Acting and Suffering

I saw a performance of "Ah, Wilderness" which left me disappointed with O'Neill as I always am.  In this play, a sentimental view of a family, there is a single older uncle in the family and a spinster lady, his counterpart, and would be love interest if he were able to make himself presentable to her by giving up drinking.  Uncle Sid is your classic Irish drunk in America from a hundred years ago, and as such meant to be an amusing feature of the household. It reminds me of our family chauffeur/gardener who luckily only had to drive my surgeon father to the hospital in the morning. We smiled when he used to come to the side door wth a bouquet for mother.  "He obviously was on a bender last night," she would declare, tolerant as ever for an Irish person whom she never considered the mental or moral equivalent of her Yankee stock. It takes an effort of leprechaun fairy dust, however, to make an old drunk over into pleasing, at least from the perspective of twenty first century America where  alcoholism is a medical issue rather than a quaint personal idiosyncracy.  In O'Neill's play the "relationship" or "courtship" of the older couple is counterpart to the adolescent boy who is in the throes of first love and trying out relationships.  Uncle Sid is such a failed person that the contrast does not work very well in a light comedy, suggesting as he does that this is the way of personal relationships as one grows old.  Another O'Neill character with whom I am always at odds is Mary Tyrone.  In this play's reach for "tragedy" we can add to the debilitating effects of tuberculosis and alcohol, Mary's morphine addiction, which indeed is not her fault but which makes her a major victim rather than an actor in the drama.  I am too much of a fan of ancient Greek tragedy to find a victim compelling;  the play is always tedious even the celebrated performance of Katherine Hepburn in the film.  It seems to me more noble to act decisively in the full knowledge of potential retribution in order to set things right, or right in the minds of some.  I think of Clytemnestra murdering Agamemnon because he sanctioned the ritual sacrifice of their daughter, or Oedipus killing the man who manhandled and threatened him on the road even though he knew he was fated to kill his father.  One thinks of Lady MacBeth--the list is long.  It is why I am never sure about Othello as really tragic figure since Iago so manipulates the man that he sometimes seems not his own person, like Mary Tyrone, more a victim.  It doesn't help if one knows the Plautine antecedents to the dramatic action, I mean the wily slave who craftily works to seduce his master to a course of action.  What is a laugh riot in Plautus is utterly sinister in "Othello" but I am not sure it is tragic.