AH, WILDERNESS!, directed by Joseph Ziegler. The Court House Theater, Shaw Festival, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Canada, 15 July 2004.

For the first time ever, the Shaw Festival Theatre mounted a production of a Eugene O’Neill play, Ah, Wilderness!, in its 2004 season. In her second year as artistic director of the Shaw, Ms. Jackie Maxwell enlarged the artistic mandate of the Festival by including a work of America’s greatest playwright. The happy result was a moving production enriched by the acting talents of one of North America’s most experienced repertory companies.

The Shaw Festival Theatre has been called by John Simon “the best repertory theater on the entire continent, with standards that consistently aim high and generally deliver.” It is easy to agree with Mr. Simon’s judgment about the Shaw’s high standards: the company’s superb ensemble and character acting somewhat in the English manner greatly enrich its performances. These traits have no doubt been nurtured by the many years of experience that the Shaw’s actors have garnered as members of a repertory company that was founded in 1962. An unusual illustration of the cast’s skills occurred unexpectedly during the first act when a woman spectator fainted onto the stage. The actors quickly melted into the wings while two doctors in the house attended the stricken woman. After about ten minutes they escorted the woman to the theater’s exit, whereupon the players showed they were hardy troupers by picking up their lines without missing a cue.

Ah, Wilderness! was presented at the Shaw’s Court House Theater whose small thrust stage is used for intimate and experimental performances. The set was minimalist, suitable for a restricted playing area, but was effective in showing the casual lifestyle of an unpretentious middle-class family at the turn of the century. The set designed by Christina Poddubiuk included a chaise lounge, some wicker and two upholstered chairs, a round living room table littered with miscellaneous papers, and some small tables holding kerosene and other lamps, all of which gave the impression that this family room was solely for relaxation. Behind the set hung a huge stage-wide painting by Gwyneth Stark, head of the Shaw’s scenic art department, of a photograph by Edward Steichen called “The Pond—Moonrise.” The painting is of a forest scene and suggests an earlier and simpler time when American cities were less populous and closer to the country. Other scenes in the play such as the barroom and the beach scene between Richard and Muriel were also minimalist, since sparsity was the scenic style of the production. This style served to emphasize the human relations and feelings of these warm, uncomplicated and unspoiled Americans who lived with iceboxes, managed without telephones, and went for a casual and leisurely drive to the lighthouse in their Buick on uncrowded roads on the Fourth of July.

There are numerous innovations in this production such as the painting of the Steichen photograph, the original quartet music composed by Shaw musical director John Tute based upon the contemporary songs O’Neill included to add atmosphere, and the soothing presence of the Middle Eastern sitar to amplify the Rubaiyat theme of the fleetness of happiness expressed in the title of the play and in several quotations in the script. However, director Joseph Ziegler wisely retained a traditional interpretation, since Ah, Wilderness! is a celebration of normal and happy human emotions like love and affection. Such a theme in a 1906 slice of middle-class life does not permit much experimentation.

Foremost among the excellent performances in the production was that of Norman Browning, veteran of sixteen seasons at the Shaw. As Nat Miller, Mr. Browning outdid himself as a character actor performing the role of the loving, grumpy father and husband who must defend his children and his family’s honor against those who would denigrate them. Occasionally grumpy on the outside, and occasionally embarrassed when confronting sexual issues with his seventeen-year-old son Richard, Mr. Browning displayed an amazing variety of grimaces to express his displeasure, as well as an even more amazing catalog of sounds including sighs, grunts, growls, and, when his dander was really up, virtual roars. This ferocity was clearly shown when he stood up to the crotchety old buzzard David McComber, admirably played by George Dawson. Similarly, Mr. Browning was skillful in portraying Nat Miller’s close and loving relationship with his wife, Essie, expertly played by Wendy Thatcher, who was completing her twentieth year at the Shaw. In addition to showing herself as the warm partner of her husband, Ms. Thatcher sensitively acted her role of the caring mother concerned about the daring authors her teenage son Richard reads, the likes of Wilde, Ibsen, Shaw, and Carlyle.

Young Richard Miller, played by Jared Brown, gave a convincing portrayal of a rebellious teenager sensitive to the radical politics of his time and to the new currents in literature. He is proud of his belligerence and eager to show he is a radical and, of course, an experienced man of the world. The scene in the barroom with the young prostitute Belle, well played by Lisa Norton, was one of the most hilarious in the play. The mood of the scene was set up by the rollicking barrelhouse jazz tune pounded out in the background. When the stage action began, the confident, cute and charming Ms. Norton, in her role as prostitute Belle, was a perfect foil for the callow and inexperienced Richard, too proud to reveal his youthful ignorance. After trying unsuccessfully to entice Richard to an upstairs room, Ms. Norton had the perfect touch of sarcasm when she suddenly uttered O’Neill’s trenchant line: “Say, honestly, Kid, does your mother know you’re out?” Mr. Graeme Somerville played the savvy bartender whose bearing and presence also contributed to the success of this scene, further aided by the barwise traveling salesman acted by Michael Ball.

The Fourth of July dinner scene is one of the most joyous and sad scenes in Ah, Wilderness!, a scene that the Shaw cast performed with relish. Seated under a period chandelier in which each lamp had to be turned on individually, the family gathered at a table resplendent with a lace tablecloth, cut glass water pitcher, and attractive white period dinnerware. The actors portrayed their joy at the feast of lobsters, the spirit of the holiday, and the festive family dinner. Mr. Browning easily conveyed the hearty good feeling of Nat Miller and the natural effects of his holiday imbibing, Mr. Brown well displayed Richard’s disdain for the patriotic holiday, the younger Miller children Mildred and Arthur played by Tamara Kit and Jeff Irving showed their normal sibling rivalry by teasing and by other childish torments, the women chatted and laughed, until uncle Sid Davis, the ne’er do well, played by William Vickers, came in happy and intoxicated, drank his soup directly from the bowl while standing, and even danced a type of Irish jig. The able Mary Haney as the spinster Lily Miller, who has rejected marriage with the irresponsible Sid for sixteen years, sank into sadness after giving a scolding to her drunken suitor. As is well known O’Neill celebrated in this dream play the happy childhood he never had, but the inclusion of the Lily-Sid plot shows that O’Neill understood that no time is without its human problems, even that of this turn-of-the-century happy American family living before world wars, depressions, and loss of much

As Normand Berlin has written in the program notes, the theme of this nostalgic play is love. This theme has been well demonstrated by the bond between Nat and Essie Miller, and is further clearly expressed by the boat scene on the beach between Richard and Muriel McComber, played by Maggie Blake. These actors were well suited for this tender scene, mildly interrupted by a lover’s quarrel. They express their love, kiss, and innocently look up at the moon and stars revealing only a world of love, hope, and possibility. Similarly, Mr. Browning and Wendy Thatcher close the play with this transcendent feeling that love predominates in this world. As Nat Miller says: “. . . we seem to be completely surrounded by love.”

Robert Simpson McLean
City University of New York

 

AH, WILDERNESS!, directed by Joseph Ziegler. The Court House Theater, Shaw Festival, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada. 13 May-8 October 2004.

Ontario’s Shaw Festival, dedicated to producing the work of George Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries, staged Ah, Wilderness!, this past summer, its first play ever by Eugene O’Neill. To Nat Miller in Ah, Wilderness!, “This Shaw’s a comical cuss. Even if his ideas are so crazy they oughtn’t to allow them to be printed.” To the Shaw Festival, which has fixed on O’Neill’s only comedy the rigorous critical scrutiny it practices as part of its namesake’s legacy, O’Neill himself is an unlikely comical cuss with some crazy—and very wise—ideas of his own.

Director Joseph Ziegler has staged a lively and smart, even witty, Ah, Wilderness! grounded in a fine sense of time and place and in a great feel for Shavian style. This Ah, Wilderness! detects in nostalgia a pipe dream for the past, however, revisiting adolescence as the joyful experience it almost never is and exploring the familiar territory of memory, foggier with each passing year, that, over time, succumbs to the illusory comfort of what might never have been.

The intimate, three-quarter round space of the Court House Theater, the smallest of the Shaw’s three venues, reinforces the private dimension of the Miller family intrigues on the Fourth of July, and with the help of Christina Poddubiuk’s appealing scenery, this Ah, Wilderness! treats the audience as welcome holiday guests, giving a metatheatrical twist to Nat Miller’s observation in act 4—“From all reports, we seem to be completely surrounded by love.” The overstuffed cushions and wicker furniture on stage almost serve as extensions of picturesque Queen Street, just outside, where the sidewalks are lined with ice cream parlors and upscale souvenir shops, and where the slow summer traffic includes horse-drawn buggies for hire. Upstage, however, is dominated by sliding scrim panels and a soft impressionistic drop, suggested by Edward Steichen’s “The Pond—Moonrise,” of a blurry moon reflected through trees on the surface of a pond. This modest design choice asserts that the attractive quaintness of Niagara-on-the-Lake, looking very much like a slice of the play’s 1906 setting, ultimately bears only an ironic relationship to a production that nudges us, ever so gently, beyond the realistic idiom of nostalgia’s façade.

The aims of Ziegler’s production are realized in great measure by his work with an expert cast from the Shaw’s repertory company. As Nat Miller, Norman Browning, a popular Shaw Festival veteran and a well-known Canadian television actor, provides reassurance, even relief, to his extended family that, at times in the close quarters of the Court House Theater, appears to include the audience as well. More stimulated than shocked by his son’s ideas and exuding an understated pride in Richard’s intellectual pursuits, Browning’s Nat is the voice of wisdom in the play—albeit in a Canadian accent that he, unlike his fellow actors, does nothing to conceal.

Although Nat’s son, Richard, endearingly played by Jared Brown, is the play’s protagonist, Ziegler has wisely directed son and father as younger and older versions of one another. Nat’s conclusion about Richard—“No matter what life will do to him, he can take care of it now”—brings the production’s quiet scrutiny of nostalgia back to its origins, for Browning, with his poignant reading of this line and the sigh of resignation with which he punctuates it, might just be talking about himself.

Other members of the cast infuse their characters with startling fresh interpretations that remind us the comic world of Ah, Wilderness! is shaped, in part, by realities that are not always funny. Sid Davis, the most broadly comic role in the play, is portrayed with a streak of self-loathing by the puckish William Vickers, and, when she finally appears in act 4, Maggie Blake’s complex, manipulative Muriel McComber assures us that she will, given more time, stand between the lovesick Richard and his dreams. Brown’s sometimes awkward physicality as Richard, which is least effective during his jerky drunken gestures in act 3, later works to his advantage as he tries to steal a kiss from Muriel, bathed in the light of a summer moon plucked out of his poems. Moreover, the beached rowboat in which Richard and Muriel tentatively embrace anchors the scene to the production’s ambivalence about nostalgia: although the eternal love they swear to one another is as seductive as their youth, the two are on a voyage that will never leave port.

Ziegler and his cast also have taken full advantage of those moments in O’Neill’s text abruptly intersected by a character or an outburst that emphasizes the comedy’s complexity. In his act 1 confrontation with George Dawson’s arrogant David McComber, Browning’s Nat reveals a startling glimpse of the Miller patriarch’s participation in the unpleasant side of business that secures a pleasant life for his family. Wendy Thatcher’s excellent Essie Miller breaks through a façade of charm and stability while berating her hapless Irish maid, Norah (Jessica Lowry), in act 3; this brief scene, usually played for laughs based on Irish stereotypes, instead explodes in anger that exposes class hatred and bigotry as parts of the Miller family’s milieu. Similarly raw emotion erupts when the drunken Richard, trying to defend the honor of Belle (Lisa Norton) by provoking a fight with a salesman-on-the-make (Michael Ball), prompts this particular O’Neill tart to burst out in genuine fear that Richard’s antics will deprive her of an evening’s earnings. Perhaps most noteworthy, however, is Ziegler’s handling of the family dinner in act 2. Although Uncle Sid’s clowning, especially with Vickers’s expert timing, earns well-deserved laughs, the entire scene seems delicately balanced between the fun of low comedy and the unwanted tension a drunk creates for everyone but himself.

The music and lighting contribute, for the most part, to the nostalgic haze and historical accuracy that this production so effectively blends. John Tute’s original and evocative music, all of it suggested by the songs O’Neill enumerates in his stage directions, bathes the production in soothing, but unreal, sound. This paradox is echoed in Adam Brodie’s lighting for the opening scene which isolates Richard in a soft glow as he lingers at the breakfast table to read while the brightly-lit Miller family bustles about the stage glowing with morning energy. Brodie’s resourceful use of gobos in act 2 to cast the shadows of two unseen revolving ceiling fans creates a humid July night in a seedy hotel bar, but his murky upstage lighting obscures one of Ziegler’s finest directorial touches, in which Uncle Sid, while walking the drunken Richard off to the boy’s room, seems to sag under the weight of his own years of drinking.

At the close of this Ah, Wilderness! music, not quite recognizable, begins softly to play as the Miller household disappears into darkness. Nat and Essie are isolated from one another in subtle pools of light, while Richard, upstage with his back to his parents and his face towards the moon, is lit, as his father observes, “like a statue.” For a moment, Richard seems to be at one with the moon, its reflection on the pond at his feet, and the wilderness of trees he will learn to navigate on his way to adulthood. A few falling leaves float from above into this final tableau, a gentle reminder that memory itself, fleeting and inexact, can always trick us with a touch of the poet.

Michael C. O’Neill
Lafayette College

 

MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA (SORGIN KLÆDIR ELEKTRU), directed by Stefán Baldursson. The National Theater of Iceland, Reykjavík, opened 2 April 2004. BRIM, by Jón Atla Jónasson, directed by Haflidi Arngrimsson. Presented by Vesturport in association with Arbox at Hafnarfjardarleikhúsid, premiered 20 February 2004 in the Westman Islands.

An outstanding company of actors, settling accounts with the existential bankruptcy of the post-war Mannon clan, validated the choice to present O’Neill’s uncompromising exploration of dispossession in a laboratory space. Working within a more flexible physical setting than O’Neill called for, the actors and director Stefán Baldursson framed the play in the modernist Freudian perspective O’Neill favored in his best plays. Spare, evocative set pieces, the decaying pillars, porches and portraits of the Mannons’ long-dead progenitors, foregrounded the chaotic emotional territory traversed by the actors in each performance.

With only a bench and a chair, a fluted column, knotted ropes at dockside and little else to clutter the small space, the audience witnessed the event in extreme close-up in which moments, whether of longing or savagery, were unmodulated by physical or aesthetic distance or even the dependable context of a settled performance. Simultaneously expressing excitement and trepidation over the almost improvisational freedom that the actors displayed onstage, Rúnar Freyr Gislason (a youthful, hungering Adam Brant), emphasized the constant need in performance for adjustment: “Sometimes you get it, sometimes you miss, and you don’t want to slip into a kind of emotionalism—a melodrama of the situation instead of the character who is being drawn into the circumstances. And you can’t make safe choices either or what’s the point? For the performance to work, everything must be in reaction to what we encounter that night.” Such risks were evident and even occasional insecure connections carried their own kind of tension as the actors, trusting O’Neill as the great American actor Jason Robards always urged, reset their sights and moved ahead with the performance. The good news is that the connections, when solid or recovered, led to a blazing immediacy that came as close as can be to exemplifying the unsparing search for dramatic truth that O’Neill defined as his own quest.

Gudrun Gísladóttir visibly endowed the repressed ardor of Christine Mannon, suffocated by her marriage, with a fierce determination to draw breath and new life. Her final conjugal encounter with Ezra was, in this light, a horrific mix of defeat and victory, degradation and renewal. As Ezra, the remarkable Ingvar Sigurdsson offered a strong, no-nonsense proprietor whose entitlement was no more forcibly demonstrated than when he took possession of Christine. The failure of intimacy that doomed each character to isolation from the other set the tone here for the rest of the characters. In this scheme Hazel and Peter Niles were outright aliens who played with an earnestness and vulnerability that properly illuminated the corruption that threatened to overwhelm them. The tragic arc of Lavinia’s progress from heiress to proprietor of the family legacy was a wonder in the course of Arnbjörg Hlif Valsdóttir’s performance. As self-possessed as any Lavinia has to be but Hamlet-like in her disorientation before making a decision, she seemed, even in her calculating behaviors, trapped in a moth-to-flame encounter with the madness that finally consumed her. Finally, Hilmir Snær Gudnason brought home an Orin who was, at first look, almost ambivalent—perhaps the best, unsentimental way to see a returning war veteran—until a newly aroused passion pulled him toward his destiny, deftly shaded, until it engulfed him.

No doubt it was the vortex of Fate that influenced an earlier Icelandic translator to render the play’s title as “No One Escapes Destiny.” In rightly digging deeper toward O’Neill’s double-edged irony, Árni Gudnason combined the more literal “sorgin” (mourning, as it is in English) with the more evocative “klædir” (to dress, clothe, or envelope). Trimmed to exclude the townsfolk, the pared text accentuated the directorial concept of close encounters between the characters. Hjalti Rögnvaldsson (Seth Beckwith), the lone remainder of the Chorus, wisely balanced the loyalty and squinty skepticism of the serving man with the sadness of a prophet. Although limber enough in its present day Icelandic diction, the text remained faithful to O’Neill’s language in both its structural weight and character detail. A native English speaker, familiar with the play and with Icelandic more from studies of written and audio sources than from conversation, had little trouble keeping up.

By contrast, and also worth mention in this O’Neill context, almost no one but a native Icelander could catch the nuances of Brim, a stark slice-of­life drama seen through the fourth wall of an Icelandic fishing trawler. From the start, O’Neill’s influence is felt as the crew takes its place in the fo’c’sle in the pecking order of the social contract. Brim (surf or breaking waves), is the work of Vesturport, one of the most exciting lab groups in Iceland’s burgeoning alternative theater, whose high-wire Romeo and Juliet received acclaim at the Young Vic in London and is poised for a showing in New York.

With the company of actors (including Ingvar Sigurdsson who flees the National Theater after Ezra Mannnon meets his demise to make the later curtain at Brim in suburban Hafnarfjödur), playwright Jón Atla Jónasson has constructed a perfect vernacular storm worthy of David Mamet. The continually rocking cabin, its suspension cables and framework in plain sight, was the work of designers Börkur Jónsson and Hlynunr Kristiánsson. Director Halflidi Arngrímsson was never at a loss to manage extreme changes of pace and mood and the details of complex choreography within the confines of the tiny cabin.

Though the genealogy is unmistakable, the players of Vesturport, in the best tradition of O’Neill’s own exploration of form, add more than enough of their own to give their audience an original dose of an altogether searing reality. Crushed between the strain of the fishery’s demands and the fury at their own poor prospects, the crew finally turns on itself. An outrageous and often hilarious punctuation to the building drama is a series of out-of-set, out-of-character musical interludes that doff a hat to Brecht and offer a wry perspective to events, as well as make a brave wager that the actors, trained acrobats all, can offer direct-address insight and a few jokes and still put the audience back into the middle of the grim ordeal aboard ship. They win.

In a conference on Nordic Theater held in New York in April 2001 (replete with perhaps too-hastily translated readings of scenes from new work), many of the young playwrights noted that O’Neill was nowadays a more fecund influence than Ibsen. That the interest of actors and directors has been attracted as well was certainly evident in the uninhibited production of Mourning Becomes Electra and the resolute creation of Brim.

J Ranelli
Old Lyme, CT

 

NEW GIRL IN TOWN, directed by Dan Cawthon. The Village Theatre, Eugene O’Neill Foundation, Danville, CA, 23-26 September 2004.

In September 2004, to commemorate its 30th anniversary, the Eugene O’Neill Foundation presented the musical New Girl In Town, based on O’Neill’s “Anna Christie.” This latest production of New Girl, staged at the Village Theatre in Danville, California from September 23-26, reprised the original 1957 musical, written by Broadway master George Abbott and then-newcomer Bob Merrill (dances staged by Bob Fosse). New Girl blends the classic story of Anna Christie with the colorful atmosphere of turn-of­the-century New York, and melds the moving tenderness of the play with appealing melodies.

While one might consider it remarkable that any successful musical could be crafted from the somber tones of “Anna Christie,” New Girl In Town was a strong success—both in 1957 and 2004. The 1950s, the golden era of musical theater in the United States, proved that musicals could be developed from works of literature. During that decade, New Girl shared the Broadway stage with Oklahoma, Carousel, The King and I, and South Pacific, to name a few (all musicals based on literature). Further, as scholars have repeatedly noted, many of O’Neill’s plays have a musical structure.

Still, one should not conflate “Anna Christie” with New Girl In Town. New Girl retells the saga of Anna’s life, this “child of the sea,” with significant change. Many of the structural elements of the original story as presented by O’Neill are present: an old Swedish sailor, Chris, is overjoyed when his daughter Anna visits him after fifteen years of living in St. Paul, Minnesota. His crony Marthy realizes Anna is not the sweet innocent her father imagines, but a former streetwalker come back to reassemble the pieces of her shattered life. Anna gradually fits in with her father’s friends, even falling in love for the first time with Mat Burke, a defiant, worldly ox of a seaman. Yet, unlike the original play, here, an envious Marthy spills the truth about Anna’s past at the “Check Apron Ball,” nearly destroying Anna’s dream of happiness. New Girl highlights Marthy’s jealousy and accents the unambiguous nature of love’s ability to conquer all. While the ending of “Anna Christie” is perplexing to say the least, New Girl’s ending is cheery and hopeful: Anna is outed as a fallen woman; Mat ships out in disgust; Anna picks up the pieces of her life, becoming a farmer in Staten Island; Mat returns to port; Chris tries to keep the two lovers apart, but their reunification is inevitable (that is the nature of love); Mat finds Anna, lovely as ever; time heals all; the lovers kiss and make­up. A dramatically lovely story, for certain, but markedly different from the one O’Neill told.

In this recent reprisal, director Dan Cawthon, Chairman of the Performing Arts Department of St. Mary’s College and Eugene O’Neill Foundation Vice­President for Programming, without benefit of scenery or costumes, succeeded in conveying an atmosphere of bonhomie, including all eighteen songs featured in the original production. Standouts included “It’s Good to be Alive,” “Anna Lilla,” “Sunshine Girl,” “Flings,” and “If That Was Love.” The music was upbeat, fun, lively, hummable—the vintage sounds of barroom innocence, the kind of tunes that make you want to sing in a convivial atmosphere with friends and strangers alike. Much of the music reminds this reviewer of Rogers and Hammerstein.

Indeed, New Girl In Town is a production easily enjoyed by actors and audience. Originally written to highlight the sleek sexuality and dancing of the “triple-threat performer” Gwen Verdon (then married to choreographer Fosse), New Girl earned both Verdon and Thelma Ritter, her costar, Tony’s for their spirited performances.

Likewise, the Danville production successfully showcased the talents of Tielle Baker, a popular Bay Area performer—charismatic, lithesome and gutsy. In this production, Miss Baker was both the childlike, hopeful innocent, as well as the world-weary, hopeless, jaded adult. One could clearly hear the bitter complexity of Anna’s situation as a sexually abused servant farmhand when Miss Baker intoned “On The Farm.” When she sang “It’s Good to be Alive,” Miss Baker managed to convey the precariousness of the sentiment. The show also featured strong performances by Warren McClure (Chris) and Greg Zema (Mat). Kerry Shawn, a veteran O’Neill actor, gave a warm, spirited, and engaging performance as the misguided but generally well-intentioned Marthy.

The Danville production featured minimal scenery, costuming, or full­fledged choreography. Thus, in some sense, one could focus more—not less—on the words being recited and sung. The production pointed towards “Anna Christie,” but eventually led one to a different destination with a markedly different approach to the tale of a fallen woman who discovers the regenerative powers to be found in the sea, who purges herself of her past, and who rises to the challenge of a more hopeful future which she, in part, has created. While O’Neill’s play is somber and brooding, New Girl is light­hearted and easy. How is this possible? The two works serve distinctly different purposes.

O’Neill documents Anna’s plight as a woman with nowhere to go, physically weak, unable to ply her trade, lying about who/what she is, and without the resources to create a viable future. The twist O’Neill hands his audiences is that his Anna was first abused by her own family on the farm, and then fled to the city to get away from her home and to survive in the only way she knew. Indeed, Anna finds a small measure of self-determination in the tough new life she adopts in the city. O’Neill brought the prostitute in his play out from under the crippling restrictions of economic slavery and moral degradation which arose during the Victorian era. O’Neill humanized Anna, and, by extension, all fallen women, a bold statement to make by a playwright just beginning his career in the 1920s.

By the 1950s, the prostitute was out the closet and more of a recognizable member of society. Thus, the musical (in which comedy always plays a part) based on a prostitute was conceived and choreographed. And, as a result, only some of the original tragedy remains. New Girl In Town derives its power not so much from the story, but from its incorporation of music into the story. In this musical, Anna is still a wronged and sexually abused heroine, but now her plight becomes one to celebrate in song and dance. We know beforehand that her goodness will shine through; that love will overpower evil; that she will transform into one of us as she sings and dances the telling of her tale.

One cannot overlook the stark difference between the awful ambiguity of the ending of O’Neill’s “Anna Christie” and the far more breezy conclusion of New Girl. As mentioned earlier, New Girl leaves the viewer with little doubt that all will be right and that love will triumph. However, though Anna and Mat are united in “Anna Christie,” O’Neill never intended a happy ending for his play, insisting on the uncertainty of what obstacles lay ahead for the characters: “And the sea outside—life—waits”—the sea, “dat ole davil sea” as Chris refers to the not-so-beneficent forces which surround man. Throughout the play, Anna’s projections of happiness consistently conflict with Chris’s forebodings of doom, and the play is studded with numerous fatalistic allusions challenging the very possibility of purposeful self-determination.

The inconclusive ending of “Anna Christie” and its dark overtones is totally absent in New Girl In Town. This is not, I believe, to burden unfairly the musical with the drama, but to emphasize the fact of two separate and distinct theater experiences. As presented by the Foundation in September 2004, theatergoers were reminded of the innocence of the 1950s when New Girl In Town was conceived and treated to delightful music not heard often enough today.

Eileen Herrmann-Miller
Dominican University

 

Beyond the Horizon, directed by Cailin Heffernan. Boomerang Theatre Company at Center Stage, New York, NY 8-26 September 2004.

As a veteran drama critic, I’ve discovered that staging any classic without a new vision is a disservice to the work, but small New York theater companies are by definition daring and they lure in many a critic by producing works that are rarely seen, like Beyond the Horizon. The play has always seemed to me like the experiment of a young genius orchestrating the tools of Naturalism. O’Neill’s first Pulitzer Prize was a remarkable act of foresight. In his 1920 review from the New York Tribune, Haywood Broun noted the “signs of clumsiness because the young man has not mastered the tricks of his trade but [the play] deserves attention.” In the New York Times, Alexander Woollcott recognized it as “One of the real plays of our times. At times impracticable and loose, but a tragedy of the misfit which in mood and austerity has seldom been written in America even half so good.” The play opened on Broadway in February 1920, and ran a respectable 111 performances. The last major production, in 1926, lasted 79 shows. A 1974 revival at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, NJ, was praised by Clive Barnes for “stammer[ing] out miracles.”

Anticipating another fumbling revival, I arrived at Center Stage with sluggish steps. But the Boomerang Theatre Company’s staging of Beyond the Horizon was a delight and taught me to see the familiar play with new eyes. The young, non-profit company compensated for its limited budget and experience with creativity and insight. All theater is collaborative, but the guiding hand of Cailin Heffernan, the founding artistic director of Manhattan Dance/Theatre, was the special ingredient in this production. Her extra-literary expertise in movement, blocking, and the adaptation of visuals for thematic development served the play well.

Since the characters on the page are not completely believable, presenting the first scene well is critical. Throughout the drama, O’Neill works the contrast between land and sea, which also informed the early one-act sea plays and, more subtly, “Anna Christie.” But in BTH the conflict remains between absolutes. Extremism is often the stuff of tragedy, but Rob’s situation lacks tragic scope. On top of that, his sudden decision to scrap his dream and betray his brother by marrying Ruth and devoting himself to the farm that he is at best indifferent to is dramatically too precipitous. But Boomerang convinced me—without any suspension of disbelief.

In gesture and attention, Peter O’Connor’s Rob seemed alive, not two-dimensional. He held the small book he was studying with the casual reverence of a man for whom reading is a passion, not an escape, and his talk about the world beyond the horizon was a wistful prayer punctuated by magical words: Yokohama, India, South Africa. But his fervor was not focused; it spilled over Jennifer Larkin’s arrival as Ruth. While they spoke, his fantasy of travel wrapped itself around her, confusing the two dreams—and no wonder. Larkin’s voice, style, and appearance reminded me of Sarah Jessica Parker, who has seduced millions of television viewers as Carrie Bradshaw in “Sex and the City.” Larkin has a voice that implies more than words, making me think of Daisy Buchanan in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Deeper into the play, when the passion between Rob and Ruth had died along with the daughter who linked them and their hopes for success with the farm, we (the audience)— and Rob—could still feel her vibrancy. She remained an important stage authority throughout although O’Neill in his stage directions had her fading “dully” into the “sad humility of exhaustion.”

In the segment when Ruth convinced Rob to remain on the farm, Cailin Heffernan took her hint for blocking from the text, translating what Michael Manheim identified as the language of kinship into movement. This restrained push-and-pull allowed the inexperienced actors to complement their readings with body language that mirrored the characters’ emotions. At one point, Ruth, convincing Rob to stay, slowly backed him against a wall—so that the beat ended with more hint of passion than entrapment. After his confession of love, he grew speechless while she became rushed and articulate. When she stepped away from him, he moved toward her. There was no doubt that this was a love scene. This balancing prepared the audience for O’Neill’s alternation of indoor and outdoor scenes throughout the play, a hint of O’Neill’s growing curiosity about Expressionism, a genre in which the set reflects the inner turmoil of the protagonist.

The director was also highly creative in her use of proximity as a thematic tool. Her dance training most likely inspired the slight delays that allowed O’Neill’s ideas to penetrate. In the opening dialogue between the brothers, Justin G. Krauss as Andy was both laconic and an eloquent physical presence. When Andy mentioned Rob’s ill health, Rob, in rebuttal, took some friendly jabs at him, just long enough for us to absorb this new information and reevaluate the brothers. Later, when Rob and Ruth announced their engagement and Rob’s decision to remain on the farm, Krauss moved from a silent, central position, where he had been mending a piece of farm equipment, to various points on the periphery of the gathered family. You could almost hear his brooding. He retained presence, and ironically only lost it when his father erupted in rage at Andy’s decision to take to the sea. (Robert Mayo is named Rob in the program; Andrew, Andy.)

This fury was Ron Sanborn’s (as James Mayo) moment, and he easily atoned for his earlier indifferent performance. Sanborn adopted an Irish cadence that so fit O’Neill’s language that the majesty and poetry of betrayal flashed from the small stage. Heffernan staged a most affective love relationship between Andy and his dad. When old Mayo joined the brothers on the knoll in the first scene, Krauss instinctually stepped close to him, a gesture of familiarity and comfort. It was obvious that Andy and his father loved and respected each other, and the father’s eruption into violent speech in act 1 was part of this clear arc. Although old Mayo had died by act 2, the arc was retained by Ruth’s fantasy of Andy as a savior, and was completed in the final act, when Andy returned to discover his brother dying. The brothers sat close to each other at the kitchen table, their postures implying an emotional bond (a belonging) that was absent from the domestic scenes between Ruth and Rob. It was now Ruth who was excluded from the small family circle although Larkin held her own. The subtleties and complexities of this staging all benefited the text.

Heffernan used several techniques to draw the audience to the play. The line readings were natural and contemporary, which is not always the case with revivals of O’Neill. The opening sound of the play was a lowing of cows, just enough to stimulate the imagination. Before James Mayo arrived, we heard the sound of horses and one of the boys announced, “Here comes Pa.” (This early encounter of father and son is not in the first scene of the Library of American edition of BTH.) In the final scene of the play, O’Connor murmured Rob’s lines so low that the audience had to bend toward the stage to hear. The whispering created a remarkable transformation. Since the staging ran close to three hours, the audience had become restless. O’Connor pulled them back while Larkin and Krauss’s powerful reactions to Rob’s dying held them, and the play closed with strong affect. The final scene, O’Neill’s reworking of the closing scene of Ibsen’s Ghosts as the dying Rob waits for the sunrise, repositions the death of the invalid as a release and blessing on Ruth and Andy rather than the heavy hand of fate felt by Mrs. Alving. When Rob proclaimed that going to far-off places “was always the cure for me,” there was more welcome than resignation in O’Connor’s voice, which eradicated much of the excessive melodrama from the scene and offered closure.

The visuals were conventional but effective. Set designer Harlan Penn used a two-tiered wooden floor, synthetic rocks, and a five-panel pictorial backdrop for the outdoor scenes, the panels turning to indicate either the arid farmland below a blue sky or the Mayo dining room. The outdoor pictorial seemed to belong to an old-fashioned melodrama, which was a mistake. Instead of following O’Neill’s directions for the interior, however, Penn provided a cheery scene—curtains, a solid table with chairs and a china hutch— while conveying “the orderly comfort of a simple, hard-earned prosperity.” Later, the presence of the portly, impeccably groomed tuberculosis specialist (John C. Fitzmaurice) hired by Andy threw the whole into a cramped dinginess. I could feel myself longing for the space and light of the outdoor scene. My guess is that designer Carrie Wood was crafting magic with the lighting. In other shoestring productions I’ve seen, Rob’s escape to the open field was simply a scene change, not a mood shift.

Designer Cheryl McCarron paid attention to details in both the costumes and the text. Rob opened the first scene in a tie, shirt, and suspenders. The long sleeves of Andy’s shirt were rolled up, the collar open. Ruth wore a pink dress and ribbon. The Captain’s uniform was not impressive so it blended in with the other costumes. By act 2, Rob was the one with rolled sleeves, open collar and suspenders. He complained about a hot day, and he looked flushed and sweaty. (Wonderful effect! His wheezing and labored breathing in act 2 were also impressive.) He was not listless (O’Neill’s stage directions) and he became enraged when Ruth mistreated their daughter. When Andy returned, he was resplendent in a natty uniform, complete with a knotted tie; it was not the “simple blue uniform and cap of a merchant ship’s sailor” that the playwright described. This Andy was far more comfortable with his lines. The wheelchair that Ruth’s mother was confined to was a clumsy antique, a real find and a reminder of how much the premise of BTH owed to Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome. (O’Neill, of course, did Wharton one better by saddling Rob with three women—one aging, one nagging, and one crippled and nagging.)

Beyond the Horizon is a Naturalist machine tragedy, so the play creaked in sections despite the best efforts of the Boomerang troupe. But there were moments when it and Rob sounded remarkably contemporary. After Ruth had berated him for running down the farm, Rob retorted, “Say a word of encouragement once in a while when things go wrong, even if it is my fault. . . . With your help, I can do it. With you against me—.” His rejected offer to make his own lunch and clean-up when he arrived late had a contemporary sound, making him an even more sympathetic referee.

This production has been criticized for not bringing home the pathos of Rob Mayo’s life and death, but I felt it—and more. Boomerang offered us the tragedy of a beautiful soul buffeted by fate, losing everything and still remaining compassionate. I had assumed before my visit that if Andy had remained on the farm, he would have been happy, but after seeing this production, I’m not sure. When Robert says to Ruth, “And now—I’m finding out what you’re really like. . . . It wasn’t that I haven’t guessed how mean and small you are—but I’ve kept on telling myself that I must be wrong . . .,” he is talking about life on the farm. At the heart of the play is the desire to soar and the bitterness of the compromises the characters make by trading down for love. Ruth’s choice of Rob, the dreamer, was her confession of her longing to escape. If Ruth is read as the villain—and the play implies this in sections— then Rob has no tragedy. But if his final acknowledgement is that (farm) life made them both suffer, his wish for her happiness is transcendent, not simply forgiveness. At the end, O’Neill brings us two adults who must remake their lives, burdened with self-knowledge and guilt. My thanks to Boomerang for the insights.

Glenda Frank
Fashion Institute of Technology, CUNY

 

A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN, directed by Preston Lane. Triad Stage, Greensboro, NC, 6-27 March 2005.

Anyone who loves great plays and who can get to the lovely city of  Greensboro, N.C., and get a ticket, should see Preston Lane’s exceptional production of A Moon for the Misbegotten mounted by the Triad Stage, the repertory theater serving North Carolina’s Piedmont Triad. The matinee I saw on Sunday, March 13 may be the most entirely satisfactory of the many productions of the play I’ve seen.

As with all of O’Neill’s major plays, the great problem is trusting the playwright and the play. Only by doing pretty much exactly what O’Neill asks for will the play work at all. When it’s off even a little, it’s barely possible to imagine why anyone might consider it a great play. When it’s on, it seems impossible that anyone could think it anything but one of the greatest ever written. The latter was how I felt, watching and thinking about the Triad Stage performance.

The set, designed by Howard C. Jones, is realistic enough to suit the outwardly realistic tone of the play, with what looks like real dirt on the floor, old wood used for the porch and wall of the Hogan shanty, and a fine boulder in the foreground where some of the action takes place. Someone found a real wooden pitchfork for Mike to carry as he runs onstage at the beginning, in flight from his tyrannical father. Costumes by Kelsey Hunt were perfect. Sound design by Justin Grant was effective and everything worked perfectly. The stage manager was Catherine Hagner, and casting was by Cindi Rush Casting, Ltd. All are to be complimented. The support given by local businesses and institutions to a theater that mounts plays that challenge an audience is especially commendable. This cannot have been an inexpensive production.

Kyle Payne, a young Greensboro actor and graduate of the UNCG theatre program, was convincing, funny and even sympathetic in his brief role as the self-righteous Mike. He made one hope that Mike will grow up and learn to cope with life in the city better than he copes with his father. Matt Giehll, who has had considerable regional experience, was just fine as the Standard Oil fop and villain, Harder. I look forward to seeing him in a more substantial part.

Dane Knell, who has wide experience on and off Broadway, and in regional theaters, is entirely satisfactory in the major part of Phil Hogan. He seemed to me better than Roy Dotrice, who played the part very well in the Gabriel Byrne/Cherry Jones New York production of 2000, in that he did not appear to be using, as Mr. Dotrice sometimes had, every old theatrical trick in the books to make Phil funny. Mr. Knell was very funny, and also very convincing in his love for and empathy with his cantankerous and deeply lovable daughter.

Matthew Mabe, who understudied in the Kevin Spacey production of The Iceman Cometh and who won a Drama Desk Award for one of his several off-Broadway roles, gave the finest, deepest performance of Jim Tyrone that I have seen. Let me try to explain what I saw. The problem of playing Jim is deeper and far more demanding than to make him charming and lovable in the first two acts, which Mr. Mabe did very well. It is more than showing Jim’s self-loathing when he thinks of his behavior at the time of his mother’s illness and after her death as he brings her body to New York. What I have never seen before is an actor who could project what lies behind the charm, the bad behavior, and the self-loathing.

Toward the end of the twenty years he spent trying to get over his brother’s death, O’Neill finally began to understand things about his brother that were below or behind the charm and misbehavior. In the course of writing this play he forced himself to understand that his brother was possessed by a degree of self-loathing and inner emptiness or nothingness that are terrifying to try to imagine, let alone to live with. They are qualities that are perhaps unimaginable by most of us, and we may thank God for that. But it was only when O’Neill was finally able to understand the terrible inner emptiness of his brother that he could begin to know who Jim had been. Only then could he forgive Jim O’Neill for not being the man Eugene had needed him to be, and so complete his 20 years of mourning. He had to accept that his brother was incapable of loving anyone, not just his brother but especially himself, except in the moments that someone was helping him forget the inner emptiness. O’Neill wrote A Moon for the Misbegotten in order to try to know his brother and complete his mourning, and that required him to accept that Jim was empty and incapable of loving him, or even his mother, except as they fulfilled urgent requirements not to know at this moment the nothingness within him. Somehow Mr. Mabe let himself express that potential, which presumably exists in all of us, for seeing a nothingness within, a place without light or dimension. I don’t know what it may cost Mr. Mabe to visit that non-place, the nothingness, but I have not seen another actor reach it, even Gabriel Byrne, at least in the performance I saw.

For O’Neill finally to accomplish knowing his brother, he invented a woman who loved the idea she had of Jim, and who, for various reasons, was not subject to the distractions (easy love affairs or a drifting into marriage, or whatever) which would incline a more ordinary or conventional woman not to waste much attention on Jim, a woman who would perhaps know intuitively that he could not give what she needed or accept what she could give. The particular, unusual circumstances of Josie’s story put her in something like the position her creator had felt himself in—as the ten-year younger brother in a family in which reality was rarely stable or apparent, and who needed to believe himself loved and protected by someone like he thought his brother to be, one who knew the world and who had common sense.

Lise Bruneau gives us a Josie who is in something like the emotional place O’Neill thought himself to have been in growing up in a family in which only his older brother would tell the truth about how the world really was. Her father constantly manipulates people and circumstances so that the complex truths of the world or life outside the farm are not often visible to his daughter. She makes it apparent that her life with her father is interesting enough, and so much fun that, lacking a man she can respect enough to love and marry, there is little reason to seek a life elsewhere. And in part, she has managed to keep her own sexuality largely unknown to herself: something to joke about, but not something directly to feel. Thus, from her point of view, it is safe to fall in love with a man like Jim who she knows will never marry, and who, for whatever reason, will not force her to know more about her own sexuality than she wishes to know. To give the audience an obvious-seeming reason for a person as attractive as Josie to remain single O’Neill wrote the part for a woman not only as sharp-witted and sharp-tongued as her father, but also as large and strong as a man (although, O’Neill adds, she is “all woman”). In fact, when A Moon for the Misbegotten was to be performed in 1949 and no large actress was found suitable for the part, O’Neill chose Mary Welch, a woman of average size. During rehearsal and during the play’s pre-opening performances in Columbus, Pittsburgh and Detroit, he thought Ms. Welch the only person involved with the play who understood her part and understood the play, and sent her red roses.

Lise Bruneau is a slim woman, perhaps slightly taller than average, costumed with large breasts and walking on very high heels, who moves beautifully on stage, like a dancer, and who also shows the strength of a dancer, or the strength to do a man’s work in the fields of the farm. Her voice is so beautifully expressive that one wants to hear her sing. She almost literally dances and sings her way though the role of Josie, so that it is obvious why Jim would love her “in his fashion,” would feel safe in flirting with her and come as close as was possible, for him, to feeling protective and loving toward her.

The moment of awakening comes most painfully for Josie. Persisting in her need to see Jim not as a dead man but as merely guarding his feelings against being hurt, she tries a little too directly, for him, to lead him to love. It is the beginning of the profound discovery for her, and for the audience, that makes the play as great as it is. It is the moment when one cannot fail to see that under certain circumstances profound comedy and profound tragedy are either one and the same thing, or so close to the same thing as to be indistinguishable. Mr. Mabe and Ms. Bruneau make the moment infinitely ugly and beautiful, infinitely sad and, for her and the audience, perhaps optimistic, as well. The moment leads directly to Jim’s excruciating confession of his shameful behavior on the train bringing his dead mother’s body from Los Angeles for burial. Mr. Mabe is entirely convincing in the self-loathing he shows for Jim’s behavior with the hooker, and Ms. Bruneau is entirely convincing in the sequence of revulsion that leads her to understanding that Jim is an entirely different man than she has made herself believe him to be. Finally she can see and accept him as he is under the charm, and pity his emptiness, his deadness. He repeatedly tells Josie that he’s dead, and she insists on understanding him to mean he feels like hell. Knowing she does not understand him, Jim finally tells her the dreadful story of his sleeping with the hooker on the train, every night, while the train takes his mother’s body to New York. The story shocks and horrifies Josie, but her shock and horror seem caused not only by the story but by the recognition that she has never known Jim at all. Before our eyes we see her grow from her father’s daughter to her own woman. She makes herself accept that Jim is a completely different man from the one she has thought she was in love with; she accepts the man she newly understands, a man who can give her nothing, a man she will never see again after this night.

Ms. Bruneau gives with great conviction and visible understanding a woman who can choose to spend a long night holding her “dead child,” keeping away from him the wakefulness that will bring back to him his self-loathing. She does it for her own sake as well as for him. She began the night as a dependent daughter, and ends it the next morning as her own woman who can choose to remain with her father since no better alternative has yet presented itself. Josie grows from letting herself finally know who Jim is, as her creator grew from being able finally to know and accept his brother as the man he was, rather than the man Eugene needed him to be.

Great tragedy and great comedy have always been so close to each other as often to be indistinguishable, one from the other. We know this was the case in the ancient world, even though few examples of tragedy or comedy survive, because we have, among other examples, such related plays as Oedipus the King and Sophocles’s much later play Oedipus at Colonos. At the end of Oedipus the King the audience knows what Oedipus himself has come to know, that the world is nothing at all like he and almost everyone else has believed it to be, that is, a place where to some extent one can make decisions which allow one to control future events. What we call humanism and attribute to fifth-century Athenians is based on the premise that mind gives control. But the great drama of that same age belies humanism. The conflict between the two beliefs is enacted in the towering quarrel between Oedipus and the old blind seer Tiresias. To the latter nothing is more intolerable than his lot, to know the future and know that he can do nothing to avert future disaster or suffering. In Oedipus at Colonos, Sophocles gives us an Oedipus who has learned that he understood nothing about the world. Throughout the strange and beautiful play, Oedipus, who once epitomized the humanistic virtues of forethought and worshipful self-reliance, now understands that worshipping the gods is best done by trying to align one’s self with the forces represented by the gods, and hope to avoid the lightning and storms of Zeus, the earthquakes created by Poseidon in the bottoms of the seas, or the other manifestations of the gods. In the Bakkhai of Euripides, comedy and tragedy coexist in a single play that shows us more explicitly than anything until Shakespeare that whenever we reach the extremities of human experience, we discover that we know nothing of our lives and ourselves. Sometimes, for no visible reason (as in A Winter’s Tale) we are made to see that things of benefit or harm to people occur without reasons visible to people, and all we can do is accept them. A Winter’s Tale is an example of a great play some of whose greatness seems to come from the conjunction of tragedy and comedy within it. A Moon for the Misbegotten is another such example. The Triad Stage’s wonderful production shows us the extraordinary potential for tragic and comic drama.

Stephen A. Black
Simon Fraser University

 

A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN, directed by Gordon Edelstein. Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven, CT, 2-27 March 2005.

On a cold raw day on the waterfront in New Haven, Connecticut, the  audience was delighted with a warm and splendid production of Eugene O’Neill’s tragicomedy A Moon for the Misbegotten at the Long Wharf Theatre, a house that has hosted a number of successful O’Neill revivals.

The production got off to a good start with a beautiful set designed by Mr Ming Cho Lee. A small clapboard farmhouse, housing a large iron stove and a kitchen table and some other small furniture, was perched upon a hill. On stage right of the ramshackle house was a huge expanse of blue sky dappled with cumulus clouds, and on the left of the house was an attached shed containing a simple brown chest and bed with a white bedspread serving as a small bedroom for Josie Hogan. The shed was framed with young trees whose leaves were alternately sunlit and moonlit adding beauty to the set. In front of the house and shed stood several white posts and a mock wall, acting like a scrim, showing windows and two doors, but no siding to obstruct a view of the kitchen and Josie’s bedroom. In front of the set, making, in effect, a thrust stage, was a well-worn farmyard of a marginal farm containing a working pump set at the edge of a six-inch high square catch basin. There were also a number of boulders at various places in the yard offering a little hard seating, and giving a sense of place and attesting to the rugged and stony nature of New England soil. Last, there was a short wooden staircase on stage left, the memorable staircase where Josie and Jim will hold their love tryst. No wonder the set was so good: Mr. Lee, winner of the National Medal of Arts, enjoys a national and international reputation for achievement in stage design.

The casting was similarly outstanding. Leading the bill were Ms. Alyssa Bresnahan and Bill Raymond playing the roles of Josie Hogan and her father Phil Hogan. As feisty father and daughter, these two were perfect foils for one another. Their endless wit combats approached Falstaffian heights. Ms. Bresnahan, along with all her other talents, can manufacture sunshine: her warm smile and purring Irish speech when she expresses her love for Jim could melt a glacier. And when she bristles, her sharp tongue can easily cut down an adversary, like the hapless T. Stedman Harder, Standard Oil baron, played by Wynn Harmon, or even her redoubtable father who wisely does not try to push her too far. Ms. Bresnahan’s abundant acting skills easily show why the unfortunate Jim Tyrone is deeply in love with her. If it is true that the role of Josie Hogan is based upon no original, then the character is only another testament to the great creativity of O’Neill.

Veteran actor Bill Raymond’s long list of acting credits have been well earned and all his skills were in play in his performance. He is wily, he is fierce, he is witty, he is grasping, he is tyrannical, and he is loving. He recites O’Neill’s invective as if it were his own. The fight scene between father and daughter and T. Stedman Harder is one of the most glorious in the drama. O’Neill never wrote a funnier scene. In addition to being entertaining, this scene mirrors the Irish immigrant versus Yankee conflict that appears elsewhere in the play as well as in other works of O’Neill. Mike Hogan, Josie’s younger brother, well played by Steve French, expresses his dislike for Yankee Jim Tyrone’s airs before he runs away from the despotism of his father. Fight Director Thomas Schall dreamed up a great battle between Hogan and Harder, which ended ingloriously for Harder, when Hogan threw him into the catch basin filled with water. After Harder’s ignominious withdrawal, Mr. Raymond magnificently crowed O’Neill’s great line: “It’s a great day for the poor and the oppressed.” Wynn Harmon rightly played Harder as a man out of his element, incapable of fending off the high spirits and roughhouse manners of Josie and Hogan.

Costume Designer Jennifer Von Mayrauser turned out Harder well in his fashionable riding habit, as she costumed all of the characters to express their roles. Hogan and his son Mike wore simple farm clothes, while Josie in the first act scorned shoes and wore a simple but attractive pink frock. In the sad love scene in the last act, she wore a navy blue party dress with somewhat high black heels, a stunning contrast with her beautiful red hair.

Mr. John Procaccino took on the most difficult role in the play, the role of the tragic and dying Jim Tyrone, Jr., O’Neill’s portrait of his doomed brother James. In the first act he gave little hint of his tragic destiny. Neatly turned out in a three-piece suit, white shirt and red tie, he looked much too healthy for a dying man. However, in the third and revealing third act, Mr. Procaccino gave a moving and convincing portrait of the guilt-ridden Jim Tyrone, who showed up drunk before his dying mother, and consorted with a whore and drank himself into oblivion on the train carrying his mother’s corpse to the East Coast. Highpoint of the performance was the pietà scene when Josie cuddled the stricken man in her lap on the wooden staircase throughout the night. Amidst frequent kisses and expressions of mutual love, Josie and Jim found comfort in each other’s arms. Most importantly, Mr. Pocaccino tearfully confessed that Jim’s sin against his mother was rooted in his anger at her death, and Ms. Bresnahan showed the depth of Josie’s love and humanity by fervently expressing her forgiveness and love for the tragic Jim Tyrone, who desires only that his life should end in the peace of death. As the dawn came and the farm came back to life, Ms. Bresnahan’s lilting voice movingly conveyed a sense of understanding and peace as she tearfully pronounced O’Neill’s beautiful benediction: “May you have your wish and die in your sleep, Jim, darling. May you rest forever in forgiveness and peace.” As the lights dimmed closing the play, the house boomed with an explosion of applause, and when the actors came out to take their bows, a large part of the emotionally moved audience, including this writer, gave the cast a standing ovation. It was a great performance.

Following the production, Mr. Arthur and Mrs. Barbara Gelb gave a brief presentation about the play. They began by praising the production as “magnificent” and as an “incredibly powerful performance.” They then related the production history of the play, lamenting that it was never presented on Broadway during O’Neill’s lifetime, a victim of bad luck in tryouts outside of New York. On one occasion at a performance in Detroit the police closed down the production saying that the whole theme was obscene and an insult to American motherhood. The police had the power to close down plays at that time, and Mr. Gelb warned that the intimidating atmosphere of the Bush administration could bring back such a situation today. In another context Mr. Gelb said that Long Day’s Journey into Night was a “Rosetta stone” for understanding O’Neill. However, in 1956 when that great play was first produced, the public did not know if the drama were autobiographical or not since O’Neill’s private papers were under lock and key at Yale. It was at this point that he and his wife decided to interview all the people who knew O’Neill to ascertain the facts of his life. Thus began the Gelbs’ long scholarly study of O’Neill’s life.

Mr. Gelb also observed that O’Neill is always writing about his family in his work. Commenting on A Moon for the Misbegotten, Mr. Gelb said it was written in “expiation for his brother’s death.” He added that O’Neill had to first forgive himself before he forgave his brother. O’Neill finally concluded that Jamie “was more a tragic figure in the family than anyone else.”

Mr. Gelb mentioned that he and his wife are working on the second volume of their recently published biography of O’Neill, and that they have worked with Mr. Ric Burns on a documentary on O’Neill to be shown on PBS. The documentary is four and one half hours long, but must be shortened to two hours. Mr. and Mrs. Gelb will speak as honored guests in June at the O’Neill conference in Provincetown, Massachusetts.