BEYOND THE HORIZON, directed by Andrea Gordon. The Old Barn, Tao House, Danville, California, September 20-29, 2002.

It’s hard to imagine a more perfect setting for O’Neill’s first major play, Beyond the Horizon, than the old barn at Tao House, O’Neill’s home in Danville, California, where the playwright lived from 1937 to 1943. The first play’s production, in 1920, was plagued by many problems for which reviewers blamed O’Neill’s supposed inexperience, including the fact that the play ran more than an hour longer than was necessary. O’Neill changed the set from inside to outside the Mayo’s farmhouse each scene, and each set change required a twenty minute intermission.) At Tao House the problem was solved by the set design of Marcel Cacdac and Stephanie Forster (the Production Manager) who simply divided the playing area in half: on the audience’s right, the parlor; on the left, the farm outside.

I saw the Tao House production twice, the first and third performances, and was greatly impressed, both by the production in general, and by the growth of the cast members into their roles by the third night. Much credit must go to Andrea Gordon, the director, who also directed A Moon for the Misbegotten for last year’s festival at Tao House. I understand that the cast had been able to work together only about two weeks before opening night, and it showed. But by the third night, the performances were just terrific. Most of my remarks below refer to the third performance.

The shorter roles were played well. Joe Lucas performed well as both Ben, the hired hand, and as the doctor who predicts Robert Mayo’s imminent death in Act Three. Don Wood was heartily convincing as Captain Scott, Mrs. Mayo’s brother. Susan Abbott and Robert Ernst were excellent as the senior Mayos; I heard several people praise Mr. Ernst’s performance after Andy evokes his father’s wrath by deciding to leave the farm and go to sea, and I agree with their estimate. Ms. Abbot has no scene as intense as Mr. Ernst’s, but she was strong and effective whenever she was on stage. As for the infuriating, whining Mrs. Atkins, played by Molly Goode, I can only testify that a gentle lady sitting near me whispered to a companion that she wanted to “get after that woman in the wheel chair with a two-by-four.” It was a relief to see Ms. Goode, at the curtain call, smiling and able-bodied.

O’Neill puts great burdens on the three principals, Robert, Ruth and Andy Mayo. The actors have to convince the audience that they understand the meanings of the complex things they say, and to make the audience understand also. Whoever plays Ruth gets little help from O’Neill in developing a complex character. She is, at first, a naïve, small-minded girl who suddenly decides it’s really Robert she loves, not her intended, Andy, just as Robert is about to go away for a long sea voyage. In Act Two, she is embittered and despises her husband; she pleads with Andy, home on a visit, to stay, implying that she will be wife to him. At the end she is a woman who has known the deaths of her father and mother in law, of her daughter, and her own mother, and has passed beyond frustration and anger toward the incompetent seeming Robert to – something else. Jenny Lord was very convincing in the changes, and in conveying that even without Robert’s education or Andy’s worldly experience, she has learned more than pessimism and bitterness from the ordeal that her life and Robert’s has been. She is an attractive and effective actor.

Kevin Karrick, an experienced Bay Area director and actor, did very well as the older brother, changing, with Andy, from a shrewd farmer at the beginning to an assured traveler and veteran of the grain exchanges and trading pits, who has made and lost fortunes, and is appalled to come home and find his brother dying. Among other things he stands as the only major character with whom many in an audience will at first wish to acknowledge an identification. He is the one on stage who perhaps seems most like someone we would like to know and whose judgment, in the first two acts we come closest to trusting.

The most demanding part is Robert, played by Daniel Bruno, a part-time musician in, apparently, his first leading stage role (he won a Theatre Critics Circle Award as chorus leader in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis last year). A would-be poet, Robert learns from the misery of his life something that probably cannot be fully articulated, although O’Neill does a great deal with the character. Sickly in his youth, apparently tubercular, Robert has no more feel for farming than Andy has for the poetic. When the two have swapped places, Andy seems clearly the stronger and more adaptable. But Robert’s harsh life has taught him one big thing, and in the end it is seen to be more important than everything else: he has learned about the reality and meaning of death. Robert has struggled haphazardly to make a go of the farm, fleeing into his books at every chance, and pouring into his daughter all the love that Ruth is too angry to accept from him.

O’Neill seems to show Ruth having, or at least showing, little feeling for her daughter or about the child’s death. Perhaps she has felt rejected by her daughter since the child seemed closer to her father. Or perhaps she simply cannot acknowledge to herself all the things she must feel about her relationship with the child, or the loss. Robert grieves openly and deeply, and does not resent Ruth’s seeming hardness. The knowledge of death he has gained, from his own childhood illness, and from the deaths of his father and daughter, lets him accept, without visible denial or distortion, his daughter’s death, as well as his own failure in life, the unhappiness of his marriage, and Ruth’s contempt and bitterness. It also lets him accept without self-deception the recurrence of his own terrible illness. Without money or other resources, Robert has no need for a specialist-physician to confirm what he knows, that the old illness has returned and that he is about to die, and Ruth understands as well.

Robert admires Ruth for the knowledge he knows she has gained. At the end, she is not so afraid of another loss that she cannot be tender toward Robert or grieve his dying. The audience at last is allowed to see that she has grown beyond the girlish romantic of the beginning and into someone who knows that there is no choice but to accept the large realities of life. As for Robert, we see him in his dying moments, rising to a completely unpredictable sort of heroism. He insists that Andy marry Ruth, not (as Andy assumes) to take care of Ruth, but because Ruth can teach Andy about suffering and thereby save him.

It seems puritanical at best, bizarre at worst. Yet it is O’Neill’s great point. Robert believes that Andy’s latest business endeavor, speculating on grain futures, implies that his brother has removed himself from the world in which his knowledge gives him competence, to a world in which he believes that his past success proves he can succeed at anything, even guessing the future.

To bounce through life without ever having really known that life is temporary, and that we have far less control over our circumstances while we live than we can bear to know, to live without the knowledge of human mortality and weakness, is to live with one’s eyes closed or to live as if one’s wishes could make things so. That is part of the meaning of Robert’s last action, crawling out of bed and dragging himself outside to see one of the world’s great absolutes, the sun rising over the horizon. More than once O’Neill denied being a pessimist. To choose the beginning of day for Robert’s last moment is an expression of the curious paradox that tragedy has always embodied: that confronting the limits of our being may bring a sense of discovery and sometimes, even, a sort of elation.

Stephen A. Black
Simon Fraser University

ANNA CHRISTIE, directed by Mary Catherine Burke. Cold Productions & The Storm Theatre, at The Studio Theatre, 145 West 46^th Street, New York City, 6-28 September 2002.

Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Anna Christie, that played on Broadway in 1921 for nearly 200 performances, was given a successful revival in the fall of 2002 in New York City. Directed by Mary Catherine Burke, the production was earnestly performed by actors who enthusiastically adopted Irish brogues, Swedish diction, and other ergots of raffish waterfront types frequenting Harry the Priest’s bar on Fulton Street.

Playing Anna Christopherson was Caroline Strong, who performed her difficult role well. The idea of a prostitute with a heart of gold is a hackneyed notion that strains credibility. Still, Ms. Strong’s fervent acting and considerable stage presence resulted in a convincing portrayal. Only her stylish hair-do looked somewhat inappropriate, not only in midwest brothels but especially in Harry the Priest’s waterfront gin mill. Cast opposite Anna was William Peden, who, as Mat Burke, also gave a convincing performance despite the fact that O’Neill had almost created a stage Irishman in the role. Mr. Peden’s sincerity and earnestness matched Ms. Strong’s, and won the audience’s sympathetic attention. The performances successfully communicated the idea that Anna and Mat were both lovelorn, vulnerable and beaten-down by life, and thus susceptible to real love and affection. Mr. Peden conveyed Matt Burke’s warmth and friendliness, emotions that quickly penetrated the cynicism that Anna had learned from hard knocks. These lovers are the heart of Anna Christie, and Ms. Strong’s and Mr. Peden’s love scenes, their terrible quarrel, and their final reconciliation made the production a success.

If Mat Burke is almost a stage Irishman, Chris Christopherson, ably played by Dale Fuller, is almost a stage Swede. Happily, Mr. Fuller’s stage presence and dialect skills permitted him to portray convincingly a sea-faring Swedish father, long separated from the daughter whom he wishes to protect. His futile attempts to keep her from marrying Mat, whom he sees as another rootless, wandering sailor, were moving.

Last, the old seafarer Chris Christopherson is O’Neill’s resident philosopher. Mr. Fuller played the role effectively, identifying all the malevolent forces in human experience against which there is no defense except fortitude with the nautical symbol of “dat ole davil, sea.”

The remaining ensemble members gave good accounts of themselves. Rebecca Hoodwin as Chris Christopherson’s mistress played her role with feeling and sensitivity. Barry J. Hirsch did a memorable turn as Johnny the Priest; and Ben Uphan and Duncan Nutter, the longshoremen, Craig Rising, the postman, and Bill Dealy as Larry all offered strong support.

Since the set was minimalist, employing a few chairs and tables, the production did not give a vivid sense of place. However, the vivid characterizations and the costumes designed by Kirche Leigh Zelle made up somewhat for this deficiency. Altogether, the sincerity of the production revealed the actors’ love of O’Neill’s artistry.

Robert Simpson McLean
City University of New York

 

THE HAIRY APE, directed by David Herskovits. Cleveland Public Theatre, 22 March – 7 April 2002.

One would expect the union of The Hairy Ape, the Cleveland Public Theatre, and David Herskovits to be a fruitful one. O’Neill’s play is one of the American theatre’s most caustic and provocative works of social criticism. Cleveland Public Theatre has developed a reputation as the city’s gritty, activist theatre. Herskovits, as founder and artistic director of New York’s Target Margin Theater, has a reputation for experimentation in staging classic and contemporary plays. Yet with the exception of a few moments of provocative, highly theatrical innovation, Herskovits struggled to find an effective balance between his collaborative production style and the expressionist mode of O’Neill’s work. This search for an effective performance style was hindered by the uncertain relationship the actors had to their audience and their environment, and by the anti-realist conventions of the production.

If one were to assign a style to this production, it would be closer to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty or Grotowski’s Poor Theatre than the expressionist style in which O’Neill originally framed the piece. But labeling the production Cruel, Poor, or even applying the more indeterminate label of “environmental” theatre is problematic. The performance space, a recently reclaimed vaudeville house undergoing extensive renovations, was raw, industrial, and rich with the ambient possibilities of confrontational street theatre. Herskovits exposed these possibilities but did not move far enough into the realm of the abstract and confrontational to clarify for his audience the benefits of his troupe’s reworking of O’Neill’s play. Before the show began the audience witnessed the actors’ visceral preshow exercises as performers welcomed individual audience members entering the space, but after the patrons were seated the audience space was never again noticeably violated by the actors. As a result, audience members came to feel they were observing this story from a remove, unaffected by the struggles ensuing on stage.

Although the confrontational aspects remained muted, Herskovits employed the environment skillfully in several other respects. The audience occupied two sections of steeply-raked stadium seating turned away from the vaudeville theater’s original stage and facing toward the balcony and rear doors of the playhouse. This allowed for a compelling use of the space below the balcony for the bowels of the ship, the prison, the I.W.W. office, and the zoo. In turn, the balcony space served for the above-deck scenes and the Fifth Avenue scene. This spatial division cemented the class divisions present throughout the play and emphasized moments of transgression, such as Mildred’s descent into the fire room and Yank’s arrival on the gleaming streets of commercial New York.

Overall, however, Herskovits’ collaborative style resulted in a formless presentation punctuated by a few powerful moments of discovery on stage. The actors’ costumes illustrated the amorphous outcome of this collaborative creative process. Dressed primarily in street clothes, they were marked with cryptic symbols and words on their faces and T-shirts. A few words, like the word “old” blocked out in fluorescent tape on Paddy’s shirt, had clear points of reference; but most were abstract markings that carried only indeterminate meaning. Herskovits and his cast collaborated to create, if not a distinguished production, at least several memorable and powerful moments on stage. In these moments the mixture of 1920s social activism and contemporary anxieties created the visceral, shocking effect attempted throughout the performance. The most striking of these was the final scene’s image of the caged ape. Three actors created this immense creature with their bodies, oversized black rubber gloves, heavy rubber work boots, and an enlarged ape mask manipulated into subtle and shocking movements by the hands of the central performer. The actors’ combined movements created the image of an enormous, savage beast. At the same time, the common industrial sources of its composition evoked a sense that this behemoth was a manufactured nightmare—a being freakishly out of joint with nature and a thing that both Yank and the society he represented had become.

Yet, beyond a few such striking moments, the stylization of this production more often denied the sophistication of the original play than it served to capture or enhance it. The sounds of the production, provided by the actors and a visible sound operator, were more organic than the mechanical and industrial rhythms O’Neill’s text specifies. The vocal choices lacked power and sophistication. The actors too often relied on yelling, especially Jimmie D. Woody as Yank and the actors in the below-deck scenes. In the most stylized moments—such as Scene Four when the weighty concepts of “Think,” “Love,” “Law,” “Government,” and “God” are to be mechanically repeated—O’Neill calls for a radical departure from the ordinary, in this case voices that mimic the “brazen, metallic quality” of phonograph horns. Herskovits’ actors failed to distinguish their voices adequately from the standard speech patterns they had been employing, and the sound operator’s use of a bullhorn proved unimpressive.

Likewise, the movement vocabulary lacked a consistent, distinctive stylization. Potentially the most explosive stylized moment, Yank’s Fifth Avenue confrontation with the city dwellers, was accomplished effectively by reverting to the essence of the original stage directions; but the overall range of movement choices was neither sufficiently fluid nor deliberately rigid. For example, rather than use the actors to frame space and support transitions between environments or distinct moments within environments, Herskovits tended to employ broken moments of repositioning for his actors that disrupted the flow of the performance and decreased the natural build in tension. As a result one of the hallmarks of the play’s expressionist style, the emphasis on the central character’s relentless, dehumanizing descent, was seriously undermined.

In another questionable departure from the original, the “thinker pose” that Yank assumes repeatedly in O’Neill’s script was downplayed in this production, having been completely removed from some scenes. As a result, the audience was not sufficiently encouraged to weigh the seeming paradox of the simultaneously coarse and cerebral Yank, a complex creation that defied the stereotype of the industrial worker in the 1920s. In its place we were offered a visceral creation from Artaudian theater. While Yank’s power to shock and confront was certainly not in question in Herskovits’ and Woody’s interpretation, his complexity was. Lost was the richly symbolic, multi-layered searcher found in so many O’Neill works. Instead we had an outsider alienated from his society who did not reach the heights of questioning, the everyman persona, that O’Neill’s original creation—captured eloquently in his use of Rodin’s sculptural form—elicits.

Herskovits’ decision to cast Woody, a vocally and physically powerful African-American actor, as Yank and to reorder the gender and ethnic orientations of other cast members held great potential to reframe much of O’Neill’s commentary in gripping new ways. This disruption of O’Neill’s gender and racial distinctions should have encouraged a rethinking of the ways we see exploitation. However, the ill-suited stylistic adjustments in other areas led to a nebulous production that prevented these potentially valuable choices from bringing new undercurrents and new audiences to O’Neill’s work.

This is not to say that this play or others in O’Neill’s canon should not be considered ripe for stylistic innovation. Indeed, O’Neill moved through a range of styles, blended elements of various styles within a single play, and even crafted hybrid stylistic content within The Hairy Ape. The danger, rather, is that adaptations such as Herskovits’ seem to lack a reason for their existence other than to be “collaborative” or “innovative.” In such cases the conceptual director’s intent seems to hold the play’s message hostage rather than allowing the message to find its way to a new audience. As this Cleveland Public Theatre production illustrated, directors would do well to find their way through O’Neill’s texts rather than force their actors to compete with them.

Joseph Fahey
Case Western Reserve University

 

MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA, directed by Gordon Edelstein. Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven CT, 19 November-22 December 2002.

For his debut as the new Artistic Director of the prestigious Long Wharf Theatre, Gordon Edelstein directed a three-hour version of Mourning Becomes Electra, a production that had already been staged in Seattle, where Edelstein was Artistic Director of the ACT Theatre before coming to New Haven. The Long Wharf, under the leadership of Arvin Brown, has always served O’Neill well. That Edelstein, who was at one time Associate Artistic Director under Brown, and who directed a fine Anna Christie back in 1990, took over Brown’s position is a good omen for the future of O’Neill production in New Haven. Edelstein has a formidable record of accomplishment, and his decision to direct Mourning Becomes Electra in Seattle and to make the play his debut assignment for the Long Wharf suggests he is willing to meet theatrical challenges. I went to the theatre with high expectations, even though I knew beforehand that O’Neill’s six-hour trilogy was reduced to three hours. I left the theatre disappointed with almost every aspect of the Long Wharf production. I find myself in the uncomfortable position of applauding the fact that the rarely-seen Electra was produced at all, even as I negatively criticize the way it had been produced.

Theatre is a collaborative art, and no director should be a mere middleman, giving text to audience exactly the way the playwright designates in his stage directions or in personal comments on his intentions. At the same time, a director, although following his own instincts, should be respectful of the text and of the playwright’s wishes; he should be a loyal collaborator. This is a difficult juggling act, but the best directors of O’Neill’s plays manage to achieve an acceptable balance, usually tilting toward O’Neill. The decision to cut a text can never be easy for a director; and in the case of Electra, most reasonable persons would agree that a six-hour play may be too much for modern audiences to endure, especially audiences that seem to have shorter and shorter attention spans as the years go by. Some cutting might be necessary—with some plays, even beneficial—but one must be very careful with the operation or the patient will die.

I believe that a major strength of Mourning Becomes Electra is its massiveness, which for many others is it major weakness, a too-muchness that cries out to be cut down to conventional size. “Size” is precisely what O’Neill was striving to achieve in a play that confronts head-on the large ideas of Death and Determinism, in a trilogy that contains multitudes—the historical background of New England Puritanism and the Civil War, Greek myth, the theatrical background of the Greek dramatists and Shakespeare, the psychological dimension heavy with Freud, the symbolic South Sea Islands release, with subconscious autobiography as subtext. O’Neill, halfway through the writing, claimed that he “never worked so intensively over such a long period as I have on this damn’ trilogy—wish now I’d never attempted the damn’ thing.” When he was finished he was drained, but his final reading of the script left him “moved and disturbed spiritually,” with the feeling that there was “real size in it.”

It’s a big play, in every sense of the word, with it’s marathon length matching the ambition of the challenge O’Neill had set for himself. When it was produced by the Theatre Guild in 1931 the play ran for approximately six hours (with a dinner break after The Homecoming); and the major reviewers, although they all mentioned the play’s length, did not complain about the audience’s inability to remain with the Mannons during that long period of time. The play gathered the most glowing reviews O’Neill received in his lifetime, and the reviews contain words that pertain to the size of the play. For John Mason Brown, this play of “heroic proportions” was proof that theatre could still have “grandeur and ecstasy.” Brooks Atkinson referred to it as a “universal tragedy of tremendous stature.” Robert Benchley, although he felt the play was an hour too long, called it a “gigantic tour-de-force,” “a great masterpiece.”

Edelstein, reducing the play to three hours, was aiming for a more brisk presentation, and he achieved his goal. But this Electra was a skeleton of the play O’Neill wrote. O’Neill’s tragedy with melodramatic trappings became Edelstein’s melodrama and only melodrama, trappings without the large dimensions of death and determinism that inform O’Neill’s full play. Yes, we are given death and determinism aplenty; but the murders and suicides and the adultery and the incest usually remain on the plot level. We are given little depth of context because speeches have been eliminated, dialogue made brisker by cutting lines, seemingly superfluous exposition reduced, repetitions avoided, choric scenes cut. (How I missed, for example, the Chantyman interlude. An easy character to cut because he does nothing to further the plot; but his long speech on the good old days, his talk about the deaths of Ezra Mannon and Abe Lincoln, his song “Hanging Johnny,” his connection with the sea—all contribute to the play’s larger context and set the perfect elegiac mood before Adam Brant’s death.)

This large play depends on its largeness, even its excessiveness, for its depth, its nuances, its heavy atmosphere, its emotional power. Take away the TIME we spend with the tortured Mannons and we become less attached to them, less capable of understanding their special predicament. They need more extended attention, which becomes deeper attention, and that’s the demand O’Neill makes in a tragedy that he wrote in competition with the Greek tragedians. If we give the Mannons that attention the rewards are great; if we don’t we are left with a diminished theatre experience. The Mannons of the Long Wharf production occupy a smaller world than O’Neill’s Mannons, more soap opera than opera. When the spirit of a work depends so much on the text, then the text should be kept as intact as possible. With a work like Electra much pruning, no matter how careful, is damaging. Take three hours or two hours or even one hour away from Electra and you achieve something else, something multiply less.

The play’s largeness is projected not only by length of playing time but by scenic design. O’Neill wrote the play for a proscenium stage, offering detailed description of the special curtain and the Greek-temple style of the House of Mannon, with its tall white pillars and central large door and steps leading up to that door. The most famous photo of the 1931 Theatre Guild production (pictured in the Long Wharf playbill as it is in every other playbill) shows us Lavinia (Alice Brady) sitting on the steps in front of the big black door and Christine (Alla Nazimova) standing behind her, the door itself functioning as an important component in O’Neill’s drama. Because the Long Wharf does not have a proscenium stage, much depended on the ingenuity of the set designer, Andrew Jackness, who gave the production a clean fluidity that matched Edelstein’s desire for briskness of presentation.

Moveable gray interlocking walls produced inside and outside configurations, with the acting space almost completely spare for the exterior scenes and containing some minimal furniture for indoors. It would be churlish to fault Jackness and Edelstein for not having a proscenium stage, and they did accomplish their purpose—speed of presentation, fluidity, flexibility. Unfortunately, the clever flexibility of the staging—with the walls moved by automatons, obviously ghosts of the house, culminating in a box-like container, presumably highlighting the claustrophobic nature of the Mannon situation—the very fluidity, seemed to work against whatever we may think of as massive or grand. And even if one is forced to use moveable walls, one must wonder why there was no large door or some suggestion of Greek-temple pillars or a more prominent portrait of Ezra Mannon. The House of Mannon lost its importance in the Long Wharf production. A large mythic story became smaller, space conspiring with time to make it smaller.

Whereas director Philip Moeller and set designer Robert Edmond Jones had been in sympathy with O’Neill’s intentions in the 1931 Guild production— yes, O’Neill was there at every rehearsal to make sure they were!—Edelstein and Jackness departed from those intentions in significant ways. Don’t misunderstand. I believe directors and stage designers must find their own inspiration when they offer their interpretations; they are creative artists. But in that collaborative art called theatre they should never allow their creativity to subvert the playwright’s intentions when those intentions are clearly known. I am reminded of Kenneth Tynan’s appreciation of the critic Stark Young’s observation about O’Neill’s particular strength as a dramatist. “What moved us was the cost to the dramatist of what he handled.” For those of us familiar with O’Neill, watching the Long Wharf Electra could not help but make us feel that something precious was lost, and this relates to how much feeling and sheer work O’Neill put into the writing of this huge drama.

For those not familiar with O’Neill, the play was a story filled with melodramatic happenings and numerous brief emotional exchanges, rarely reaching for the larger dimension of tragedy. It was a smaller accomplishment. Because Edelstein cut so much he tried to find other ways to suggest the play’s larger dimensions and to compensate for what was lost. I offer one glaring example. To indicate the importance of family determinism, he filled the play with ghosts. Their entrances and exits became mechanical substitutes for the atmosphere of doom that O’Neill gives us in the extended talk of his characters. With O’Neill we feel the presence of the ghosts; with Edelstein we see them. The ghost of Ezra Mannon appears after the shooting of Adam Brant; the ghost of Christine appears when Lavinia tells Orin to kill himself, and that ghost remains on stage when Orin does kill himself, walks around the stage, and then goes into the house. In the last scene all the ghosts—Ezra, Christine, Orin, Brant—appear on stage in an outside scene even as Lavinia is talking about seeing them inside; and throughout, anonymous ghosts move the moveable walls. Well, Edelstein is offering the right idea—ghosts haunt the Mannons—but the obviousness of their entrances makes the melodrama even more melodramatic.

By cutting down on the talk, on the repetitions, on the nuances, certain emotions or ideas can only come through by means of exaggerated stage action. Orin, for example, looking for his mother in the house, shouts “Mother” so loudly and agonizingly that we are reminded of Stanley Kowalski’s “Stella.” O’Neill has the “Mother” in the text, but Edelstein needs the exaggerated shout, forcing us to be aware of Orin’s Oedipal desires—an interesting example of a director being more excessive than O’Neill in pushing the Oedipus complex, something not easy to accomplish. In this connection, Lavinia jumps on top of her dead father in bed in a sexual position, when she utters those fateful words, “Want me! Take me, Adam!” In short, in order to make up for the loss when so much text is cut, we are left with exaggerated action and melodramatic behavior.

To be successful, Mourning Becomes Electra demands two powerful performances from the actors playing Lavinia and Christine. Unfortunately, this did not happen on the Long Wharf stage. Jane Alexander, who played Christine (and who played Lavinia in 1970 for the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut), is a splendid actress who has received justifiably high praise for her many performances on the stage, in the movies, and on TV. In all the Long Wharf publicity she was featured as the leading lady, receiving more attention than either O’Neill or Edelstein. (In the Study Guide to the play, available in the Long Wharf lobby, the space given to her achievements equaled that given to O’Neill, and the “Suggested Films” section listed six of her movies and only three O’Neill movies. This is the wrong emphasis, I believe, but it does reflect someone’s conception of the audience’s interest, the star appeal.) Alexander was a more subdued Christine than O’Neill created. She sounded all the stops in O’Neill’s script—she was angry, troubled, deceitful, loving to her son and to her lover, distraught, sick at heart—but what I missed was Christine’s sinister quality, her viciousness, her sensuality. There seemed to be little darkness in her soul, no depth to her need for love. Whenever she mentioned the poisoning of her husband, the audience chuckled or laughed. I suspect that the Theatre Guild audience never laughed when Nazimova spoke those lines.

Alexander’s Christine seemed less passionate than O’Neill’s Christine, dark in motive and action but beneath the action nothing simmered. Her most successful scene was her confrontation with Ezra Mannon when he returned from the war, a changed man. Here she and Kevin Tighe as Ezra worked beautifully together. We could feel his awkwardness, his pitiful attempt to reach his wife (shades of Ephraim Cabot trying to reach Abbie in Elms), to be forgiven for past mistakes; and Alexander displayed just the right amount of coldness to him even as she projected some warmth for his predicament. Mixed feelings, producing a sensitive scene, one in which both actors displayed the real reality O’Neill was aiming for. In contrast, the love scenes between Christine and Adam Brant—played by Thomas Schall with the solidity O’Neill wanted but without the deep sense of disappointment at his personal betrayal of the sea—were muted, passionless.

Christine, in the smaller world of this production, seemed a bored housewife ready for a fling with a guy in uniform. Whenever the South Sea Islands were mentioned as an escape for the two of them the audience laughed— perhaps because a modern audience knows that the concept of an island release is no longer possible, foolishly romantic, or perhaps because the couple’s escape did not seem significant in the smaller scale of Edelstein’s production—a trip to Club Med, not the place of huge symbolic significance that O’Neill worked so hard to achieve. When she hears of Brant’s death, murdered by Orin, Christine falls to the ground and moans uncontrollably, displaying the passion she felt for the man, now dead. But very little passion had been revealed when he was alive. Alexander projected a pleasant motherly tenderness toward her returning son Orin, played by Steven Sutcliffe with just the right measure of weakness; but Christine’s love for Orin never threatened to spill over into the unnatural; we never sensed the danger. Throughout, I felt that a truly fine actress was keeping herself from fully expressing the character O’Neill wrote for Christine.

The play’s most difficult role is Lavinia; this, after all, is her play. But in the Long Wharf production Christine was the more dominant presence because Jane Alexander is a more formidable actress than the young Mireille Enos, and because the reduced text, coupled with Christine’s appearance on stage when the play begins, followed by all her appearances as a ghost in later scenes (not to speak of all the publicity attached to her as the leading lady), made Christine the more central character. Enos projected nicely the rigidity that O’Neill required for Lavinia, and she became believably vivacious when she returned from the islands, now wearing her mother’s colors and literally letting her hair down. But she usually operated on a steady plane, her voice never powerful enough to be ominous or scorchingly jealous and angry. We did not sense the darkness of her character or the intensity of her love and hate. Simply stated, this was not O’Neill’s tragic heroine.

And because of the direction she was not given the opportunity to rise to the tragic end O’Neill labored to achieve. As his diary reveals, O’Neill, early in the play’s composition, had his ending in mind. Lavinia, realizing she cannot escape the cage of family, asserts with finality, “Always the dead between!” She faces the fact of fate, acknowledges the justice of her own removal from society, and is ready to confront the dead Mannons who are inside the house, now not so much a house as a tomb. O’Neill sets up his ending with great specificity. Lavinia orders Seth to close the shutters and to tell Hannah to throw out all the flowers in the house; Lavinia stares into the sunlight for the last time in her young life; we hear the shutters closing “with a decisive bang.” Lavinia then marches stiffly into the house, “closing the door behind her,” alone, resolute, ready to face the terror within.

Judging from the reviews of the 1931 Guild production, this was a stunning theatrical moment. The Long Wharf ending didn’t come close to providing such a moment. First, the door of the moveable set was just an ordinary door, its neutral color and average size giving no sense of the importance of the House itself. Second, we never heard the shutters banging shut, surely a lost opportunity to stress the finality of Lavinia’s bold act (and disappointing those of us who were waiting to hear the sound of the closing, as we wait to hear the chopping down of trees in Chekhov). Third, all of the Mannon ghosts were stationed outside the house. Fourth, and most puzzling—distressingly so—as Lavinia enters the house a flash of blinding light emanates from within the house. Instead of entering darkness and doom, Lavinia enters a house of brilliant light. I must believe that Edelstein had something specific in mind here, but I just don’t get it. As I already stated, a director need not follow to the letter a playwright’s stage directions or text, but so gross a distortion of O’Neill’s ending seems perverse. If a director does not make a commitment to the letter of O’Neill intentions, he should surely commit to the spirit of those intentions.

In his “News Release” Gordon Edelstein says, “Every time I work on one of O’Neill’s plays I’m rewarded by what a great artist he was.… I believe that his achievement in Mourning Becomes Electra is remarkable.” Sad to say, the great artist’s achievement was minimized by the directorial choices Edelstein made. There is no question that Mourning Becomes Electra has its excesses, and some very careful pruning may be tolerated. But it is possible that tolerating the excess is the price we pay when a dramatist like O’Neill is aiming for magnitude. Perhaps the very excess is what contributes to that feeling of heavy doom that leaves an audience drained of emotion at the end of this marathon play, but thoroughly satisfied, having had a grand theatrical experience.

Normand Berlin
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

 

MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA, directed by Gordon Edelstein. Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut, 19 November-22