The Hairy Ape

The protagonist is Yank, a physically powerful and confident stoker who tends the furnaces of a transatlantic ocean liner. He is proud of his strength and his essential role in powering the modern industrial world, but his identity is shattered when a wealthy passenger reacts to him with revulsion.

Eugene O'Neill wrote The Hairy Ape in 1922 as an expressionist drama, using distorted dialogue, stylized staging, and symbolic settings to convey Yank's psychological state. The play's scenes move through deliberately exaggerated environments that reflect Yank's alienation from different layers of society.

After being rejected by organized labor, the wealthy class, and the church, Yank goes to the zoo seeking kinship with the gorilla. He identifies with the ape as a fellow powerful being, but when he frees the animal it crushes him, and Yank dies in the gorilla's cage, suggesting he belongs nowhere in the modern world.

Mildred Douglas is the wealthy socialite who descends into the stokehole to see how the ship's workers live. When she encounters Yank, she calls him a 'filthy beast' and faints, an event that destroys Yank's self-image and sets him on his journey of futile attempts to regain a sense of belonging.