MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA, directed by Howard Davies. The National Theatre, London, England, 20 December 2003.

It is an ongoing embarrassment to the American theater that one is distinctly more likely to see major revivals of American classics in London than in New York. Thus one of the major offerings in the winter 2003-4 season of the British National Theatre was Eugene O’Neill’s epic Mourning Becomes Electra, playing in the Lyttleton from November 17 to January 31.

The production team was a powerful one, with an impressive cast headed by two of the leading figures in the London theater, Helen Mirren and Tim Piggot-Smith as Christine and Ezra Mannon with, in the central role of Lavinia, Eve Best, who burst onto the London scene in 1999 with a brilliant ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore at the Young Vic, and who has since become one of the National’s most honored younger actresses. Howard Davies, the director, is internationally known for his work at the National and the Royal Shakespeare Company as well as for a number of Broadway productions including the American classics Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Iceman Cometh. Designer Bob Crowley is equally well known on both sides of the Atlantic and for opera and musical theater as well as for straight drama.

With such an impressive gathering of talents it would be gratifying to report that this production was brilliantly realized, but to be honest I found it more respectful than moving, more impressive in its ambition than in its achievement. To begin on a positive note, Crowley’s design, especially for the Mannon front porch, is simply stunning. We do not see it head on as in the famous Robert Edmond Jones setting, but from one end, with the house running back on our right, perpendicular to the footlights, and the perspective interior roof of the porch covering most of the stage. Three large white columns have their bases on the porch, but instead of capitals, they extend up through frayed circular holes in the porch roof, which is painted in fading, decaying colors to represent an American flag. Beyond this porch is a dark void, with in the far distance a few tiny structures, possibly ruins, silhouetted against a red sky in the beginning which grows progressively darker. Parallel to the footlights, two long low steps leading up to the porch and scattered with fallen leaves run across the width of the stage and are frequently used for intimate conversations.

The interior settings are less striking, but effective in the expressionistic simplicity. For each of them, a high red wall runs at a sharp perspective angle upstage, repeating the angle of the porch. Although the minimal furnishings— chairs, Ezra’s bed, the study desk—suggest different spaces, the strong visual lines and color of the set make all these rooms seem much the same, and all of them perhaps better suited to Strindberg’s Dance of Death than to the Mannon mansion. Brant’s ship is considerably more daring and more successful. The huge flag/ceiling is lowered to form the upper deck of the ship, though running at a steep angle upward from right to left. Because of the holes in the porch roof it is able to drop down around the columns, which now read as masts. In the larger below deck space to the left is Brant’s cabin, and the scene where Orin and Lavinia on deck listen to Brant and Christine below, the two pair often falling into the same physical relationships, is extremely effective. The lighting, by Mark Henderson, reflects that strong emotionality of the work in these scene and others with sharp contrasts in volume and color of light in different parts of the stage and with powerful use of low lighting angles.

The heavily Freudian relationships and their melodramatic expression present in O’Neill’s work offers a formidable challenge to even the best actors, especially in an era preferring subtler emotional effects. Too subdued and realistic a performance makes the lines and situations seem crude and extreme, while a more exaggerated style risks distancing the audience. In terms of blocking, Davies has decided upon a straightforward approach, which could almost serve as a textbook example of showing relationships through movement. The first scene between Adam Brant (Paul McGann) and Lavinia is typical, every nuance of their relationship carefully represented in the blocking, so that the constant pattern of her moving to a new location and his following and moving in on her in different areas around the stage becomes so clear and repetitive as to be faintly comic. I suspect that an audience member who did not understand a word of English would be able to follow the tensions and relationships clearly through the movement alone. This might seem a virtue, but in a work with such clear and often repetitive development of emotional relationships it ultimately becomes rather flat and predictable.

A greater problem, however, is the acting, beginning with the accents. The English can do American accents brilliantly. I will never forget how impeccably they were managed in Olivier’s famous 1973 production of Long Day’s Journey into Night. On the other hand even major productions can fail disastrously on this matter, as did Michael Gambon’s much-honored View from the Bridge in 1987. Unhappily, this production is much closer to the latter model than the former, and to American ears it is almost constantly jarring. It is difficult to imagine just what sort of “New England” accent was being attempted, but it comes out as a mélange of standard stage British, Bostonian, modified southern (say, Tennessee), and occasionally distinctly Brooklynese. Some actors naturally handle this better than others. Piggot­Smith is generally quite acceptable and McGann is not bad. Both Mirren and Best also do fairly well, although neither of them seem quite sure what to do with either “r”s or final “g”s, and in fact attempt a fairly wide variety of alternatives. Paul Hilton as Orin is a linguistic disaster, ranging up and down the east coast from Massachusetts to the Carolinas, with certain words and phrases that are unmistakably from Brooklyn. Jana Washington, listed as the dialect coach, claims some fifty productions in major London theaters among her credits, including not a few American works, some of which I have seen and found quite acceptable on this score. Perhaps O’Neill’s somewhat hysterical New England speech was too eccentric for her, or perhaps the project did not allow her enough time (there was still a surprising insecurity in lines in general the night I attended, more than a month into the run), but the result was, at least for an American, most troubling.

Hilton’s difficulty with his accent was by no means his only problem. Taking strongly the often repeated references to Orin’s childishness, weakness and instability, he presented almost from the outset a character so internally disturbed, unpleasant, and erratic that he soon exhausted any sympathy or patience the audience may have had. This essentially left Best to carry the last half of the play alone, with little help from the crushingly bland Peter (Domnic Rowan) and Hazel (Rebecca Johnson). The clearest indication of the failing power of the later scenes in this production was that O’Neill’s melodramatic relationships and situations, which the formidable acting skills of Mirren and Piggot-Smith had managed to keep convincing, even moving in the first half of the production, began to arouse audience resistance as the evening went on and the burden of the piece fell on Hilton and Best. The clearest indication of this was the laughter (never heard in the first half of the production) which began to greet such lines as Hazel’s line to Orin “I know something is worrying you,” immediately following one of Hilton’s semi-lunatic outbursts. When such laughter greets Hilton’s portentous announcement “I’m just going in the study to clean my pistol” it is clear that the audience’s emotional sympathy for the production has been lost. Of course this is the stuff of melodrama, but precisely the challenge of the play is to capture the power of melodrama without tipping over in this way into melodramatic parody.

The production admittedly has many extremely powerful moments and sequences, especially in the scenes between Mirren and Piggot-Smith. Their first dialogue on the porch and final scene in the fatal bedroom display an admirable intensity and brilliant emotional range. But frontloading Mourning Becomes Electra with one’s strongest actors, one who appears only in the first play of the trilogy and the other only in the first two, is almost a recipe for a disappointing arc of production, as this ambitious undertaking clearly demonstrates.

The smaller roles are on the whole competently although not strikingly rendered, but James Smith does a lovely comic turn as the pompous Doctor Blake at Ezra’s funeral, and Clarke Peters is one of the solid delights of the production, both in the cameo role of the Chantyman and, more substantively, as the chorus/gardener Seth Beckwith, who always manages to convey by the subtlest of means that he understands far more about what is going on than this situation and his cultural placement allow him to say. One wishes that any one of the haunted Mannons had half his insight into themselves or their condition.

Marvin Carlson
CUNY Graduate Center

 

MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA [Rouw siert Electra in the Dutch translation of Ger Thijs], presented by Toneelgroep Amsterdam, directed by Ivo van Hove: Opening at Het Toneelschuur, Haarlem, 15 Nov. 2003.

When Ivo van Hove in 1989 staged Mourning Becomes Electra at the Zuidelijk Toneel Company (the performance is reviewed by Marc Maufort in The Eugene O’Neill Review,13.2 [1989] 73-77), he was already stressing the existential aspects of the trilogy rather than its surface realism. This was modestly suggested by visually linking the mid-nineteenth century with the late twentieth century. In his new, second staging of the trilogy, he went one step further. The references to the American Civil War were hardly noticeable. We were concerned with war in general; even the music of the brass band heard intermittently did not especially relate to the war O’Neill had in mind. In fact, the war aspect was altogether marginalized in the performance.

In the Oresteia the chain of guilt begins with Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his and Clytemnestra’s daughter Iphigenia; this partly motivates Clytemnestra’s fatal revenge on her husband. In Mourning Becomes Electra there is no sacrificed daughter; Christine’s revenge here concerns the life­denying Mannon Puritanism. In van Hove’s performance the American setting was universalized. We were here concerned with the plight of man. What O’Neill hides under a veneer of surface realism, van Hove presented undisguised as a mental conflict within each of the characters, made visual through sudden shifts between closeness and distance, tenderness and cruelty.

Van Hove cut the trilogy to a running time of three and a half hours. He left out O’Neill’s counterpart of the Greek chorus, the townsfolk, who keep commenting on the Mannons, and he had the ship’s scene in Part Two, presented as a film, radically shortened.

The simple permanent set, by van Hove’s regular scene designer Jan Versweyveld, showed a gray wall with a rectangular black opening in the middle, a visualization, it seemed, of the Mannon coolness, angularity, and death-in-life. Rather than a private environment, the bare setting had the characteristics of an office or a classroom By means of an overhead projector, assisted by the Mannons’ man of all work, Seth Beckwith (Hugo Koolschijn), the titles of the three trilogy parts were written in blood-red letters on the wall.

Contrasting with the grim interior was the attractive exterior, shown in the form of a stream of pictures emanating from a TV set. Here both the characters and the audience could see the impressive, fake-Greek facade of the Mannon house, interspersed with beautiful landscapes and idyllic scenes of the past, corresponding to the characters’ nostalgic longing for a return to virginal nature and childhood. At one point a clumsy animated film, showing a man, a woman and a palm tree on a tiny island, seemed to be an illustration of this childish longing and, when the couple was suddenly swallowed up by an enormous wave, a rejection of it.

The costumes were all modern and rather insignificant, except for the color. Van Hove abstained from the men’s uniforms, retained O’Neill’s contrast between the masculine black of the deathly Mannons and the feminine green of their women, and had Lavinia change from gray to green to black.

Each part opened in the same way. Before taking their various stage positions, the characters lined up downstage, faced the audience which at this point could be seen as corresponding to the peeping townsfolk in the trilogy. The characters took off their shoes and placed them in in front of them on the stage. Was it a generic announcement, an indication that what the audience were to witness was not a trilogy on cothurni, i.e., not a tragedy, but something more modest, more suited to our time? Was it a hint at the Moslem custom of taking off one’s shoes before entering the mosque? Or even a suggestion of the victims of the holocaust? The significance of this opening gesture was enigmatic in its suggestiveness.

Lavinia and Orin’s healthy, everyday friends Peter (Alwin Pulinckx) and Hazel (Karina Smulders) were retained. Present on the stage throughout the trilogy, they witnessed like a second audience the destruction of the Mannon family, in this respect acting as a substitute for the omitted townsfolk chorus. In other respects they functioned as classical confidants, speaking partners and supporters of the main characters.

Like them, Ezra Mannon, engagingly incarnated by Pierre Bokma, by many seen as the most prominent male actor in the Netherlands today, was constantly present on the stage, both before his return from the war and after he was murdered by Christine (Janni Goslinga). Sitting next to his unfaithful wife and faithful daughter in an immobile position, he was a study in lifelessness, augmented by his stereotypical, monotonous way of speaking. Without looking at Christine, he undressed, declared his love for her, and then “raped” her from behind on the family table, while Lavinia, next to them, filmed their intercourse with her video camera, envious and rationally cool at the same time. In the last part Orin and Lavinia ended up in the same loveless love position as their parents. After his death, Ezra figured prominently in the form of two huge photos, projected on the gray wall, one of which showed him intermittently opening and closing his eyes, a striking image of the husband-father haunting his family.

Sharply contrasting with the lifelessness of the characters were their sudden outbursts, revealing their suppressed emotions. Ezra could suddenly break through his grown-up military mask and show us the weeping child behind it. Lavinia, superbly acted by Halina Reijn, could suddenly reveal herself as the vulnerable little girl she is underneath her grown-up mask, when childishly attacking her mother.

While the actors belonging to Toneelgroep Amsterdam, this goes also for Hans Kesting as Adam Brant, showed a highly theatrical, at times grotesque style of acting, Jochum ten Haaf, a guest performer earlier successful as the young van Gogh in the play Vincent in Brixton, played Orin in a psychologically somewhat more realistic way. Although not specifically intended, the difference made sense since Brant is, after all, an outsider with regard to the Mannons.

O’Neill’s stark ending shows Lavinia, left alone, joining her departed family in the darkened Mannon house, atoning for her sins by burying herself alive. Van Hove let her instead be embraced by old Seth, the guard of the Mannon mansion and at this point even a figure of Death. This was to my mind a more harmonious but less stark way of concluding a trilogy whose very title points to Lavinia’s post-scenic self-affliction.

Fond of so-called cross-overs in the arts, van Hove’s Mourning Becomes Electra was a veritable multimedia performance. While we watched Ezra live on the stage, we saw his face greatly enlarged projected on the back wall. Since an audience always tends to focus on the faces of the characters, the paradox arose that we disregarded the live person in favor of the film image of his face, as we often do in our daily life in the present media era. The danger of van Hove’s approach is obviously that our attention is divided between various simultaneous stage effects: live theater, TV transmission, and video images. These stage effects inevitably distracted our attention from what the characters were saying, especially since they often spoke so fast, at times simultaneously, that it was difficult to hear what was being said. In short, the question is whether the noble aim, finding an arresting equivalent for the modern human condition, was not somewhat defeated by the means.

What van Hove seemed to be dealing with in this performance is our inability to communicate directly with one another. He even indicated a sad development. While the parents still attempted, without much success, to communicate directly with one another, their children were no longer able to do this. Thus a crucial dialogue between Orin and Lavinia occurred not face to face but via laptop messages. In agreement with this device, the characters’ undressing themselves should be seen, I believe, as a way of finding a modern equivalent for O’Neill’s mask-face dichotomy, especially since the contrast between costume (culture) and nudity (nature) is inherent in the trilogy, where it is expressed as a contrast between the life-denying Puritanism of New England and the joie de vivre of the South Sea islands.

As is often the case with his productions, van Hove’s second Mourning Becomes Electra was a far cry from the more or less realistic way in which this trilogy is usually presented. To some it would, like some of O’Neill’s plays, seem to be the result of an all too eager desire to experiment. To others it would show a forceful determination to stage the text in such a way that it would, to quote O’Neill, indicate a sense of fate “which an intelligent audience of today, possessed of no belief in the gods or supernatural retribution, could accept and be moved by.”

Egil Törnqvist

 

STAGING O’NEILL TODAY: An Interview with Ivo van Hove

Of all the more prestigious directors in Europe today, no one is so concerned with O’Neill as Ivo van Hove, presently heading both the foremost theatre group in the Netherlands, Toneelgroep Amsterdam, and the annual Holland Festival.

When I visited him in his office on a canal in central Amsterdam where Toneelgroep Amsterdam has been located for about a year, he had just returned from a teaching period in San Diego. An attractive man in his mid-forties, not altogether unlike O’Neill, he is in good spirits, having just received several offers to direct in reputable American theaters. He has even had a new play written for him by an American dramatist who, unlike van Hove, does not like O’Neill.

Born and bred in Flemish Belgium van Hove had studied law for a few years in Antwerp when he decided to turn to the theater, much to the dislike of his parents. His first production, in 1981, passed unnoticed in his native country but received favorable comment in The Drama Review. In 1987 van Hove was allied with the theater group De Tijd (The Time). During the 1990s he was head of Het Zuidelijk Toneel in Eindhoven, Holland. Since then he has held a central position in Dutch-Belgian cultural life. As a theater manager he knows what he wants, and has the characteristics of a leader. As a director he has staged a number of acclaimed, some would say controversial, productions, often devoted to the classics. His productions have been shown at festivals in several European cities. For his New York version of More Stately Mansions he received an Obie.

As a director, van Hove strives to be very clear and at the same time polyinterpretable. The directorial “message” should, he says, be distinctly formulated and at the same time open to various interpretations. Clearly averse to Stanislavski realism, he creates performances directed to what he sees as the heart of the matter, the inner, universal-psychological realism, what O’Neill called “the drama of souls.” Characteristic of the acting style he cherishes is that the characters switch very quickly from one mood to another, from passionate outbursts to cool distance, but “every moment is true in itself.” The restlessness of modern man can be sensed in this changeability.

The work process from initial decision to opening night, he describes metaphorically as a journey from, say, Amsterdam to Moscow. The director, he finds, has an obligation to map out this journey to his theatrical team already at the start. By that time he has already, together with his scene designer, decided on the setting in which the drama is to take place. The team, notably the actors, then have the opportunity to decide, together with the director, whether the journey should go via Berlin or Vienna, whether by air, train or coach. As for the theater critics, he is skeptical of those who see the trees rather than the woods, the “special effects” rather than the underlying concept. “A piece of art should not be hacked into pieces” is what he tells his students at the Theater Academy in Antwerp.

Despite or because of his Catholic upbringing, he does not believe in a higher power. Yet his upbringing may well have affected his belief that we are responsible for our own actions and that what we call fate or destiny is simply hypocrisy, a way of trying to escape responsibility. The relationship between free will and determinism is obviously of key importance to van Hove, as it has been to many dramatists. A rational person with an intense wish to explain the actions of the characters, he regards himself as “a psychological theater maker.” But psychology is not enough. The performance must reach out beyond everyday reality and become “poetically” true. This naturally brings us to O’Neill. As van Hove has said:

I have once in a while called O’Neill America’s Shakespeare. Like Shakespeare he manages to present a very personal message in totally different ways.

A second, even more important reason why he appeals to me is that the oeuvre of O’Neill is characterized by a great amount of necessity, the need, even while writing, to fathom why you are in this world, how you see this life and which oppositions you are confronted with. These are big themes close to my heart.

O’Neill wrote out of necessity. I make theatre for the same reason.

When van Hove chose to do Desire Under the Elms (Begeren onder de olmen) in the early nineties, many were surprised at the choice. But having been brought up in a small village surrounded by farmers, van Hove sensed a connection between that kind of life and that of New England farmers a hundred or more years ago. Moreover, he declared, “I’m in love with this play. It is a small, forgotten jewel.” van Hove has often shown a predilection for forgotten jewels. The idea behind the production was to create a piece of emotional theater, to make the emotions behind the laconic lines obvious. The translation was based on a somewhat constructed East-Flemish dialect. The names were adjusted to the Flemish environment. Ephraim became Jozef, Abbie was called Bie. The most startling effect was the placing of live cows on the stage. The idea behind this extreme form of naturalism was to emphasize the genuineness of the people in the play by surrounding them with an authentic environment. However, when I saw the performance I found the bellowing cows more of a distraction than an asset.

In the mid-nineties van Hove nourished the plan to do first A Touch of the Poet, then More Stately Mansions and finally to combine the two, thereby “providing a glimpse of O’Neill’s gigantic Cycle.” A Touch of the Poet was both translated and rehearsed when it appeared that the actor cast as Melody had problems with his part and the production was called off.

More Stately Mansions, somewhat prosaically entitled Rijkemanshuis in Dutch, on the other hand, was an immediate success when it opened in Eindhoven, a success that was repeated when Van Hove directed it again with an American cast in New York. (The latter production has been reviewed by Robert S. MacLean in The Eugene O’Neill Review [1997]: 178-182, and by Yvonne Shafer in The Eugene O’Neill Review [1998]: 218-220.) Dutch critics had no problem with the fact that More Stately Mansions, though uncompleted, was staged. In the United States opinions were somewhat divided on this point. When comparing the Dutch situation with the American one, Van Hove expressed the belief that European actors, more than their American colleagues, focus on how the text should be interpreted. They see the text primarily as gas to enable the car to ride.

It was on the occasion when he had already conceptualized his second production of Mourning Becomes Electra (reviewed above) that van Hove happened to see the American documentary film Capturing the Friedmans. The film which demonstrates how a once happy family disintegrates under pressure of their alleged hidden crimes, had a great impact on him and confirmed, as it were, the actuality of O’Neill’s trilogy and the meaningfulness of his own approach to it. Characteristic of the Friedmans is that they record their own misery by filming it. Similarly, Van Hove lets Lavinia create her own “photo album” by having her film her own family in exceedingly revealing situations. The central underlying idea behind the production has much to do with van Hove’s own experience of denying the importance of your parents until, eventually, you realize that you cannot escape them, that you are not unique, that whether you like it or not you are a product of a father and a mother. Van Hove: “At the end Lavinia realizes that she cannot escape her parents. Even though they are dead, she has to live with them. She must learn to mourn the terrible things that have happened. If you don’t learn to reconcile yourself with past wrongdoing or with your own origin, you will never find peace. I feel a strong emotional connection to this view of life.”

The unabridged translation by Ger Thijs, himself a prominent and experienced director, is published by Toneelgroep Amsterdam so that the interested spectator can buy it before or after seeing the performance. It is the first time, van Hove told me, more proud than ashamed, that Mourning Becomes Electra, the play that more than any other helped to get O’Neill the Nobel Prize, is published in Dutch. The translation both reads and plays well. But of course there are now and then untranslatable words or passages, as when Seth, the gardener, at the end “pretending to search the ground” says: “Left my clippers around somewheres.” He is obviously referring not so much to the garden tool as to the clipper ships which, together with the South Sea islands, stand for the longing for release that characterizes the Mannons as representatives of Man. This reference is not, and cannot be, carried over into the Dutch translation.

Van Hove denies that he has any concrete plans for a new O’Neill production. Early plays like The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape do not interest him particularly, although he can value them as testaments to O’Neill’s wide thematic and formal range. But he would very much like to stage The Iceman Cometh, A Moon for the Misbegotten or Strange Interlude. And while the troubles around A Touch of the Poet have given him cold feet and made him shy away from that play, he would not mind doing Desire Under the Elms again, in a different way. There is hope that sooner or later he will launch another O’Neill on the stage. Which one, when and where, remains to be seen.

Egil Törnqvist

 

MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA, based on O’Neill’s play, music by Marvin David Levy, book by Henry Butler, directed by Bartlett Sher. New York City Opera, 21 March 2004.

Beginning on 21 March 2004, New York City Opera mounted the third revision of Levy’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1967), in collaboration with Seattle Opera. Since readers of this journal presumably know the play, I will concentrate on the production of the opera in the comments that follow. The production team, led by stage director Bartlett Sher, and the cast of eight singers put together a gripping performance. Levy’s music, conducted by George Manahan, is easier to listen to now than it was originally, when some critics were not ready to hear such “modern” sounds in the opera house. I question whether Levy and his librettist, Henry Butler, have quite controlled this sprawling story, but Levy got excellent support for his attempt in this revival.

Like any librettist working from a play, Butler needed first to remove most of the excesses of the script in order to make space for music. Onto the skeleton he provided, Levy grafted music that is clear and energetic, if not especially subtle. Both were concerned to drive the action forward, sometimes faster than singers can display motivations. Unfortunately, the single largest dramaturgical problem of O’Neill’s trilogy, the shift in focus from Christine to Lavinia, remains incompletely solved. The 1998 revision, mounted by Chicago Lyric Opera, tried to tighten up the narrative by dividing the score into only two acts. For the latest version, O’Neill’s triad has been re-instated, with the adjustment that Christine and several other figures now come back as ghosts. However, for reasons I cannot explain, the early part of the libretto has not been changed to prepare the audience to expect to see ghosts in the mansion, nor were they sufficiently differentiated visually from the living characters. As a result, these silent figures were not immediately comprehensible and so were less effective than they should have been.

The action took place within a bare white neoclassical room dominated by three huge louvered doors in the back wall. All important entrances were made through these doors, which opened onto a void. I interpreted this as a comment by designer Michael Yeargan on the isolation of the Mannons’ house. On either side of the room there were also a series of louvered doors to facilitate exits. Stage right led outside; stage left gave onto a hall, seen in cross-section, where there were further exits to the rest of the house. This layout, although architecturally improbable, was functional: the hallway allowed for eavesdropping and eventually for ghosts to enter. The single large room became an entry hall when furnished with a table and vase, a bedroom with a bed, chair, and medicine table, a best parlor with Ezra Mannon’s bier and chairs for mourners, or a study with a desk.

The non-representational space was open at the top, permitting intrusions from above. The ominous opening music leaves little doubt of the overall trend of the story, but Christine’s apple green dress and the full-blown peonies she was arranging were commented on visually by a rain of flower petals: no hopes would come to fruition in this locale. Later, autumn leaves swirled down. These elements of nature’s cycle were joined at the end of Act II and in Act III by sheets of paper—a puzzling visual reference to Orin’s manuscript family history, which had not yet been mentioned in the text. The open top of the set also accommodated the flying in of Captain Adam Brant on a catwalk, which was one of the elements representing his ship and its environs. A ramp stage right was the entry to his mid-stage cabin, furnished with a desk and bunk bed. Rather mysteriously, the upstage part of the space contained chairs on which sat dimly-lit, unidentifiable figures that turned out to be ghosts (Ezra Mannon joined them). The relationship between the catwalk and the ramp was muddled: since Christine used the same exit to the ship’s cabin through which Lavinia and Orin entered, why did they not meet along the way? A final use of the flies provided a post-modern reference for those familiar with pictures of the original Theatre Guild production. Twice during the third act a pair of massive black doors flew in, presaging the suicides of Christine and Orin. They transformed the interior to an exterior, while characters remained stationary. The settings provided the director with acreage in which to move his singers around unimpeded, and almost all of them were able to fill the space.

Like the setting, Jennifer Tipton’s design for the lighting was partly representational (night during the ship scene), but partly symbolic (Christine was unnaturally silhouetted against the lighted back wall when she was discovered back home after Adam’s murder). Playing the final scene inside the house, rather than outside, showed more completely how Lavinia entombs herself with the Mannon ghosts, as doors and shutters closed off the outside world, and the light faded.

Elizabeth Caitlin Ward did not take as many liberties with costumes as Yeargan did with scene design. The women wore hoop skirts, the men uniforms or suits of the period, but colors provided a means of editorializing. For example, Christine did not succumb to full black mourning but reveled in a navy and purple brocade, with teal ribbons on her veil. Less formally, she adopted royal purple. The off-the-shoulder apple green dress she wore at the beginning of the opera had a sheer layer on top that gave it an iridescence and lightness: a hopeful, if too youthful, dress. When Lavinia “stole” this color from her mother in Act III, her buttoned-up, quasi-military outfit was made of a flat, hard fabric which absorbed light, rather than reflecting it. The color was similar, but no life burgeoned beneath that dress, which not only soured Lavinia but contrasted markedly with the peach color and blonde ringlets worn by the doll-like Helen Niles. Ward’s ghosts were unevenly successful. By what logic did Christine’s appearance change when she became a ghost, while others only grayed their faces? The dead Christine wore a nightgown and robe with a long train, and her hair cascaded down her back the full length of the train, in a grotesque extension of the “growing” of hair after death. Opera history whispers that Christine got a new costume because she was played by a leading lady, but that did not help the dramatic effect, especially since the ghost outfit was by far her least flattering, and gray skin improves few people’s looks.

Within these physical bounds, Bartlett Sher worked hard to identify purposeful movements for the singers. Very seldom did they give in to the wandering syndrome that so easily spoils dramatic effects, especially in opera revivals. Most were fully committed physically to what they were doing, which brought crispness to the performance. Lauren Flanigan offered a tense and desperate Christine, so convinced that her life with Ezra Mannon had been wasted that she was ready to go the extreme of poisoning him in order to escape to a potentially blissful (though only vaguely conceived) life with Adam Brant. The text hints that at some level she is aware that she is manipulating Brant (“Run, Adam, run, but never forget: our hands are joined in Ezra’s death. You will not leave me now”), but in the ship scene they seemed to be genuinely wrapped up in one another. At times, alas, Flanigan’s diction made subtitles not just welcome but essential. Nevertheless, she is a mesmerizing performer, able to act as well as sing powerfully.

Emily Pulley (Lavinia) and Flanigan took the first star call together, but Pulley took the last one by herself, an indication that, as the title character, she was considered the star. She matched Flanigan’s energy and intensity, and sang expressively, but for me Lavinia remained more opaque than Christine and simply much less interesting. Neither O’Neill nor Butler gives her a chance for any semblance of a normal life. She is already condemned before the opera begins, because Brant’s surreptitious kiss awakened her sexually, outside the bounds of patriarchal authority. The Freudian slip by which she reveals herself in her last speech to Peter (“Want me! Take me! / Love me, love me, Adam!”) is melodramatically effective, but it only seals O’Neill and Butler’s indictment. Pulley gave as committed a performance as Flanigan, but she had less to work with. Peter and Helen Niles serve essentially as foils to the young Mannons: neither is a plausible mate for the heirs of this peculiar family. Richard Byrne and Tonna Miller projected innocence, health, and enthusiasm in their small allotment of stage time.

Stephen West’s Ezra Mannon was a man ready to put off the soldier and try to make his marriage more than a duty. Yet Ezra had little idea how to accomplish this impulse. Act II began with Christine, still in her underwear, spreadeagled across a corner of the marriage bed, and Ezra buttoning up the longjohns he had not bothered to remove when asserting his marital rights. That graphic image spoke volumes about the marriage. He donned a black robe for the confession scene, while Christine stayed vulnerably bare. When he was stricken, she automatically started for the medicine table, then remembered and deliberately chose to use the poison from the pocket of her red robe, still on the bed. Lavinia, also in black, had been lurking in the stage left hallway. When convulsions threw Ezra on the floor, she knelt beside him, and the act ended with Christine bearing down on them in her red robe, as frightening as vengeance incarnate.

Kurt Ollmann developed Orin admirably, a challenge, since the character is unable to cope with any member of his family, living or dead. No sooner had Christine lured him and Helen into waltzing beside Ezra’s bier, a shocking picture, than Lavinia entered and called him back to mourning. When, in a fit of dangerous petulance, he seized his father’s sabre and swung it, Lavinia simply took the sabre away from him as if it were a toy, stabbed it into the floor, and declared, “I accuse Mother and her lover, Adam Brant, of murder!” In the ship’s cabin, Lavinia was so much in control that she stood beside Orin and lunged with him as he stabbed Adam Brant the first time. Not surprisingly, he was horrified to find her kissing the corpse when he came back from rifling the cabin. In the last act, Orin tried hard to get his family history out of the house via Helen, but when Lavinia prevented that, he collapsed. The director did not give him as powerful a death as his mother’s, however. The half-mad Christine, calling Lavinia “Adam,” had kissed her passionately and exited through the mobile black doors, whereupon a shot rang out. When the door unit flew out, Christine had vanished. The sound brought the handyman Jed (Don Yule) and other servants, who patently disbelieved the explanation of her suicide. Orin’s fatal exit was less tidy: he went through the black doors, but instead of exiting through a trap, he reeled offstage across the hallway to shoot himself, while Christine and other ghosts began to assemble in the main room.

Adam Brant is a key figure in this opera, since he has awakened Lavinia, bought poison for Christine, and dies in the midst of plans to run away to live (on nothing) with his adulterous lover. Jason Howard’s best moment in the role was his meditative solo on the catwalk at the beginning of the ship scene, II.ii, when the audience first learns that he will have to give up the sea for Christine. Unlike the rest of the cast, he never found a way to show Adam’s feelings by facial expression or gesture: he only sang. In a less accomplished cast, his woodenness might not have been so noticeable, but in this assembly he was an automaton. Fortunately, others just acted around him and were not impeded.

In Levy’s music, I hear Benjamin Britten and Dmitry Shostakovich, among others. The opera is through-composed, rather than written in numbers, and the lack of interruptions for applause helps propel it. Orchestral interludes cover scene changes, though the music is less thematic than Britten’s in Peter Grimes. Levy indulges in far too many fortissimo passages. The first act, in particular, pitted Christine and Lavinia against each other in unrelieved screaming sequences, to the point that I felt harangued by the music. The overuse of fortissimi early on also meant that the music had less room in which to build to climaxes later. The libretto identifies Lavinia as either a spinto or a dramatic soprano. I find it difficult to imagine that a spinto could stand up to Christine even as well as Emily Pulley did, but two dramatic sopranos made for more noise and less separation between their voices than is ideal. I do not wish to sound entirely negative about the music. There were wonderful passages: when Orin and Lavinia, overhead on the catwalk, eavesdrop on Christine and Adam in his cabin, their quartet showed great variety, and many of the plot turns were effectively marked. Levy has added music at the end, during which a collection of ghosts (the accumulated corpses, plus several others, unidentified) accepted Lavinia into their company, while Ezra blessed her. Although cut off from the world, Lavinia now seems at peace, rather than suffering penance. This new ending is very different from O’Neill’s exterior doors that close and leave the last of the Mannons invisible to the community.

On its own terms the opera works well, moment by moment, but the shift in focus from Christine to Lavinia remains difficult. Lavinia does not have a viable plan beyond avenging her father, and that action is complete long before the end of the play. She does not appear, like O’Neill’s character, to have become the “fancy woman” of a native during their travel to the Blessed Islands. Orin’s offer of incest as a partial solution to the tensions of their relationship comes too suddenly and is too quickly rejected to be a plausible motive for his suicide. Lavinia may bow to the inevitable when she isolates herself among the ghosts, but the element of tragedy dissipates when her father blesses her. If Marvin David Levy and his production team have not quite solved all the problems, this third revival at least gave the piece as strong a showing as one can easily imagine.

Judith Milhous
CUNY Graduate Center

 

HUGHIE, directed by Catherine Baker Steindler. Trinity Repertory Company, Providence, Rhode Island, 28 February 2004.

According to program notes, the Trinity Repertory Theatre production of Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie grew out of a fortuitous meeting between Brian Dennehy and the theater’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis, at which Dennehy expressed his desire to tackle the one-act. Not surprisingly, Trinity Rep jumped at the chance of having the two-time Tony Award-winner tread the boards of their intimate, 300-seat theater and also agreed to his suggestion of putting Hughie on a double bill with the little known Sean O’Casey one­act, A Pound on Demand. The two plays aren’t a likely match, though both involve a character (played by Dennehy) who is or was on a lengthy bender. A Pound on Demand involves the drunken antics of Sammy as he comically tries to withdraw a pound from his account at an Irish post office and ends with him defeated and heading back to the pub to drink. Hughie begins with gambler Erie Smith returning to his New York hotel after having been “off on a drunk” for days. At the performance I attended, there was a slight chuckle of recognition from the audience at the start of Hughie after Dennehy delivered the “off on a drunk” line. But this almost winking allusion to the O’Casey farce within the O’Neill production does little to establish and maintain any deliberate pace and melancholic mood needed in Hughie. Indeed, the main problem with the production was the pace and staging by director Catherine Baker Steindler.

At the very least, having A Pound on Demand precede Hughie provided this reviewer with the opportunity to view the interesting set change from O’Casey’s post office to O’Neill’s hotel. Production designer Eugene Lee suitably conveyed O’Neill’s once grand New York hotel lobby, which, according to O’Neill’s stage directions, “has given up all pretense of respectability.” Its current state of dinginess is suggested by requisite threadbare carpet on the stairs, dirt and grease caking the corners and lips of the peeling wallpaper and missing tiles on the lobby floor. The large oak hotel desk, still boasting impressive carvings and moldings, has an almost palpable stickiness to it, suggesting years of patrons carelessly abandoning pint glasses on its top and extinguishing too many cigarette butts on it. A small dining room is suggested through an archway upstage right, with faded floral wallpaper, empty tables for two and dust on the tablecloths. Two worn burgundy leather chairs are placed downstage center with a cigarette stand in between. A large black and white cityscape of 1920’s New York City flanks the upstage left wall, near the hotel’s entrance. Above the stage is a series of beams suggesting an elevated subway track , which shakes and lights up at the start of the production. The New York subway, with its noisy rumblings and screeching brakes, appears the only animus in the city’s early hours, particularly when the stage lights come up to reveal Joe Grifasi’s night clerk, half catatonic at the hotel desk.

Into this scene enters Brain Dennehy as Erie Smith, a down on his luck gambler residing on and off at the hotel. Dennehy’s Erie is a study in forced composure and controlled nonchalance. Dennehy easily captures Erie’s confident bombastic façade, with his imposing posture, slicked back hair, and low, conspiratorial laugh punctuating his musings on women and gambling. Dennehy’s intimidating size, though he has lost approximately 60 pounds since the end of his Long Day’s Journey into Night run, works well to his advantage trapped behind the large hotel desk. At 65, Dennehy is 20 years older than Erie Smith and so a script change makes his Erie 55 rather than 45. Arguably, adding ten years to the gambler makes his plight more desperate and his life more pathetic, yet there is a dignified air to Dennehy’s Erie that fights this impression. Dennehy’s Erie is not the haggard shell of Robards, nor the comic hustler of Pacino, but a smoothly confident, physically imposing gambler whose strongest feeling is that of entitlement. Dennehy’s Erie is almost too well put together, almost too comfortable to convey convincingly a man terrified of what will happen to him if he can’t pay off his debts, let alone someone who has spent days sleeping out on the street. Though costumer William Lane provides the requisite seersucker suit, suitably rumpled and sweat stained, Dennehy still has his tie tied and his dress shirt still stubbornly tucked in. One might argue that this plays to Erie’s futile attempts to keep up the façade at all cost, but Dennehy’s Erie wears the mask of smooth confidence so securely that I longed to see him lose the struggle a little and let the façade slip a little more often.

The 4 a.m. conversation between Erie and the hotel clerk that makes up the play was entertaining, given the level of the two actors, yet the staging was rushed, and the actors appeared to be still feeling their way around the stage. The conversation sped along so quickly that for two men who largely don’t connect, they appeared to have an ordinary conversation, one that you’d never suspect was taking place at 4 a.m. Grifasi’s hotel clerk is so meticulously polite that his responses follow too quickly on the ends of Erie’s sentences. What I most wanted in this production were more uncomfortable silences between the two men. Silence between Erie’s lengthy musings on his departed friend Hughie, and the largely unrelated responses of the bell clerk forced to listen to Erie. Grifasi is so quick to respond to Erie’s questions and statements that he appears to be listening too well, making Erie’s angry response, “You should have told me that you were deaf” lack any theatrical impact it might have had. The audience misses out in witnessing Erie’s devastating observation that the night clerk, unlike Hughie, hasn’t in fact hung on his every word. Erie’s angry response, while so revealing, appears only as hyperbole.

Yet the production is not without its wonderfully resonant moments. In one nuanced piece of the staging, Dennehy sat downstage in one of the hotel chairs, staring straight ahead and the bell clerk stood behind the hotel desk upstage. Erie had just spoken of Hughie’s funeral and the silence following his speech lasted approximately fifteen seconds, with Erie lost in memories and the night clerk, exhausted, staring at Erie, half wondering if he should say something and half hoping that he would just retire to his room. That moment, when the mask had slipped from Erie to reveal the character’s desperation underneath, the subject of so much of O’Neill, was worth the price of admission. In a play that is all about the inability and great need of people to connect, in a seedy old hotel that was once grand, in a city that is unforgiving, ruthless and still alive at four in the morning, more is conveyed in the silence of the two men than in any of their conversation.

The final, wonderful transformation in the play, when the night clerk enthusiastically asks Erie if he really does know a famous gambler, signals the shift when the night clerk willingly assumes his “Hughie” role as admiring, gullible foil and Erie realizes that he has found another avid listener. Yet the transformation in this production was not impressive. Dennehy was positioned on a short landing at the top of three stairs, and, for reasons not clear to this reviewer, had his back to the audience. When he turned to the night clerk, his new Hughie, the audience had only Dennehy’s back to look at, and not his face.

The production, while enjoyable, was so well received by the audience that people appeared to leap to a standing ovation before the last line was even spoken. This I fathom had much to do with the thrill of having Dennehy perform Hughie in an intimate space. Like many shows, I suspect that this Hughie will find its legs as the run progresses. Dennehy remarked in an interview with Channing Gray of the Providence Journal that he “liked long­running roles, at least if they are great ones. You keep learning from those kinds of parts.” There is talk of this Hughie going on an extended tour, possibly ending up in New York. I look forward to the possibility of seeing this production again and witnessing its growth.

Deirdre O’Leary,
Graduate Theatre Program
City University of New York

 

ABORTION, directed by Manu Narayan and Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj. Rasa Theater, the Studio Theatre at Theatre Row, New York City.

The newly organized Rasa Theater Company, dedicated to producing American drama utilizing Southeast Asian experience, gave its inaugural productions of two one-act plays at the Studio Theatre this winter in New York City. One of Eugene O’Neill’s so called “lost plays” that he had written early in his career and that he had meant to destroy, the one-act Abortion, led the card for the evening.

Freely adapted by Uzma Rizvi, the play was set, not in New England, but in Calcutta in the year 1855 when India was under British rule. O’Neill’s American characters were replaced by their Indian counterparts. The men dressed in Western dress if they were highborn Indians and low caste Indian garb if they were not, and the beautiful young Indian women in the cast donned stunning saris magnificently colored in blue and gold, red and gold, and pure white. Costume designer was Ms. Rizvi. Adding to the Asian atmosphere was the seductive and original Indian music composed and sung by Geeta Bhatnagar. Also atmospheric were the soothing and romantic Indian dances choreographed by Mr. Maharaj. The dances also included the symbolic hand gestures, the mudras, to express the story of the love of a man and a woman, as well as caste differences among the characters. For some reason all of the Indian characters retained their American names in the production.

One set was used for all the scenes. It consisted of a couch sumptuously decorated with a coverlet of maroon and beige. Behind the couch at stage left and right stood tall white columns on either side, and between these columns were placed at different times a map of India and a large window partially concealed by a dark drape. This set served as the college room of Jack Townsend at Presidency College, formerly known as Hindu College, the first institution for higher learning for elite Indian men, and also the living room of the Townsend family.

No doubt Abortion was freely adapted because this early work might better have remained at rest. Understandably, the production began with a rousing rendition of “God Save the Queen,” demonstrating clearly that the upper-class Indian families identified with British culture, but did the chorus led ably by Ms. Bhatnagar have to sing all four verses? Moreover, the chorus stood with their backs to the audience with only Ms. Bhatnagar facing the listeners. These beautiful Indian women were a delight to look at but perhaps it would have been better if the viewer were given a frontal or at least a side view of the chorus rather than that of a row of derrieres, however shapely. Interestingly enough, music throughout the production played an important role in raising esthetic values of this performance, far more important than the simple “He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” song of O’Neill’s text.

The simple tragical plot of O’Neill’s play quickly unfolded, and clearly demonstrated that O’Neill is a rich subject for multi-culturalism, having a universal appeal. The timeless story of an upperclass young man impregnating a lower-class girl whom class differences prohibit him from marrying transfers well into the Indian caste system in 1855. Mr. Azher Ali played the young seducer Jack Townsend, and Ms. Meeni Naqvi was particularly good as Nellie Murray, the sweet lower-class girl who dies from a botched abortion arranged by her lover Jack. She was most interesting in the confrontation scene with Jack when she displayed much character by acting with dignity and showing no bitterness. She was also impressive in the interpolated ghost scenes when, after her death, she tried to intercede in the bitter conflict between Jack Townsend and her brother Joe Murray, sincerely portrayed by Mr. Debargo Sanyal. Ms. Naqvi performed a charming and conciliatory symbolic Indian dance to try to calm the two antagonists. She was also impressive in her last ghost scene at the end of the play when she tries to prevent her lover Jack from shooting himself, as she stood in her beautiful white dress cuddling her dead baby in her arms. The story reaches its inexorable end when Jack Townsend, at the height of success in sport and in his graduation, shoots himself fatally, while his friends and admirers sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Also unfortunate was the fact that the rented antique pistol misfired, causing only an anti-climactic pop.

Despite some uneven acting from this predominantly youthful cast and the banality and lack of character development in this early O’Neill work, there was a commendable amount of imagination, energy, and enthusiasm in this young Rasa Theater group. The use of elements of Indian culture were definitely admirable and helped to deepen a simple text.

Dr. Robert Simpson McLean
Professor Emeritus,
City University of New York

 

THE ICEMAN COMETH, directed by Tony Mabesa. Dulaang Theater, University of the Philippines, Manila, 15 February-7 March 2004.

I had no particular expectations on March 5 when I attended a performance of The Iceman Cometh, except those arising from a story I read in a newspaper which mentioned that Tony Mabesa was celebrating his 50th anniversary as a director by doing the play, and which also mentioned that some of the leading actors in Manila were to play in it. Clearly this would be no ordinary student production. I assumed that if this was the way a man chose to celebrate fifty years of directing plays, he must love the play, and I took that for a good sign. Later I would learn from Tony that he had loved the play since the time of his post-graduate studies at UCLA, decades ago, and that he had had three months of rehearsal with his actors. The program notes speak in detail about the recent Kevin Spacey production which I assume was the source for some interpretations. The play was given in alternating performances in English and in Filipino, the two official languages of the Philippines.

The performance was scheduled for three hours, beginning at 6 p.m., including two five minute intermissions between Acts 1 and 2, and a brief blackout between Acts 3 and 4. Everything worked exactly on schedule. The play was over almost exactly at 9, just in time for a late supper.

The playing area was not large and the set was simple. It followed O’Neill’s directions except that there was no division between the back room and the bar: at stage left was the bar with two or three stools visible leading offstage; at stage right were five tables. One was isolated from the others near a rear exit and a stairway and occupied only by Willy. At front-right next to a suitably dingy window, were Larry and Hugo; next, and slightly behind, a table with Joe, Piet, Jimmy and Cecil. A little left of center stage and a little farther forward was Harry Hope’s table, Harry facing the audience, with Mosher and McGloin at either side. A fair amount of the text had been cut, but not many of the cuts were particularly noticeable. The show worked extremely well, and one was not physically exhausted when it was over. The house was full, with mostly students in the audience. There was a little inattention in the first two acts, perhaps the discomfort of the middle-class young put amongst a bunch of human derelicts. But everyone in the audience seemed focussed in the last two acts and appropriately moved at the end when there was long applause.

I was immediately struck in this performance by the sense that I was seeing the characters anew. There was a variety of accents—such as, the Filipino-accented English of Don Karigal who played Rocky (an accent that I did not notice in his speech after the play). It worked very well to suggest that what we were about to see might as well have happened in some rough part of Manila, as in lower Manhattan. The various backgrounds of Harry Hope’s barflies fit as well in the Philippines as in New York. Like Manhattan, Manila has been home to people from almost anyplace in the world for many generations.

Rocky and Larry have the first lines of the play. Larry is usually played as some sort of Americanized Irishman and O’Neill describes him as a big, strong looking man of sixty. Ebong Joson, who is smaller, spoke Larry’s lines with the consonants and fluted vowels of someone educated by the British and after a moment of being a little startled, it made as good sense to me as any other way of playing the part I have seen. He played Larry as a somewhat different character than I have seen before, quicker and more clever, rather than strong and straightforward, seeming more fragile; Mr. Joson made one pay attention to Larry and keep an open mind as to how Larry would react to various things. Harry Hope was played very effectively by Edwin Decenteceo who has a wonderful voice, and was effective throughout. Hope, Larry and Rocky are the stable foundation on which the society of bums rests so that in Hope’s saloon a few of the more fragile members of the No Hope Society can play out their pipe dreams.

The other denizens of Hope’s bar were mostly excellent. Richard de Guzman as Chuck made a good partner to Rocky and Cora (well played by Chol del Coro). André Tiangco (Willie) has a splendid voice and made full use of it for Willie’s flamboyant ups and downs. Jacques Borlaza was excellent as Joe. Fonz Deza and Manuel Aquino seemed perfectly cast as Piet and Cecil, their Boer and British accents perfect to my ear. Allan Palileo was fragile and pathetic as poor Jimmy Tomorrow, Alexander Cortez and Gamaliel R. Viray were effective as Mosher and McGloin, Hope’s hangers-on. Stella Caete and Imma Matudio did very well as Pearl and Margie. I did not understand most of Spanky Manikan’s lines as Hugo.