STOP WASTING TIME & ROLL SOME DICE
By Noelle Goodman-Morris

In Hughie, Eugene O'Neill explores our relationship with time by presenting us with two characters who exhibit no apparent desire to create something that will last beyond them. The playwright serves also as psychoanalyst and philosopher, concluding ultimately that humans cannot hope to conquer time's unrelenting progress.

O'Neill reflects on time via his stage directions, tracing his characters' thought patterns as they wander from the conversation to another era and place. For example, when the Night Clerk seeks escape from Erie Smith's chatter in the mundane sounds of the garbage men outside, he considers dully the transience of the night, endless as it may seem:

The night men have gone their predestined way. Time is that much older. The clerk's mind remains in the street to greet the noise of a far-off El train. Its approach is pleasantly like the memory of hope . . . only so many El trains pass in one night, and each one passing leaves one less to pass, so the night recedes, too, until at last must die and join all other long nights in Nirvana, the Big Night of Nights.

Through the clerk Charlie Hughes' thoughts, O'Neill considers time's ultimate power - its inescapability: he recognizes that no one - not the garbage man or Charles Hughes, or Erie, or you or I for that matter - will exist forever.

At this point in the play, we have little hope that Erie Smith and Charles Hughes will manage to seize the moment and enjoy it for what its worth because both men are so invested in the fabrication of their own imaginations.

Erie Smith has long since submitted to time's baffling passage; he asks the Night Clerk, "How long you been on the job? Four, five days, huh? I been off on a drunk . . . ."

Smith hardly cares that he has lost nearly a week to booze; in fact, he continues to exist in a state of drunkenness, shuffling through the rolodex of his memory, unaware that the clerk has no desire to speak with him.

Charlie Hughes' apathy exudes from his person, as when O'Neill first describes the clerk's eyes: "One would say they had even forgotten how it feels to be bored." He is a man so quietly desperate to escape the present moment that he no longer registers what it means to exist. He feels nothing, not even irritation at his monotony.

Even when the clerk thinks of his son, he fumbles (silently), "Eddie, the oldest, is eleven now - or is it twelve?" Hughes has given up the chance to play an active role in his history. Each seems to believe that life will go on forever as it does now, Erie with a veneer of bliss, Charlie with vacuous surrender.

In the midst of one of Erie's droning tales, without warning, the night clerk blurts out, " . . . you can't just burn it all down, can you? There's too much steel and stone. There'll always be something left to start it going again."

Suddenly, as a result of this statement, Charles Hughes and Erie Smith are jolted from their respective fictions and are forced to have a real interaction. The two men seem equally surprised by this moment, jarred by the fervor of the clerk's response; out of this, the two previously detached men find common ground.

Ultimately, O'Neill reveals a companionship that emerges from sharing in one simple moment - however illusory its basis - and as Erie and Charles Hughes enter into a silent gambling ritual, we feel as though they suddenly belong.

If we all take a break from our own fictions in order to engage with another person, we might realize that we should take a moment to venture outside ourselves and roll some dice, just as these two unusually paired men do.