BEFORE BREAKFAST, directed by Amy Coleman.  Common Basis Theatre Company, New York City, Fall 1994.

 

Hidden in lofts and basements throughout Manhattan are numerous unrecognized and almost clandestine theatre companies who bravely experiment with new plays or try their hand at old ones that Broadway and the commercial theatres ignore.  Such a group is the Common Basis Theatre Company, led by Marcia Haufrecht, who, like her associates at the Common Basis, is a veteran of the Actors Studio.  I was most fortunate, last fall, to see a double bill of one-act plays by this small and competent company: Harold Pinter's The Lover, and Before Breakfast by the young Eugene O'Neill.  Both plays were expertly acted and directed, but, given the journal, I shall confine my remarks to the latter.

 

Before Breakfast is the young O'Neill's naturalistic slice-of-life glimpse of the last tortured minutes of an unsuccessful young man married to a shrewish lower-class wife who ultimately drives him to suicide.  The work seems heavily indebted to August Strindberg's The Stronger, a play that contains only two characters—a wife and her husband's mistress.  Throughout the entire play the wife conducts a monologue, since the mistress never deigns to converse with her.  Similarly, in Before Breakfast, the unhappy Mr. Rowland never speaks—never even appears on stage, remaining in the bedroom while the aggrieved Mrs. Rowland recites a monologue of complaints, criticism and abuse.  Evidently, O'Neill wanted to see if he could sustain a monologue throughout an entire play, as Strindberg had successfully done in The Stronger.

 

However, Strindberg's play is more dramatic than O'Neill's because wife and mistress confront each other directly while seated at a table in a restaurant; and although the mistress never speaks, she employs facial expressions, hand movements and other body language to heighten dramatic tension and add complexity to the tacit question as to which of the two is the title character.  O'Neill's intentions are more demanding than that, since Mrs. Rowland must remain on the stage entirely alone and carry the whole dramatic burden.  This experiment by O'Neill paid dividends later, when he wrote the largely one-actor plays, The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape, though his greatest triumph among his one-act plays in which one actor predominates was the far later Hughie.

 

Another Strindbergian influence on Before Breakfast is the rancorous warfare between the sexes.  Mrs. Rowland's monologue overflows with demeaning criticism.  No doubt, too, Strindberg's notion of the presence of love and hate in human relationships was exemplified not only in O'Neill's own family but in his first marriage, to Kathleen Jenkins, who, like the wife in Before Breakfast, ridiculed her mate's literary ambitions.  Before Breakfast resonates deeply with O'Neill's pent up feelings about his short and unhappy marriage to Kathleen.  Biographer Louis Sheaffer says that O'Neill was a man whose wounds never healed, and who was consequently doomed to relive the suffering of the past in his art.  O'Neill, too, made a suicide attempt during the time he lived at Jimmy-the-Priest's waterfront dive, to which he retreated after that first marriage had ended.  No doubt the intense feeling and power of this early one-acter derive especially from the strong personal feeling that the young O'Neill poured into it.

 

Director Coleman wisely took few liberties in interpreting O'Neill's text, focusing entirely on revealing the author's intent.  The set accurately followed his grim description, the bareness and squalor of a slum tenement on Christopher Street after the turn of the century (clotheslines stretched across the kitchen, cigarette butts strewn about the floor) artistically complementing the misery and deprivation of the impoverished Rowlands.

 

Actress Donna Jason gave a superb performance as a slatternly lower-class shrew mismated to a Harvard-graduate husband who aspires unsuccessfully to become a writer.  Alone on the stage throughout the play, Ms. Jason performed numerous “bits” to portray the character and to sustain the audience's interest during her extended monologue.  She took a slug of vodka while sitting on the floor as a morning eye-opener, threw plates onto the same floor when she wished to express her anger, broke into tears when moved thereunto by her own comments, yelled repeatedly to offstage Alfred to get up and look for work since the rent was due, complained bitterly when she found a letter from Alfred's pregnant mistress in his coat pocket, spewed contempt for his educated demeanor and his unsold stories and poems, and prepared a meager breakfast of stale bread and coffee while reciting her grievances as Alfred shaved himself in the bedroom.

 

O'Neill foreshadows the play's gruesome denouement when Mrs. Rowland enters the bedroom to doctor the unseen Alfred, who has nicked himself with his razor.  Perhaps her declaration that she will not give Alfred a divorce is the final blow that leads him to cut his throat.  All the audience hears is a heavy thud as a body falls to the floor, and a piercing shriek from Mrs. Rowland when she sees her doomed spouse.  This last detail calls to mind the identical end of Strindberg's Miss Julie, who also felt trapped by life.

 

Altogether, Donna Jason carried the role well, essentially evoking the suffering and the hopelessness of both unhappy characters.  Only to one small extent was she miscast.  O'Neill calls for an actress inclined “to a shapeless stoutness,” while Ms. Jason has a slender figure; and, while Mrs. Rowland complains that she was once “young and pretty” before her marriage, Ms. Jason is still young and pretty.  But this type of miscasting is probably unavoidable in a small company.  The Common Basis Theatre Company, so named because they “have a common way of working,” are to be commended for presenting a first-rate production of this early and too-seldom-seen O'Neill work.

 

Robert S. McLean

 

 

THE HAIRY APE, directed by Matthew Wilder. Mandell Weiss Forum, La Jolla Playhouse, San Diego, CA, 13 July - 22 August 1993.

 

Eugene O'Neill is hardly regular performance fare on the West Coast, and the plays an artistic director might deem less than safe for purposes of houses and receipts are extreme rarities.  Nearly a generation has passed since The Hairy Ape was last seen in California, but this mounting would cause one to wonder why the play has been so widely ignored in an otherwise theatre-conscious part of the country.  This production by the La Jolla Playhouse, the 1993 Tony recipient for outstanding American regional theatre, proclaimed in the boldest way imaginable that O'Neill's Hairy Ape works powerfully seven decades after it first appeared.

 

Matthew Wilder's direction had much to do with the success of the production.  The young (mid-twenties) Wilder placed his stamp (and an occasional reinterpretation) on the play in such a manner as to bring up to date the occasionally antiquated materials, all without losing sight of what O'Neill was saying—or even how the playwright was saying it.  A thinking late-twentieth-century audience lost neither the point nor the power of this early-twentieth-century drama.

 

The set design by Robert Brill suited both text and space very well.  The cavernous stage of the Mandell Weiss Forum never seemed too large for the action, thanks especially to the brilliant lighting design by David S. Thayer, which defined and confined each venue.  The promenade deck for the scene between Mildred and her aunt was set high above the stage floor on the simplest scaffolding; the stokehole was located on the stage below.  Whole set changes occurred rapidly as sets were moved outside (the wings) and replaced as quickly—but never in the style of the mechanical tricks of the Broadway stage O'Neill so detested.  Somewhat distracting, though, were the red streamers that crisscrossed the ceiling, screaming ideological mottoes.

 

Yank (Mario Arrambide) was very much in control of everything except his own insecure personality.  This Yank “tinks,” harangues and postures, but is easily thrown off-balance by a fainting Mildred, the upper class automatons on Fifth Avenue, or a caged gorilla.  His fellow stokers (some of them female) were strong in their own ways, especially the aloof Paddy (Jan Triska), who was very able to hold his own in exchanges with Yank and Long (Mark Harelik), even as he argued laboriously with Yank, Mildred (Micha Espinosa) acted the spoiled heiress with brittle conviction.

 

There were ways in which Wilder added his own twists to the text.  Throughout the play, the scenes were announced by a child's voice, adding little but interruption at those moments.  (It remanded one of the projected scene titles in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie; that gimmick did not work well either.)  And it quickly became apparent in the fourth scene why the lobby had sported an emphatic warning about nudity.  The stokers were bathing, half submerged in separate trap doors—nude.  The touch appeared rather gratuitous until one realized that seamen and other assorted persons do bathe in the nude.  Furthermore, this change from the original, in which the scene opens on stokers whose “faces and bodies shine from a soap-and-water scrubbing,” served to set the tone for a later, more significant change from the text.

 

In the fifth scene, played before stylized store-fronts of Fifth Avenue, the crowd from the church became a Chorus of Zombies, marching about in formation, chanting class ideals more fitting for a modern audience, and including references to AIDS, seemingly the authenticating element for all current drama.  As with the original Yank, they still managed to confuse and anger the protagonist with thoughts that seemed to pass over his head.

It was in the final scene, at the monkey house in the zoo, that the most striking change occurred.  The original can easily elicit audience responses inappropriate to the seriousness of the story at this point, threatening to turn O'Neill's “Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life” into something approaching slapstick.  For want of a real gorilla the director must opt for a big man in a gorilla suit, inevitably creating reactions of humor and/or false horror that overshadow what is really happening on the stage and in the heart of Yank.  Wilder chose, instead, to cage a naked man, who, while not the physical equal of Yank, emitted a power and confidence that Yank could only dream of.  At that point, the warning about nudity in the play, and the “preview” in Scene Four, grew clear, and Yank's demise became somewhat more tragic.  It soon became apparent that the hairy ape, for all his Twenties social comment and his low-class tongue, can still, in the right hands, speak volumes to a modern audience.

 

Eugene Kenneth Hanson

 

 

A TOUCH OF THE POET, directed by Joe Dowling.  American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge, MA, 7 - 26 March 1994.

 

A Touch of the Poet is now recognized as one of O'Neill's masterpieces.  There are even some who deem it the masterpiece of O'Neill's oeuvre (the greatest of O'Neill actors, Jason Robards, among them). But, whatever its plae in the O'Neill canon, in no other play is the central dramatic problem of O'Neill's writing career so crucial to the exposition of character and plot.  I refer, of course, to language.  “Oh for a language to write drama in!” is O'Neill's famous lament; and in the character of Con Melody this struggle comes to the fore, both on stage and within the figure of Melody himself.  Melody must be more than a barrel-chested Byronic blusterer.  His voice and his diction must neither seem to or mean to sound right—they must be right.  The bearing is the man.  After all, it is Melody's final insult to self-knowledge that he rejects the truth of his polished diction and romantic panache and willfully wallows in the shebeen-haunted idiom and shabby stage Irish shenanigans of the likes of Paddy O'Dowd and Patch Riley.

 

Thus Melody is as hard a role to cast as Josie Hogan.  And while we have seen the latter brought to incandescent life on stage, as anyone who recalls Colleen Dewhurst's incarnation of that role will attest, we yet must await the definitive Con Melody.  Such earlier Cons as Eric Portman, Jason Robards, George Grizzard, Len Cariou and Timothy Dalton all have their partisans, but there has still been no quintessential Con Melody.  Each of the aforementioned five has put his stamp on the role: Portman had the courtliness, Robards the passion, Grizzard the charm, Cariou the world-weariness, and Dalton the devilishness; but somehow there has never been a “compleat Con.”  He is unquestionably the play's theatrical core; without a strong Con, no production of A Touch of the Poet can soar.  And, sadly, at the American Repertory Theatre, Daniel J. Travanti's Con was so earthbound that the production could only sustain itself through two acts.

 

The opening-night performance revealed a cast that seemed under-rehearsed (consultations with colleagues who saw the production later in the run, however, did not dispel this impression).  Timing was consistently off, and cues were not always picked up with alacrity.  From beginning to end there was something “off” about the production—most apparent at play's end, when the actors seemed surprised that the show was over.  It was distinctly uncomfortable.

 

But other aspects of the physical production were fascinating and genuinely compelling.  The A.R.T. is both famous and notorious for the technical dazzle of its productions; and all too frequently that dazzle is all they have to show for themselves.  Not so, this time.  Each technical element contributed to the evening's dramatic and theatrical impact.  (If only director Joe Dowling had had an acting ensemble to live up to his theatrical vision of the play.)

 

Derek McLane's evocation of Melody's tavern was both impressionistic and substantial.  Three beams hung in midair, suggesting a ceiling.  The mirror in which Melody surveys his fallen grandeur needed resilvering, the windows were filthy, the wallpaper peeling off the walls.  None of the chairs matched.  Only one table had a cloth, and it was threadbare.  The floor was slightly raked, and the entire set was thrust forward and angled so that, even though the play was enacted on a thrust stage, it seemed as though it were done on a proscenium stage, which appeared foreshortened.  One of the most overtly theatrical strokes in McLane's set was to make it quite clear that neither the windows nor tavern door actually faced anything.  There was no effort to create the illusion of a road, or of anything at all of the world outside.  There was nothing but the stark brightness of utility stage light.  This seeming alienation effect was most appropriate.

 

Frances Aronson's lighting design augmented the nineteenth century “look” of the staging by punctuating “big moments” with follow spots and lighting the upstage areas with a “footlight” effect, all done with great subtlety.  On the whole, the design truly illuminated the production because it highlighted points O'Neill makes about self-display versus self-knowledge.  For instance, when Con recites while preening at the mirror, the staging, setting and lighting create the perfect stage picture of a matinee idol in all his faded glory.  The actor stood in what appeared to be the center of a picture-frame stage, basking in a spotlight and staring into a distorting looking glass.

Director Dowling let us know that there was a great deal of feeling between the Melodys, but there was no rush to express warmth physically.  Dowling emphasizes both Sara and Con's self-consciousness.  Both turn to the audience whenever they are full of themselves; Con, when he talks of Talavera triumphs; Sara, when she waxes amorous about Simon.  When Sara told us what Simon had said to her about his feelings for her, it sounded as though she were reciting, as though she had rehearsed those lines for maximum effect.  Most appropriate.  Elizabeth Marvel was adequate as the ambitious Sara, and Margaret Gibson's Mrs. Harford had a blithe hauteur.  She delicately sneered as she entered the tavern, as glowingly white (thanks to her follow spot) as she was otherworldly.  Frances Aronson's lighting accentuated her pallor and her snow-white frock.  They contrasted vividly with the tavern.  Only when she entered were its gloom and grime fully apparent.

 

Dearbhla Molloy was a stand-out as the ill-used wife, Nora.  Every sigh and creak that issued from her tired body redounded from her life of frustration.  The air ached as she moved through it.  Alone of the principals, she etched a brilliant and distinctive performance.  Moreover, her genuine Irish inflections gave the lie to the pathetic attempts of the supporting players' attempts to “brogue it up.”

 

Daniel J. Travanti was ultimately disappointing as Con Melody.  Travanti seemed to have the requisite romantic bearing and dignity, and for nearly half the show threatened to bring off the flamboyance and subtlety of the role; but he ran out of energy mid-way through the second act.  He seemed unable to pace himself; but still, as a stage performer, Travanti acquitted himself adequately.  This was not a case of the television biggie coming to town for a “star turn.”  Travanti knew how to move and speak on stage; how to play for the right moments.  So it was all the more puzzling that he could not sustain his voice.  Travanti has the requisite noble brow, and the “monocle-in-his-throat” accent seemed satisfying at first; but this Melody was unable to make any music.  He was too harsh, too quickly nasty to Nora; his “you stink of onions” was a brutal snarl that came from nowhere.  Travanti's Con was a prancing peacock rather than a strutting eagle.  There was the trace of the pathetic about him—too much so, in fact, to the point that Jack Willis's Jamie Cregan's major function was to pity Con and remind us that he was an officer and a gentleman.  Willis's interpretation was necessary, though, because Travanti seemed delusional rather than inspirational.

Melody may have choked himself with aristocratic airs, but he really was a hero at Talavera; he really was brought up as a gentleman.  Travanti lacks the truly blue-blooded arrogance that Melody must possess.  There is self-pity in him rather than self-hatred.  This Melody is more Southey than Byron.  Travanti made nothing of the verses from Childe Harold; Melody's signature quotation (“I have not loved the world, nor the world me”) might as well be an order to Nora to clear away his breakfast dishes.  He gave no different inflection to his recitation, so it was no different from his other speeches.

 

Travanti also lacked physical grace and floundered as the dashing lover.  He rushed to kiss Mrs. Harford; and then, when rebuffed, he sprawled too awkwardly.  And he flailed as the disciplinarian father, his assault on Sara being more forced than forceful.  He lunged at her as though he meant to kill her.  Cornelius Melody is not a lunatic.  He may be enraged, but he should not appear frenzied.

 

There were other moments when the actors' movements were not well aligned.  Sara once shoved a table so hard that a vase was knocked over— obviously unintentionally.  The entire encounter between Sara and Mrs. Harford seemed less what it should be—a battle between equals—than feline fisticuffs between a rattling adolescent and a slightly distracted if not dotty patrician.  And Sara's almost randy friskiness the morning after her night with Simon was a bit too much of a contrast with her mother's moaning.

 

The whole finale seemed off-kilter, again, as though it were under-rehearsed, and Travanti's blood-spattered face looked clownish.  Still, though, in spite of many flaws, this was a production that had flashes of brilliance, a set and a lighting design that were thoroughly integrated and totally engaging, and an exquisite Nora.

 

Thomas F. Connolly

 

 

A TOUCH OF THE POET, directed by Gerhard Klingenberg.  Renaissance Theater, Berlin, November - December 1994.

 

A Touch of the Poet (Fast Ein Poet in German) was performed at the Renaissance Theater in Berlin in November and December 1994.  The Renaissance is a charming, intimate old theatre.  Damaged in the last war, it was restored and has subsequently been the home of many American plays performed in German.  The translation of A Touch of the Poet by Michael Walther was very good, as was the direction by Gerhard Klingenberg.

 

Before I saw the production, I was afraid it would be a vehicle for some star surrounded by second-rate actors.  In fact, there was a good ensemble with strong performances in even the small roles.  As Con Melody, Michael Degen was truly impressive.  His appearance, particularly when he appeared in uniform, was stirring, and his whole air conveyed the very character O'Neill created.  Elisabeth Orth performed Nora, his wife, with equal skill.  Orth is an actress whose experience spans many years in the theatre and who has previously performed the role of Sara Melody on a European tour.  In this production Sara was played by the very attractive, dynamic and sensitive younger actress Béatrice Bergner.

 

The Renaissance Theater stage is quite small, so the setting presented a challenge to Andreas Rank, whose design was very effective, with a small stairway leading to a balcony with several doors.  Director and designer worked together to make the most effective use of the space and to allow diversity in the staging.  Rank also did very well with the costumes.  Con's uniform early in the play was impressive, as (in a very different way) was the torn, ruined uniform of the last scene.  Nora was plainly dressed, but her clothing showed that she was still a fine figure of a woman.  Sara had a good change from her working clothes to a pretty dress which also showed her figure.  I was disappointed, however, by her nightgown, which looked like your ordinary flannel J.C. Penney.  Fortunately, the other costumes created a good sense of period.

 

Some of the review were negative, which was a surprise to me because I found the production very satisfying and would have been pleased to see it again.  This theatre has also had success with Eines Langen Tages Reise in Die Nacht (Long Day's Journey Into Night), and will produce Alle Reichtumer der Welt (More Stately Mansions) in 1995.

 

What with the plays at the Renaissance and the forthcoming production at the Maxim Gorki Theater of Long Day's Journey (which looked very good in rehearsals under the direction of Arie Singer), there is quite a lot of O'Neill in Berlin.  A follow-up on Der Eismann Kommt at the Deutsches Theater (which was reviewed in the last issue) is the forthcoming book by a young actor who went to pieces during the rehearsal process and had to be replaced at the very last moment.  The book will be called Der Eismann Geht!

 

Yvonne Shafer

 

 

LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, directed by Diana Leblanc.  Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford (ONT) Festival, 1994 Season (returning in repertory in 1995).

 

The production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night presented at Stratford in the summer of 1994 was most impressive.  Throughout the long “journey,” O'Neill's characters revealed their guilt, resentment, affection and inability to accept responsibility for their actions.

 

All of the Stratford performers were splendidly cast in this Strindbergian drama of love and conflict based upon O'Neill's remembrance of his own family.  James Tyrone, played by William Hutt, is based upon O'Neill's father, James O'Neill, the renowned matinee idol who made a fortune in the popular Count of Monte Cristo but ruined his career and professional promise by forever performing one profitable role.  Mary Cavan Tyrone, played by Martha Henry, is drawn from O'Neill's mother, Ella Quinlan O'Neill, whose life was afflicted by an addiction to morphine.  James Tyrone, Jr., played by Peter Donaldson, is based upon O'Neill's older ne'er-do-well brother; and Edmund Tyrone, played by Tom McCamus, is the author's conception of himself as a young man who has developed consumption.  Martha Burns completed the exemplary cast as the Irish maid Cathleen.

 

As these veteran actors blended their talents, there emerged an ensemble performance that skillfully evoked the tragic feeling of the play.  Director Diana Leblanc wisely retained the simple realism of O'Neill's original, shunning any forays into gratuitous theatricality and experimentation, and concentrating solely on revealing the inner selves of the characters, as O'Neill originally intended.  The result was a unified, Greek-like production, not only in its observance of the unities, but in its eloquent revelation of how fate, or, in the modern world, psychological and physical determinism, rules people's lives.

 

Central to the drama was the radiant Stratford veteran, Martha Henry, who expertly embodied the nervous and fretting Mary, worried about the health of her son Edmund, and suffering from the physical and psychological need to escape her problems, past and present, and resume her recently arrested morphine addiction.  Throughout her long performance, Ms. Henry revealed the tortured and guilt-ridden Mary's defiant refusal to admit she is succumbing while simultaneously longing to become lost in the concealing fog of drugged forgetfulness.  Ms. Henry was entirely sensitive and equal to the great demands of the role, reaching an unforgettable climax in the mad scene at the end of the play, when Mary, consumed by drugs, has mentally reverted to her convent days before she had met and married James Tyrone.  Ms. Henry made her entrance in the last scene carrying her faded wedding dress and wearing the veil which Mary has discovered while rummaging through the attic.  The dress, which she gives to James at the beginning of the scene, may symbolize her failed hopes for happiness in marriage and life; and the veil, which she retains, may symbolize her frustrated desire to become a nun.

Although Henry spoke her lines most expressively and gave a smooth performance throughout the drama, as did all, the final moments seemed a trifle abrupt.  After Mary said that she “fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time,” the theatre suddenly went dark, then burst into a flash of illumination, and then reverted as suddenly to darkness.  O'Neill's simple stage directions seem more fitting and expressive: “She stares before her in a sad dream.  TYRONE stirs in his chair.  EDMUND and JAMIE remain motionless.  Curtain.”  But such criticism is minor, since the ending was clearly overshadowed by the production's cumulative buildup of overwhelming tragic feeling.

 

Peter Donaldson's Jamie was appropriately acerbic.  Donaldson delivered the alcoholic elder brother's comments with a full understanding that he was portraying a man, bitterly jealous of both his sibling and his sire, who has resolutely revealed his subterranean rage by focusing his life almost solely on whiskey and whores.  Donaldson's sneering portrayal helped fuel the jarring vein of black humor that runs through the play and underscores one of O'Neill's chief themes, the tragic waste of human life and potential.  (Director Leblanc chose to eliminate some of Jamie's anti-Catholic comments in caustic conversations with his father, as she similarly chose not to include the father's defense of the Church.)

 

William Hutt was deeply engaging as the tired and obsessed old patriarch and performer whom all of the other family members alternately excoriate and forgive.  Although James is far from sinless, his sons develop a compassion for him when they sense that circumstances have crushed him into an unfulfilling mold, making his life a sad waste.  Mr. Hutt recalled most movingly the brutal poverty and suffering that Tyrone was born into, and that help explain why he is so obsessed with money and the happiness that he thought it would ensure.  Hutt also conveyed the intense pain felt by the elderly actor who now knows that the lives of his beloved wife and sons are being threatened.

 

It is no fault of Tom McCamus that the character of Edmund Tyrone is the least explored one in the play.  Although McCamus seemed to have done all that could be done with the role, the young man modeled on the nascent playwright himself did not take on substantial form.  The reason seems to be that the mature O'Neill simply could not recreate himself as the youth about to be diagnosed as a consumptive.  Nor did we see much of the imaginative spark and determination that would goad this youth into becoming one of the world's great playwrights.

The strongest compliment this reviewer can give this fine and memorable production is that the full-house audience sat hushed and raptly attentive during the more than three hours of the performance, and left quietly, having been deeply moved by the tragic revelations of this greatest of American dramas.

 

Robert S. McLean

 

 

LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, directed by Douglas C. Wager.  Set design by Ming Cho Lee. Fichandler Stage, Arena Stage, Washington, D.C., 6 January - 12 February, 1995.

 

Since its founding in 1950, Arena Stage has arguably been the most important theatrical influence in the Capital.  It has courageously presented the classic American and English plays, together with the works of controversial authors like Athol Fugard.  In so doing, it has almost singlehandedly raised the taste of Washington theatregoers beyond that of the touring companies of Broadway hits, and, I suggest, was a primary influence in developing an audience for the then-unborn Kennedy Center.  It has also generated a large, loyal and dedicated audience of suburbanites who journey into the heart of the refurbished Southwest area of Washington for theatrical experiences comparable only with the Shakespearean productions of the Shakespeare Theatre, formerly housed at the Folger Library.

 

To be sure, the Fichandler Stage is not truly suited to such a claustrophobic and intense drama as Long Day's Journey Into Night, since it requires the actors to communicate on all four sides and make use of four gangways.  This naturally meant that movement had to consider the audience and consequently numerous circular and figure-eight movements were necessary to accommodate it.  At times, therefore, the movement seemed more balletic than attuned to the text.  This, however, was a minor matter, and it may also have been the result of the height of my position in the steeply raked tiers of seats.  Here I should note that I had taken walk-in “hot-tix” (an excellent invention)—not expecting to review the performance—and was seated “two on the aisle” at the back, rather than in the customary reviewers' privileged space.  As a result, I found some of the lights at times a bit distracting.

 

The four hours of the play, with two short intermissions (one to seat latecomers, a nice consideration to all), went by as if it were half that length, and for the first time in my many Journeys I was unconscious of longueurs.  Here the experienced director, Douglas C Wager, Arena Stage's Artistic Director, was largely responsible.  The action moved at a fast clip, giving O'Neill's comedic account of Old Man Harker its full emphasis, while her “drunk” scene with Cathleen (Holly Twyford) underscored Mary Tyrone's loneliness.  The sense of oppressive night surrounding and even invading the latter's heart and mind was also well conveyed by the lighting of Scott Zielinski, its pool of illumination emphasizing the table with its summer wicker chairs and single rocking chair in the center of the dark stage floor, surmounted by the necessary multi-bulb chandelier with a delightfully obvious extension cord attached.  The wail of the foghorn was here “the loneliest sound in the world,” reminiscent in its Doppler effect of a train whistle across the midwestern emptiness; and it echoed Mary's despair, which even the forgetfulness of morphine could not assuage.  Here the darkness seemed literally to close in on all sides.

 

Tana Hicken played the pivotal role of Mary Tyrone in white summer cotton, with fluttery hands, and such enviable slenderness that her husband's twitting about putting on weight seemed more amusing than factual.  In her relationship with Edmund (Rainn Wilson) she was overpoweringly protective, full of denial, and profoundly nervous throughout the play.  While I found Hicken's interpretation convincing, there were a few times when she was not quite audible, and her vocabulary of mannerisms was a trifle limited, with movement choreographed by the arena stage-space rather than emotion.  Her music, however, was the dominant one of the play.  Created by Timothy Thompson, it included orchestrated and vocal Gregorian plainchant, together with allied referential themes, including the shock of ill-played Chopin.  Jamie alone had jazzy motifs.

 

James Tyrone was well played by veteran actor Richard Kneeland, with his wonderful mane of excellently coiffed white hair and dignified mien.  His was a rather irascible, dominating Tyrone, somewhat lacking in emphatic depth—and Don B. Wilmeth's introductory comments supported this interpretation.  What I missed here was the extraordinary sense of loss, of betrayal in love, both by the boys and his beloved Mary.  Yes, to some extent he had once betrayed her with “that woman”; but the rest of his life evidenced exemplary fidelity.  Kneeland's reaction to Mary's backsliding had more self-justificatory denial than despair at trust once more violated and hope dashed.  Here my benchmark is a Russian performance at the Tao House conference of 1994 where the James Tyrone broke one's heart with the total commitment of his love, so much so that he ended by dominating the final act with tremendous economy of acting.  Perhaps a truly “golden voice” might have overcome waspishness here, but few actors have such a gift.  (Ralph Richardson's self-conscious delivery is the nearest approximation to a superannuated actor of the late nineteenth century in my recollection.)

 

As a result, James's parsimony made him appear more hostile than hurt, and that forced both Jamie (Casey Biggs) and Edmund (Rainn Wilson) into unrelieved malicious resentment for much of the play.  Further, those of us familiar with the autobiographical facts are well aware that James was infinitely more forebearing and supportive than the play suggests (though he certainly made the boys pay for his assistance by requiring some grovelling).  Even in the revelatory scene with Edmund, this James O'Neill achieved a surface breakthrough in human relations rather than a true appreciation of the depth of his son's emotional life.  Similarly, his decision to send Edmund to the state hospital appeared motivated totally by money rather than the fatalism of his familial experience.  Nonetheless, his account of his own underprivileged early days was most moving, avoiding mawkish sentimentality and self-pity.  Curiously, the playgoer so totally accepted James Tyrone's evaluation of himself as an artistic failure that it inevitably failed to appreciate the fact that his is really an extraordinary immigrant success story, like his O'Neill original's, though neither believed that.

 

The Jamie of Casey Biggs was well varied, with his comic account of Shaughnessy and Old Man Harker a deliciously funny interlude, in which, for the first and only time, all Tyrones shared laughter—a moment which heightened the subsequent tragedy.  After that, Jamie's mephistophelean side predominated, and bitterness alternated neatly with fraternal affection.

 

Rainn Wilson played Edmund as very young and somewhat inexperienced, despite his ocean voyages.  But here O'Neill himself was rather busy whitewashing his own alter ego, and as a result I have always felt that the character does not fully ring true.  Certainly Journey includes his artistic credo and also offers his authentic Tao-ist experience of immanence; but in this production it seemed a trifle contrived.  I am beginning to wonder whether this role has forever been confused—for me, at any rate—by my knowledge of O'Neill's own just-divorced situation at the time.  Of course O'Neill had the right to refurbish his life and character, but he also creates injustice as a result.

 

One thing that I am beginning to appreciate more and more is O'Neill's command of the stage and also the influence of the theatre of his father on his own writing.  The Arena Stage production also knew how to exploit the playwright's ability to sense just when his audience will lose its concentration, and take advantage of that very typical Irish needling which leavens the dough and lightens the sorrow.  This production treated the tonal changes with singular skill, and the audience was eminently appreciative.  Despite an apparent atmosphere of unrelieved gloom, neither O'Neill nor this production overlooked the human impulse to laughter in the face of disaster, even if the play does end in what appears to be inevitable tragedy: Edmund going off to die in the State Farm, Mary doomed forever to be a poor drug-crazed ghost, Jamie a hopeless alcoholic, and James forever alone.