Extreme O'Neill
At a Chicago fest, 6 directors reanimate his dramas for a faster, harsher century
By Thomas Connors
Ah, O’Neill! A man of skill and ambition, anger and regret, one of those figures whose complexity allows us to throw any number of labels his way: Vengeful. Alcoholic. Recluse. Genius. How about experimental? After all, he not only stretched the dramatic envelope with prolix language, extravagant plots and a psychological formalism that owed as much to the Greeks as it did Strindberg and Ibsen, but also used masks, mime, sound (that ominous, never-ceasing tom-tom in The Emperor Jones) and the shockingly revealing asides in Strange Interlude to upend theatrical norms.
Still, it is the powerful yet conventional Long Day’s Journey into Night by which most audiences understand the playwright. No wonder. O’Neill is demanding, and most directors have enough to handle just addressing the texts straight up, much less rendering them in wildly inventive ways. So it’s downright thrilling that Chicago’s Goodman Theatre has organized “A Global Exploration: Eugene O’Neill in the 21st Century,” a festival whose roster includes the Wooster Group of New York’s landmark version of The Emperor Jones, U.S. premieres from Toneelgroep Amsterdam and Companhia Triptal of Brazil, and productions from two of Chicago’s most daring off-Loop directors.
“We treat our greatest playwrights over-reverentially,” suggests Goodman artistic director Robert Falls, whose take on Desire Under the Elms (starring Brian Dennehy) opened the festival last month. “It was shocking to me, for example, that when I did Death of a Salesman in New York in 1999, it was the first Broadway production that had ever done anything other than recreate the famous original set by Jo Mielziner.”
With Desire Under the Elms, Falls—whose 20-year investigation of the playwright includes his 2002 Tony-winning production of Long Day’s Journey into Night with Dennehy and Vanessa Redgrave—turned to designer Walt Spangler, who realized the raucous, almost cinematic vision of the director’s 2006 King Lear. The result was a visually expressionistic outing (no elms here) in a slightly more compact package than the 1924 original. “When I re-read it, it reminded me of the plays of Franz Xavier Kreutz,” notes Falls. “It has a spareness, a tightness. It was very important to me that, like a Greek tragedy, this play be performed in approximately 100 minutes. So I did some editing to focus on the central characters, eliminating the villagers who form a sort of chorus and having the actors who play brothers Simeon and Peter reappear in silent roles as the fiddler and sheriff.”
Judicious pruning isn’t the only strategy for making O’Neill’s more complex works comprehensible in this image-driven, sound-bite age. Ivo van Hove, artistic director of the noted Dutch ensemble Toneelgroep, not only pares the choric figures from his version of Mourning Becomes Electra, he accelerates the work further by having his performers deliver the lines at a remarkable clip. “We play it very fast,” explains van Hove, “because all the thoughts these people have are in the text, and you don’t have to show them. That was my challenge when I did More Stately Mansions at New York Theatre Workshop in 1997. I had a hard time with the actors, and the actors had a very hard time with me because we felt totally differently about how to deal with O’Neill. I think when you do O’Neill, you shouldn’t do it too psychologically. In his work, the subtext is always right there in the text. So you have to bring the subtext out in the text. And that’s what I try to do with the actors.”
In setting the play (running this month, in Dutch with English supertitles), van Hove was inspired by the psychological tension of Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki’s film documentary about a father and son convicted of child abuse) and the spatial barrenness of The Third Memory, video artist Pierre Huyghe’s postmodern recreation of Sidney Lumet’s film Dog Day Afternoon. “There’s an astonishing scene around a table in Capturing the Friedmans,” relates van Hove, “where the sons stick with their father, shouting at the mother that she was to blame. And Huyghe’s piece recreates the bank set of the film, but it’s empty, without detail. So we created a kind of bare little room where psychotherapy might take place, without any specific details. It’s a naked, pure space and the actors are only about 11 feet from the audience.”
Dispensing with the Mannons’ Greek Revival residence and the play’s Civil War context, van Hove homes in on the fundamental conflict that gives the work its almost unbearable tension. “When I reread it a few years ago, after having directed it once before, I discovered something new—Lavinia. It’s all about her, it’s all about her mourning, a mourning that she has to accept for herself. When you’re young you want to live the illusion that you are unique, that you look like your parents, but you are not like them. When I was in my thirties, when I saw my father, I accepted that I saw myself. And when I saw my mother I saw myself. And that’s what I think this play, deep down, is really about—Lavinia finally accepting that she is the daughter of her father and her mother, that she is part of this family and that she cannot escape this.”
Interpreting O’Neill means confronting a major control freak. His stage directions alone—renowned for their length and specificity—are enough to dissuade all but the most game directors from taking a stab at some of his plays. “No director is his right mind would touch Strange Interlude with a 30-foot pole,” laughs Chicagoan Greg Allen, founding director of the Neo-Futurists. “But it’s right up my alley. It’s totally outrageous on every level. The plot itself is jaw-droppingly awful. Then there’s the fact that O’Neill thought it was a good idea to have his actors speak their subtext, their internal thoughts and feelings, on stage. And his stage directions—he describes the character of Charles Marsden, for example, as having a feminine side that is not perceived. How do you play something that is not perceived?”
Although that sounds like a tyro about to play a trick on a Dead White Male, as he continues, Allen’s respect for the piece comes through loud and clear. “At its heart the play is still about identity and where our societal selves enter into our personal selves and how we wrestle internally with who we really are. How do we really think and feel compared to how we act in public? How do people come together? How do we negotiate in our hearts and minds how we’re feeling, and how much do we say? I do think it’s a fascinating play and legitimately brilliant on the terms on which O’Neill was approaching it. He was wrapped up in Freud at the time and wanted to figure out a way to show the internal workings of somebody on stage, so he created this highly dramatic situation where this woman has three different lovers, none of whom ever really comes out and says, ‘I love you.’”
When Allen and his crew first addressed the play, they sat down and read every stage direction, every character description, every line; it took seven hours. When they take to the stage this month, they’ll follow that tactic, to a degree. “Part of the Neo-Futurist aesthetic,” states Allen, “is that we don’t play characters. The audience is always aware of the actors on stage and who they actually are. The mechanics of the stage are very obvious. We come out at the top of the play and have a narrator read the character descriptions and invite the audience into the experience O’Neill intended. We attack the show on different levels. There are the actors on the stage, there are the characters the actors are performing, there’s the subtext, and there’s O’Neill and how he tries to manipulate this kind of reality he’s created.” (At press time, Allen was still pondering a resolution to those persistent asides, including supertitles and voiceovers.)
In realizing O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, Sean Graney—founding director of Chicago’s other leading experimental group, the Hypocrites—pursues a similar strategy, embracing the artificiality of the theatrical experience while respecting the playwright’s utter commitment to drama as a vitally communicative enterprise. “O’Neill writes a lot,” observes Graney, “and I think it’s hard for some actors and some directors to get their heads around that. But I think his people say what they need to say, and then they keep talking. That’s the way we all operate—we talk until something clicks for us.” Mounting the show, Graney is more than happy to disorient his audience, evoking a long-gone steamer one minute, a ’70s- era Manhattan the next. “Yank, the protagonist we’re following, is going to be completely confused, and it’s okay for the audience to be bewildered, too,” states Graney. “Eventually they’ll get over their confusion and see what is going on.”
Confusing an audience is par for the course with the Wooster Group. The 34-year-old New York company has always made a habit of not merely tinkering with the canon, but tearing plays apart and reconstituting them in not necessarily immediately recognizable form. Director Elizabeth LeCompte’s rendition of The Emperor Jones is no exception. Actor Kate Valk (in blackface) assumes the role of Brutus Jones, the African-American ex-con who recreates himself as a potentate on an unnamed West Indian island. The play, as originally conceived, posits its protagonist’s erosion of authority as a corollary to the black man’s plight in the “civilized” world, while examining how a psychological breakdown alters the afflicted’s perception of reality. In the Wooster Group’s production—with Valk sitting in a wheelchair, decked out in vaguely regal attire and speaking into a microphone—O’Neill’s text becomes not only a self-indictment (his use of the once acceptable “darky” diction of a minstrel show sees to that) and an indirect yet incisive comment on gender.
For André Garolli, who helms Brazil’s Companhia Triptal, O’Neill’s early, one-act “sea plays” (Bound East for Cardiff, The Long Voyage Home, In the Zone) have proven a rich source of inspiration. “The representation of proletarians, sailors and dockers—all of them deprived of everything except their own will to work,” notes Garolli, “thematically underlines O’Neill’s voluntary course against traditional drama based on the personal conflicts of the characters. The collective work of the seamen is the true protagonist, and O’Neill does not need to introduce villains or heroes to make the point that oppression strips mankind of its dignity. The symbolic force of the dominating sea is as imperious as the power of the economic system that feeds from their work without giving them the option to determine their own futures.”
Garolli—who locates in these pieces a “macro plan” (the distinct universe that is a boat a sea) and a “micro plan” (the relationships of the men and the dreams and illusions revealed in the dialogue)—achieves, arguably, his most innovative effect with Bound East for Cardiff. O’Neill set the action in the cramped forecastle of a tramp steamer, where a multinational crew razz one another and bemoan their lives at sea while one of their company lies ill and dying. Under Garolli’s direction at the 19th-century Artur de Azevedo Theater in Sao Luis, Brazil, the audience was seated in the center rows, allowing them to experience the play almost telescopically as they watched it unfold through an opening in a huge iron wall erected on the stage. As Garolli sees it, this tactic—and the absence of slavishly realistic scenery—prevented the audience from being passive observers. “Fragments of movements, shifting voices and the efficient use of lighting are sufficient to indicate the terror and beauty of the sea and its ambiguity as a figure of the unconscious,” he claims. As the performance progressed, the spectators joined the actors on stage, and then ended up in the basement of the building. In Chicago, Garolli plans to recreate that experience, moving the audience (limited to 60 individuals) from the Goodman’s Owen Theater to a backstage area, and finally to the basement.
Clearly, there are myriad ways to wrestle O’Neill into shape, and each endeavor offers fresh evidence of the playwright’s enduring intellectual and artistic significance. While the conceits these directors put into play may not sit well with purists, the truth is that the demands of O’Neill’s oeuvre require intelligent and often form-breaking resolutions. As van Hove asserts, “The idea that you can direct a text the way it is, in an objective way, is an absurdity. Every director directs his interpretation of a play. That’s what a director’s job is. A play is not an objective thing, a play is a very subjective thing. The Hamlet doesn’t exist. It’s impossible.”
Thomas Connors is the Chicago editor of Playbill and writes regularly on the arts for Time Out Chicago, Town & Country and Arts & Antiques.