Eugene O’Neill and August Wilson revivals serve as counterpoints in a study of American theater
Simply put, it doesn’t take long for a body of work once considered monumental to suffer the inevitable erosion that comes with the passing of time and shifting cultural perspectives.
Two major revivals are attracting audiences, arguably for very different reasons. They are works of playwrights no longer with us but whose plays exert an irresistible power over theater artists drawn to them like mountain-climbers to Everest.
On the one hand we have Chicago director Robert Falls, in a hyper-auteur mode, struggling to breathe new life into “Desire Under the Elms,” Eugene O’Neill’s mid-1920s attempt to transpose Greek tragedy through a Freudian lens to pre-Civil War New England.
His drama, set on an isolated farm in 1850, depicts a family’s Oedipal derailment after a tyrannical patriarch brings home a new bride not much older than his grown son, who happens to have mother issues.
On the other is “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” Seattle-based director Bartlett Sher’s carefully articulated production of what many consider August Wilson’s best play — a saga of personal discovery set in 1911 against the epic backdrop of the African-American diaspora.
In Wilson’s 1988 drama, a haunted man and his young daughter come to a boarding house in Pittsburgh as he searches for the wife he lost touch with years earlier somewhere in the South.
Wilson and O’Neill. One black, the other white. Each dominated his generation of American dramatists. One found power and poetry in the rich vernacular of his characters, the other crafted dialogue with the self-conscious deliberation of a sculptor working in stone.
Yet these two dramatists from different eras, different ethnic backgrounds and different aesthetic ideals are linked, at least in this critic’s mind. Each was driven by enormous theatrical ambitions (if not delusions of grandeur). O’Neill proposed an 11-play cycle depicting multiple generations of an Irish-American family that he was unable to complete and eventually abandoned. Wilson finished his 10-play epic dramatizing African-American life in the 20th century not long before he died in 2005.
Each wrote dense, novelistic, multicharacter dramas that reflected a particular vision of America. Each was informed by a sense of history, both personal and social. Each grappled — at times heavy-handedly — with the intricacies of human psychology. And each at his most ambitious sought to write tragic dramas in colloquial American speech that matched the power of the Greeks.
Each found widespread recognition. Wilson claimed two Pulitzer Prizes. O’Neill won four (one posthumously). In 1936, almost 12 years after “Desire Under the Elms” opened in New York, O’Neill became the first American playwright to win the Nobel Prize.
But how has time treated their work? Wilson’s plays remain an integral part of contemporary drama. They are widely produced in regional theaters. “Joe Turner” is the second Broadway revival of a Wilson play since 2003.
O’Neill’s works, particularly his late plays, are still produced widely. Kevin Spacey appeared in Broadway revivals of “The Iceman Cometh” in 1999 and “A Moon for the Misbegotten” two years ago. Brian Dennehy, who anchors the new production of “Desire,” five years ago starred in “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” O’Neill’s last play — and, you could argue, his most honest and personal.
O’Neill, who died in 1953, wrestled with psychological themes that were bold and insistent in their day. In the early part of his career he did so while experimenting with theatrical forms. Now it all seems a bit dated, if not preposterously melodramatic. And the plays themselves read like acts of Herculean labor.
But give the devil his due: O’Neill charted a new direction in American drama by attempting psychologically realistic plays about people on the margins of society. But facts are facts. The perceived authenticity of his dramas has all but melted away.
Now his dialogue more often than not poses a burden to actors, as when Abbie in “Desire Under the Elms” says: “If cussin’ me does ye good, cuss all ye’ve a mind t’. I’m all prepared t’ have ye agin me — at fust.”
Indeed, O’Neill’s plays read like old novels. His stage directions and character descriptions are so obsessively detailed that any director approaching the work today would, as the first order of business, throw out O’Neill’s elaborate instructions and begin with the story and the dialogue.
Apparently that’s what Falls did. And he took it a step further. He and his designers re-imagined the world of the play. There are no portentous elms overhanging the farmhouse. Instead, the story unfolds in a rocky valley strewn with boulders. The principal farm labor seems to be shoving enormous rocks to and fro.
And he made another bold choice by frankly depicting the sex that O’Neill only alludes to. In the most theatrical five minutes of the production, the studly young Eben (Pablo Schreiber) disrobes his chiseled body, takes a bath and then puts on a suit for a visit to the town hooker, all within view of the lustful Abbie (Carla Gugino), who hangs clothes from the line and attends to other domestic chores. The entire sequence is set to Bob Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet.”
It’s a weird, audacious sequence that unfortunately served only one purpose: to underscore just how antique this play really is. O’Neill may have been shooting for tragedy, but all he could deliver was pretentious melodrama. The actors — Gugino, Schreiber and the excellent Dennehy as the rough-hewn patriarch, Cabot — do all they can, but they’re like prisoners in an asylum. No matter how hard they try, they remain hostage to O’Neill’s dubious vision and Falls’ wildly unpredictable choices.
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“Joe Turner” is a different experience altogether. If anything, Wilson’s play has more resonance than it did when it was first produced on Broadway 20 years ago.
Sher and his designers have made a couple of bold choices of their own, but in service to the play. Every production I’ve ever seen of a Wilson play, either in New York or Kansas City, has employed a realistic set — even to the extent of having functional water faucets and working stoves on which food could actually be cooked.
Sher goes a different direction. Seth Holly’s boarding house, where the play unfolds, is merely suggested. At times it disappears entirely. If the story needs a window, one descends from above the stage. The dinner table and stove, when needed, ascend from below the stage surface. And mood-setting projections are thrown against an enormous upstage scrim.
The effect is to free the play.
Wilson’s work is permeated with mysticism, spirituality and an overriding sense of reality we can’t always see or touch. All of that gets shorted when you confine his dramas in the mundane details of daily reality.
At the same time, the naturalistic performances from Sher’s excellent cast underscore the universal themes that make this play worth seeing again. What’s remarkable is how many of these fine actors are making their Broadway debuts — including veterans Ernie Hudson as Seth and Arliss Howard as “people finder” Rutherford Selig, the only Caucasian role in the show.
Only Roger Robinson, who is transcendent as the mystical visionary Bynum Walker, has an extensive Broadway resume.
What we get in this version of “Joe Turner” is a play undiminished by time. Wilson wasn’t infallible. “The Piano Lesson” seemed calculatedly “lighthearted,” “King Hedley II” was a forced effort to evoke classical tragedy, and his final work, “Radio Golf,” was a slight work that gained its power from all the previous plays in the cycle.
But in “Joe Turner” he struck an ideal balance. He looked unblinkingly at the legacy of slavery and yet crafted a play that concludes with a starburst of earned optimism. It packs a sweet, sweet punch.
I’ve never seen anything quite like it.