather then serve jail time, Johnson fled. He returned to the United States in 1920, was imprisoned for ten months, and then released from jail in the summer of 1921, just before O'Neill, a boxing fan and frequent spectator at prizefights, commenced work on The Hairy Ape ("Unforgivable"; Bogard and Bryer 274).

Yank's true opponents in this "agonistic space [of] colonial authority" (Bhabha 121) are those who reinforce the interpellative power of society's steel enclosures, actual and symbolic. By prying open the lock on the gorilla's cage, Yank is defying the totalizing power of steel, a force he once believed he embodied:

In this parody of Johnson's triumphant and well-publicized release from prison ("Jack Johnson Free"), Yank revisits his own fateful stroll down Fifth Avenue with Long, which had ended in frustration, expulsion, and arrest, landing him in prison on Blackwells Island. The impenetrable, masked marionette chorus, who "seem[ed] neither to see nor hear him," had refused to participate in the symbolic exchanges of a "contact zone," repulsing Yank's angry lunges, verbal assaults, and demands for recognition: "Look at me, why don't youse dare? I belong, dat's me!" (148). Experts in the art of posing (like Mildred, only better), the chorus relied on the strategic essentialism produced by their white masks (see Fig. 20), which made them impervious to Yank's destructive rage.

Unshaven, with "the black smudge of coal dust" that "still sticks like make-up" (144) penetrating the skin around their eyes, Yank and Long appeared in stark contrast to the churchgoers and shoppers (in the stage directions, at least), whose capitalist camouflage granted them a "detached, mechanical unawareness" (147).64 This manufactured stance dissolves to ecstasy, however, when a woman notices a $2,000 item for sale in a storefront window, and, "with a gasp of delight," cries out "Monkey fur!" As with the earlier, pointed refrains of suspect terms, the "whole crowd of men and women chorus after her in the same tone of affected delight: Monkey fur!" (149). Ghoulishly stolen from the dead bodies of "poor, 'armless animals" (146) as Long explains to Yank, and "bathed in a downpour of artificial light" (144) from the furrier's window display, the animal hide is objectified by the marketplace diorama, where it is commodified as a "rich fur," obscuring the "social interactions among people and other animals" through which it is "recomposed," while "produc[ing] a story that is reticent, even mute, about Africa" (Haraway 27), the assumed provenance of the silent, slaughtered monkey.

While the denizens of Fifth Avenue had refused the symbolic, reciprocal exchanges Yank yearned for, the pleasure derived from their mere contemplation of commercial luxury goods adds to the "relentless horror" (147) O'Neill finds in their Frankensteinian appetite for acquiring body parts with which they can "keep their bleedin' noses warm!" (146). In Yank's fantasy revenge plot, however, the empty primate hide, stolen from its proper place and reappropriated as a colonialist object, is replaced by a living creature whose hirsute exterior cannot be separated so easily from his sui generis ability to signify. Like Johnson before him, Yank wants to perform his way out of the cage and onto the avenues of wealth and privilege, where he will be free to determine his own worth.

When Yank releases the gorilla, calling him "Brother," the animal "scrambles gingerly out of his cage" (162-63) and then

Able to look at a human being without the interceding view of the bars, presumably the first time the gorilla had done so since the moment he caught sight of his captor (all the gorillas who lived in the United States�there were very few of them at that time�had been captured in Africa, usually as juveniles, and transported overseas), the gorilla�who, when caged, seemed "as if he understood" (161)�must now make sense of Yank's quickly proffered hand and mocking tone of voice, which signify as non-verbal gestures of aggression, matching up with the direct and sustained eye-contact by which a challenge for dominance is initiated (see Fig. 21).

The ritual of the handshake, commonly understood to have evolved as a gesture revealing friendly intent, proof of the lack of a concealed weapon, is here bereft of its human meaning, and the word "brother," which suggests a relationship based on biological as well as racial, political, and spiritual kinship, gets lost in the mocking tones with which it is delivered. Yank's ability to talk, or at least make a bluff at it, is now his downfall. Like the term "brother," the word "order" is shared between the social and scientific realms, used in both the "secret grip" of homosocial organization and the hierarchies of animal taxonomy: humans and gorillas both "belong" to the Order Primate. But because the epistemology of the cage enforced a view of mimicry as a one-way street in which "savages and monkeys with no other strategies for relating to more sophisticated beings" were reduced to the techniques of "aping" (Goodall 132), Yank imagined the gorilla would "monkey" his own gestures, repeating them at least, even if he could not reproduce them.

Yank's assignation with the gorilla is a strangely literalized and reversed version of Paddy and Long's analysis of Mildred's interpellation. The one real opportunity Yank had to evolve was lost along with Mildred, who fainted before the prospect, thinking, according to Paddy, "she'd seen a great hairy ape escaped from the Zoo!" (141). The only physical embrace that occurs in the drama�a "murderous hug"�takes place between Yank and the gorilla, and its latent sexual connotations are fully acknowledged by the former, whose earnest if bellicose demeanor has, by the final scene, plunged to the unremitting depths of bald mockery, the linguistic equivalent of travesty: "Hey, I didn't say, kiss me."

While Mildred's interpellation of Yank as a "filthy beast" signaled his entrance into the symbolic order of humanism, Yank's interpellation of the gorilla frees the latter from that same order. While Yank once believed that his blackness, animality, and masculinity placed him at the apex of the industrialized world, only to discover that he was, in fact, its substrate, these same qualities, when reattributed to the gorilla by Yank, remove the stoker to a position that is ultimately feminized, with brotherly handshake turning instead to an imagined "kiss." A pallid Yank falls to the ground, just as Mildred did when she saw him for the first time; Yank, too, is now a poseur, and like Mildred, his pose collapses.

This series of transitive deflections�beginning with the seaman Cocky who calls Paddy an "'airy ape" in The Moon of the Caribbees, and moving through Mildred, Yank, and the gorilla�structures a "process of classificatory confusion" that Bhabha calls "the metonymy of the substitutive chain of ethical and cultural discourse" (91). At the end of the line, the audience members must decide whether to maintain the pose or relinquish it, acknowledging themselves as "hairy apes" or leaving the theater convinced that Yank had failed in his attempt to become human.

In the end, of course, the gorilla achieves what Yank could not: he eludes the spectator's demands and quits the stage altogether, leaving Yank to perform the role of "hairy ape" in his place, a move Malamud describes as "the transposition of their situations" (142) that "appears to be a zero-sum enterprise: for the animal to go free, a man has to replace it in its cage" (140).

An exchange such as this has power enough within the dramatic narrative, but as a comment on the politics of spectatorship, O'Neill's message is clear: the "imperialist gaze" was as active in the "legitimate theater" as it was in the fairgrounds, and given the chance, the "monkey man" would just as soon exit "menacingly into the darkness" offstage�where his blackness would function as camouflage�as occupy a well-lit cage at the center of the action, where he would surely perish by play's end.

The world champion Polish wrestler Stanislaus Zbyszko (1881-1967), writes Graham Noble,

Zbyszko's protest for athleticism over "acting" made sense in the 1950s and '60s, when televised professional wrestling embraced lowbrow spectacle and featured outlandish personalities who lacked the classical training and well-rounded education enjoyed by early-twentieth-century Eastern wrestlers, who dominated the sport until World War I. But Zbyszko's international fame was the result of just such showmanship, often involving ethnically inflected, fixed matches that theatricalized wrestlers of all nationalities, from Turks to Scots (Noble, "Lion�Part II"). After winning the Greco-Roman world championship in Paris, Zbyszko moved to London in 1906, where he was under contract with the renowned British theatrical agent and producer Charles B. Cochran, who claims, in his autobiography Secrets of a Showman (1925), that Zbyszko�who "was of good family, well-educated�even cultured" (124)�was also "a splendid showman, and gave the public exactly what they wanted" (117).

The wrestler performed in music halls and other theatrical venues, including the London Pavilion, where he "had a standing challenge to meet all comers" (Cochran 118). Cochran hired various amateurs to take him on; of course, they all lost. In a well-publicized and sold-out match with the professional Russian wrestler Ivan Padoubny, Zbyszko won by default after his disqualified opponent played "a series of foul tricks, all the time growling out barbaric Cossack terms of abuse" (Cochran 122). Public response to this fight claimed it had been staged, and a later match with Turkish wrestler Kara Suliman in 1908 also came under accusation, investigations proving that this "wrestling farce" was a mere publicity stunt, a product of Zbyszko's "fake proclivities," though it was clearly Cochran who had masterminded the money-making scheme in which "two foreign wrestlers hoax[ed] the British public as it has not been hoaxed for many a long day" (Noble, "Lion�Part II").

When Zbyszko visited the United States, he encountered the Iowan Frank Gotch, who played in the modern "catch-as-catch-can" style that Zbyszko and other wrestlers of his era deplored. Graham recounts one particularly memorable match between the two, "held at the Chicago Coliseum on June 1, 1910":

The resemblance to O'Neill's scene is undeniable: the na�ve Yank "holds out his hand" (163) only to be sprung upon by the ape, who is clearly playing by a different set of rules. Yank is down for the count in a matter of seconds.

It is possible that O'Neill had read about this contest in the newspapers at the time, as the press covered Zbyszko's American career with zeal. If not, the wrestler was obviously on O'Neill's radar years later, while writing The Hairy Ape. Zbyszko had returned to the United States in 1920 after being imprisoned in Russia as a spy during World War I; he worked to get himself back in shape, began to play matches in New York City, and by 1921 was again the world champion (Noble, "Lion�Part IV"). Articles on Zybszko's fights appeared almost weekly in the New York Times, and on 15 May 1921 he was featured on the front page, with the enlarged headline "Champion at 42 Years" (Rice 1). More articles arrived in late November and early December, as Zybszko defended his title against Ed "The Strangler" Lewis, performing "before a crowd of about 7,000 at Madison Square Garden" ("Zbyszko Retains Wrestling Title" 23).

On 1 January 1922, just as O'Neill was finishing his first draft of The Hairy Ape, an illustrated feature on Zybszko, "There Was No Faking When Zbyszko Wrestled for his Life," appeared in the Chicago Daily Tribune with the following analysis of the Gotch fiasco:

A claim that O'Neill had consciously worked the Zbyszko detail (with all its attendant meanings and nuances) into the play is supported by the language nationally-syndicated sports writer and cartoonist Robert Edgren used to describe the wrestler. Reminiscent of O'Neill's descriptions of the stokers in scene 1, Edgren's Tribune article envisioned Zybszko as "a throwback to the time of the cave men. Only 5 feet 9 inches tall, he is gigantic in breadth and thickness, long armed, enormously muscled. In strength he is more like a gorilla than an ordinary man" (A3).

The thematic associations with O'Neill's play even transcend Edgren's fortuitous invocation of the gorilla: The real focus of the feature was the story of Zbyszko's match against the Russian Alex Aberg while the former was imprisoned on suspicion of spying during World War I. Removed from his cell in the internment camp, Zbyszko was transported to a stage in Petrograd where he was forced to "prove his quality." If he "lost the match, he should be executed immediately." Despite the fact that Aberg filled the audience with "several hundred soldiers" whom he had paid "to root for him," Zbyszko prevailed, and "running to his corner [he] tore open a bag containing a thousand rubles and threw the money into the crowd. While the soldiers scrambled for it Zbyszko made his escape" (A3).

With "typing and revising still to be done" on the play, as O'Neill wrote to George Jean Nathan on January 2, it seems likely that the many discourses surrounding the Zbyszko phenomenon�chief among them the ambiguous and potentially subversive quality of performance itself�found their way into The Hairy Ape, helping to structure the looming questions posed by the final scene. "I have not hesitated to use everything I could find in the theatre or life which could heighten or drive home the underlying idea," O'Neill wrote, explaining to Nathan that the play was "a large experimental departure from the form of all my previous work" (Bogard and Bryer 161).

While The Hairy Ape's last scene unites the recurring structural rhymes of prison and zoo so central to O'Neill's expressionist stage picture, the tropes give way, in the drama's final moments, to yet another symbolic pairing: the deceptively euphonious cage and stage. These sites find their common ground in Yank's ambiguous "demise," performed under a steel proscenium, and behind steel bars, as a play-within-a-play, titled, according to the zoological signage, "Gorilla." The melodramatic performance begins "with sudden passionate despair," as Yank laments,

Yank's command performance participates in a popular nineteenth-century tradition Jane R. Goodall calls "savage pantomime": "The savage was a paradigm in search of supporting evidence," she explains, "and those imported to provide it were being co-opted into an already defined role in which behavior had to be repeated to order, so that the slide from exhibition to performance to fully fledged pantomime was almost inevitable" (82). It is no surprise, of course, when we discover that Yank's "savage" transformation into "a queerer kind of baboon than ever you'd find in darkest Africy" (140), was not, as various critics have claimed, political, existential, or psychological, but, in fact, utterly theatrical.

As a performative "zoo story," The Hairy Ape ironically "situates itself against the zoo�resisting it, subverting it, deconstructing it." Malamud's paradigm, within which O'Neill's play may be placed, "does not posit a voice the zoo could claim as its own: rather, it displaces and replaces the zoo in one motion. The zoo story exists instead of going to the zoo" (55). In Yank's seemingly debased performance, "mediated by the dynamics and aftereffects of imperial development," the beleaguered stoker has finally realized (and thus exposed) the kind of amusement demanded by the "legitimate theater" audience's "omnivorous spectatorial gaze" (Malamud 57).

If, in the typical zoo story Malamud analyzes, "the denouement is death" (56), and "the very fabric of representation itself [. . .] embodies and ensures the exclusive voice of the dominant system out of which it emerges" (58), O'Neill undermines that exclusiveness in the literal and figurative expression of Yank's last sentence ("Ladies and gents, step forward and take a slant at de one and only�one and original�Hairy Ape from de wilds of�" [163]), where the "metonymy of presence" so characteristic of colonial mimicry produces its dizzyingly layered "substitutive chain" (Bhabha 89, 91).

While Yank speaks "in the strident tones of a circus barker" (impersonating Paddy's earlier impersonation of the Second Engineer, whom he imagines has taken on the role of a circus barker advertising Yank's feral performance in the stokehole), he also plays the advertised ape, whose authenticity is announced in sideshow terms that undercut its pretense to authority. "The desire to emerge as `authentic' through mimicry," Bhabha claims, "is the final irony of partial representation" (88). This double-casting is heightened by the citational nature of Yank's speech, delivered behind a sign that proclaims he is a gorilla: Is the circus barker himself the "savage pantomime" artist, and the ape his subaltern, or is the primate his own double, performing across the imagined divide between human and nonhuman? The "metonymies of presence" that structure this moment occur at the boundaries of identity and essence; this is where the hybrid ape-man�who is always already an actor�operates.

The culminating dash that (dis)closes this representation, visible only to the reader, indicates an interruption�a conventional dynamic of written dialogue�but because Yank's monologue is punctuated, ultimately, by death (or, intriguingly, its performance), O'Neill deconstructs the very idea of linguistic interruption, positing instead the kind of rupture with signification that "achieves an interplay between presence and absence" (Norris 21). For the spectator, however, the (un)voiced dash opens up a perspective where the semiotics of the theater�its substitutive, if not sacrificial, logic�intersects with the history of colonialist performance to produce a spectral pr�sence Africaine.68 Figured by the hegemonic power of the zoo and its various analogues, this condemning trace, eerily sensed throughout the drama though lingering at the threshold of visibility, ultimately emerges from a text that, in the words of Margot Norris, "force[s] us to read ourselves [. . .] to listen to the voice of our own beast" (21).

"The menace of mimicry," writes Bhabha, "is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority" (88). Is Yank dead, or just posing, like the "caterpillars which project motionless like dead twigs from the bushes on which they feed" (Norris 53)? Will he, too, once the lights go down, "shuffle off menacingly into the darkness," "free to moider" Mildred, or better yet, her father? Or is Yank now Mildred's true "match," a poseur par excellence? Are the "dialectics of immolation" (Haraway 31) that take place between Yank and the gorilla the aforementioned "star bout dat'll knock `em [the theater audience] offen deir seats," with Yank unwittingly felled by his mockingly civil handshake? Or have the primates actually colluded to give the contest its sensational appearance, splitting the box office as Zbyszko and Padoubny had done when they fleeced a British public hungry for "savage pantomime"? Does the "hairy ape" at last "belong" because he has learned, once and for all, to adapt and survive in the dissimulating environment of the stage?

The metatheatricality of the zoo scene frustrates closure, refusing to provide an answer. The whole play, in fact, is theatricalized to such a degree, and is so deeply allusive, that it constantly verges on metatheatricality. By highlighting the fungible nature of man and ape on the carnival stages of humanism, O'Neill demonstrates how the interrelated generic and ontological instabilities generated by "primate dramas" plot their own form of revenge on the theater audience.

For Yank, and the modern subjects he represents, primate kinship constituted an overdetermined and ongoing m�conaissance that many insisted was tragic. In Almost Human, Yerkes (soon to be considered the world's foremost expert on primate behavior) declared, "the history of the gibbon, the orang-utan, the chimpanzee, and the gorilla in traveling shows [. . .] has been a series of tragedies" (222), but perhaps "most tragic of all is the history of the gorilla's relations to man" (223).

Historically, drama critics have tried to understand The Hairy Ape, too, as a modern tragedy, in line with O'Neill's attempts to bring classical form into dialogue with twentieth-century American concerns. From its very first reviews�Startk Young finds "pathos, confusion, and tragedy" in the final scene, and a "tragic unity" in Yank's "body, mind and soul" (43)�to the most recent scholarship in all its diversity, the consensus that the play is tragic continues to hold.69 In 1946, The Hairy Ape was included in an anthology of world drama under the category "Expressionistic Tragedy" (W. Clark 1007) and by 1960 it was featured in another anthology titled Tragedy: Plays, Theory, and Criticism (Levin) where it was listed alongside Sophocles Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare's Othello, and Ibsen's Ghosts. This view of the play survives despite its subtitle, "A Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life in Eight Scenes," which is often omitted (as it was when the play was included in the Concise Anthology of American Literature [McMichael and Leonard]), overlooked, or understood solely�like the Rodin pose�as ironic.

The sensationalist descriptor "ancient and modern" was used commonly in nineteenth-century advertising for circuses and sideshows, as well as in the titles of "educational" texts, including scientific and historical tracts. It also featured in museum exhibits, such as those offered by P.T. Barnum at his American Museum in New York, which operated from 1841 to 1865. Barnum's weekly column for the New York Mercury, "Ancient and Modern Humbugs of the World," which ran from 1864-65, promised an "insider's look" at the frauds of nineteenth-century American culture, and complemented articles on other "suspect activities," such as "blackface and boxing" (Cook, back cover, 10). This idiomatic phrase signals The Hairy Ape's performative interventions in natural history at the same time that it places "ancient and modern" in dialogue within the realm of dramatic genre. This is particularly relevant for O'Neill, whose dramaturgy couples ancient and modern forms�the productive action of the "comedy of ancient and modern life" to which he refers�while critiquing both through the play's persistent interrogation of fraudulent binaries.

Of course, it is easy to see why the play would be viewed as tragic. Yank, the presumed protagonist, embarks on a heroic, self-revelatory journey, moving through a series of reversals that lead inexorably (or so we are meant to believe) to a final scene of recognition and suffering that ends in death. The stokers chant together as would a Greek chorus, and, later in the play, the chorus of prisoners reflects the concerns of a disgruntled populace critical of the abuse of power. In the classical choral exodus, however, man recalls his proper place in the universe and returns to it. His privileged position in this world is maintained through the exclusion of "nonhuman" others (primarily women and slaves) who do not qualify as citizens.

Through his use of the animalized chorus, O'Neill subsumes the stokers' ethnic differences within a powerful "sort of unity" (121) signaling at the play's outset his interest in subverting humanist paradigms. Identifying the number of dehumanized choral entities that populate the play�apes, slaves, robots, marionettes, monsters, and monkeys�brings O'Neill's critique of humanism into high relief, especially when viewed against the authoritative ground of the Greek standard. We are not surprised, therefore, when survival, extinction, and particularly adaptation�the analogous site of (meta)theatricality for O'Neill�emerge as structuring forces within the play.

O'Neill's revisions to tragic form culminate in the play's final scene, but unlike traditional tragedy, where violence and death occur offstage, Yank performs his spectacular, melodramatic death on the platform of the gorilla's cage/stage, which acts as a "portal" of sorts (reminiscent of Rodin's liminal Gates of Hell) through which Yank exits the social hierarchy of New York and enters the theatrical economy of species performance, the only site through which his "death" can properly be read.

We must also acknowledge the connection with previous animal choruses, such as Aristophanes, which begins to shed light on O'Neill's subtitle, where a play that poses as tragedy mysteriously promises comedy. Both unions (Mildred/Yank and Yank/Gorilla), however, fail to produce their desired (if delusional) bond of kinship, and fail as well to reproduce themselves through the biological processes of sexual selection. The socially productive pleasures of procreation so essential to classical comedy are translated here from their ritual efficacy to the hackneyed stages of "savage pantomime," where those whose bodies (or minds) fall too far from the humanist ideal must stage their own exclusion.

The purpose of both classical forms is, arguably, to uphold the conflation of identity and essence as the basis of human being. Comedy separates the terms through (mis)recognition but usually manages to restore them in seamless harmony; tragedy stages the rupture of identity and essence, also through (mis)recognition, but frames it as anomalous and in need of communal purgation in order to restore order to society. The metatheatricality of the final scene, in particular, insists not only upon the sustained analysis of these terms, rather than their comic or tragic synthesis, but replaces the humanist ideologies of recognition with the mutually constitutive action of interpellation, interrupting the conservative circularity of classical form to reveal a rhizomatic field of shifting and intersecting subject positions.

O'Neill, therefore, challenges the received views of primate kinship as either tragic (as Yerkes would have it) or comic (as most already believed), producing instead a "primate drama" organized around the imitative politics of the "almost human," its destabilizing doubleness and menacing theatricality enhanced by its refusal to resolve itself under the auspices of humanism. It is here that the productive pairings of comedy and the sacrificial substitutions of tragedy are ironized: In this Darwinian, as opposed to Divine, "Comedy," the primate actor has supplanted the classical protagonist (who need no longer be human) as well as the sacrificial animal from which tragedy takes its name. "Since Darwin," concludes Egil T�rnqvist, in his illuminating study of O'Neill's "super-naturalism," "the ape is a more meaningful symbol than the goat" (144).

Finally, by situating his characters in a series of modern, metaphorical hells, O'Neill removes us from the classical world as well as the modernist stylistics of expressionism and transports us into the medieval cosmology of the mystery play, a processional drama framed by a fiery "hell-mouth," as is The Hairy Ape. By juxtaposing these dramatic forms and their attendant worldviews, O'Neill manages his usual critique of Christianity and capitalism while simultaneously skewering the humanist assumptions of both classical and modern forms, and by the end of the play has asserted the alternative model of the Darwinian "primate drama." Taking what he wants from classical, medieval, and modern traditions, O'Neill expands his domain of inquiry toward a more radical conception of what it means to be human, and to evolve.

By comprehending the extent to which nineteenth-century representational practices are critiqued in O'Neill's play, we gain a window into the important links between evolution and performance that undergird much of the drama's political content. Indeed, O'Neill seems to figure (theatrical) modernism as the quotient of these interlocking values. Accordingly, he looks to performance as a mode of knowing and being in and of itself, where questions of ontology become politicized through their very enactment. Performance also emerges here as a model of history, but one in which the humanist mechanisms of inheritance have been interrupted by posthuman visions of kinship. "What emerges between mimesis and mimicry," writes Bhabha, is "a mode of representation that marginalizes the monumentality of history, quite simply mocks its power to be a model" (87). The mocking tones with which Yank executes his final performance seem to suggest that the play's prescribed, and strangely abstract, setting ("time�The Modern") is an era in which "the great tradition of European humanism seems capable only of ironizing itself" (Bhabha 87).70

In light of all the above, I suggest we reconsider not just the subtitle of O'Neill's play, but its title as well. In the tradition of naming plays after their protagonists, received knowledge would submit that the eponymous ape is Yank himself. Even critics like Malamud have conflated the Hairy Ape with Yank, who is then "pejoratively characterized with the titular metaphor" (135). Taking the evolutionary theme and hybrid form of the drama into account, however, suggests something quite different. Might it be possible that O'Neill's multivalent title refers not only to Yank, but to all the great apes represented or invoked by the drama, both human and nonhuman? If so, O'Neill deconstructs the oppositional pairing of protagonist and antagonist to reveal another fraudulent binary supporting the humanist agony Yank calls hell.

In perhaps the most subversive gesture of the play, O'Neill joins together the stoker, zoo animal, and theater audience as members of the same club, the Hairy Apes, a group to which they may all, at last, "belong."

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