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Performance Reviews THE HAIRY APE, directed by Ciarán O'Reilly. Irish Repertory Theatre, 132 West 22nd Street, New York City, 21 November 2006. Director Ciarán O'Reilly and a talented cast presented a memorable production of Eugene O'Neill's expressionist play, The Hairy Ape, at the Irish Repertory Theatre this fall. Mr. O'Reilly sensitively followed O'Neill's stage directions exhibiting expressive symbolic scenes intermixed with stark realism. The result was a resonant and moving performance that left the playgoer with a lot to think about. Mr. Greg Derelian played well the role of the central character Yank, a man torn from his traditional culture by the industrial revolution and thrust into the lowest depths of the working class at the turn of the century, a man uneducated and totally bereft of traditional supports of family, farm, village, religion, language, and country. He is physically and spiritually dispossessed, a victim of brutality and wage slavery, and a man who, in his words, does not "belong." Symbolic of the countless millions of immigrants who have been forced off their lands and out of their own countries, he must accept any degrading work that he is lucky enough to find. As Yank expresses his isolation at the end of the last scene when he tells the gorilla: "But me—I ain't got no past to tink in, nor nothin' dat's comin', only what's now—and dat don't belong." In time, the surviving Yanks will accept the cheap popular culture that is offered to them in popular music, spectator sports, sensational daily tabloids, sitcoms, mindless movies, and so forth, diversions that will numb the mind of enthusiasts and rob them of the ability to think. O'Neill displays enormous social understanding in his creation of his character Yank. He is a spiritual and physical derelict of the industrial revolution. From another perspective, The Hairy Ape is O'Neill's most Marxist play, showing the exploitation and oppression of the stokers in the fiery bowels of the capitalist-owned great international liner, and having a working-class Marxist among the crew commenting on the sad action, the eloquent and articulate fellow stoker, Long.
All of this social significance is portrayed realistically and symbolically in the production. The first scene opens in the forecastle of a great ocean liner, where the bunk beds of the coal stokers are located deep in the ship. In this confined space the stokers drink and act out their boisterous lives. They are a raucous, rowdy, dirty, and violent bunch, stomping feet and beating time to a mad rhythm. Mr. Derelian as Yank stands separated from the group since he is the leader, the biggest and strongest of these beast-like men. They are trying to adapt to a savage and impossible home sequestered deep within the bowels of the great ship, a hidden life as if the ship were ashamed of their presence and desired to keep them out of sight. Central to this fine production was a consistent unity of effect. All the elements of this drama, the costuming, the sound effects, the lighting, the ensemble acting, the props, the expressionist movement such as lockstep, pantomime, robotic walking and so forth, melded to create the crushing and hostile world of privilege and oppression, rank and subordination. In a sense the conflict on this great ocean liner was a microcosm of the whole social system, a metaphor that countless writers have used to satirize the ship of state, and O'Neill's choice of expressionism was an excellent medium to portray the lifeless, arid, and loveless world of exploitation and suppression in which human beings are more like animals or bloodless, artificial robots. Good ensemble acting persisted throughout the production. Mr. Derelian expressed the savagery of Yank and also his sorrow as he is beaten down wherever he goes, betrayed by his own savage nature. He played the realistic scenes well and also the expressionist scenes when he imitated the ape that Yank gradually recognizes within himself. Mildred, played by Emma O'Donnell, substituting for Kerry Bishé, acted the frail, artificial and snobbish upper-class woman with the necessary superficiality of the character. David Lansbury as the working-class radical gave a sincere portrayal of man with a mission and acted something like a Greek chorus commenting on the society that afflicted the stokers. Paddy, played by Gerald Finnegan, made a great old salt who started his career in the sailing days, and who makes a beautiful poetic speech on the beauty of the clipper ships in full sail. The contrast with that vanished era and the sordid present is too clear to comment. Delphi Harrington, as Mildred's aunt, presented another portrait of an artificial stereotype of an unfeeling, upper-class dowager, overflowing with contempt for all those beneath her. Costume designer Linda Fisher used her skills to portray class divisions, literally, in black and white. All the women and all the ship's officers were turned out in immaculate white, looking something like angels or Olympian gods, while the lower class types were clothed in working clothes blackened by soot. Set Designer Eugene Lee created a series of expressionist sets to symbolize the ideas in the play. After viewing the forecastle scene of drunken debauchery, the audience saw a set come down and stop above the forecastle. This was an upper deck where we first meet Mildred and her aunt and the ship's officers, all turned out in white. The aristocrats above and the dirty stokers below symbolized the theme of the play. Mr. Lee's furnace room was a coup de theatre of expressionism. In a darkened room lit mostly by the red, roaring fires showing through the open doors of the furnaces, with the stokers shoveling frantically and maniacally and constantly throwing coal into the inferno, all summoned up fierce visions of Hell mouths vividly and horribly depicted in medieval dramas. And the ear-splitting roars and cacophonous sounds conjured by Sound Designers Zachary Williamson and Gabe Wood in the furnace room scene rivaled pandemonium or a Witches' Sabbath. No doubt a goodly number of other good people contributed to the success of this production, and we are also thankful to them, but we are most thankful to Director O'Reilly, Artistic Director Charlotte Moore and the Irish Repertory Theatre for putting on this production.
Robert S. McLean
MARCO MILLIONS (BASED ON LIES), adapted from the play by Eugene O'Neill. Directed by Tom Ridgely. Waterwell, The Lion at Theatre Row, 410 West 42nd Street, New York, NY, 4-26 August 2006. Before attending Waterwell's adaptation of Marco Millions, Eugene O'Neill's expressionistic satire of Western greed, I decided to reread the original text. Just as I suspected: so complex in its scene changes, so demanding of its set and costume designers, so weighed down by its gigantic cast (O'Neill lists 31 characters, along with "People of Persia, India, Mongolia, Cathay, courtiers, nobles, ladies, wives, warriors of Kublai's court, musicians, dancers, Chorus of mourners"), so convoluted in its mixture of genres—dialogue, music, poetry, chanting, etc.—and so hilarious and tragic at the same time, I was doubtful that the play could be faithfully staged at $35 a ticket. I was right—it wasn't. Instead, the hour-and-a-half production (with no intermission) was performed on a bare stage with only five actors dressed simply in modern suits or simple frocks, who seemingly adlibbed their way through a truncated script. One rarely thinks, however, of an O'Neill play as a fun experience. Not even his oft-revived comedy Ah, Wilderness! is fun, exactly. With this production—which was fun, fun, fun—I think most O'Neillians would agree that Waterwell has accomplished something truly exceptional. Marco Millions recounts the legendary journey of the thirteenth-century Italian trader Marco Polo who, with the goal of returning home a millionaire, destructively imposes Western materialist values across the Far and Middle East. Waterwell added the parenthetical subtitle "based on lies," a cue that the historical figure Marco Polo, upon whose autobiography the play is based, was at best a bold-faced liar, but at worst, the author of a wish-fulfillment fantasy that aroused the West's collectively acquisitive mind. Part of Waterwell's mission statement is that the group be "responsive to the events affecting the world at large." Here, its choice of play and world events have successfully proven O'Neill scholar Travis Bogard utterly wrong when he wrote dismissively of the work as "of its period, and it will remain so. Its ironic theme [. . .] is buried too deeply in time for it to emerge as a play of substance." Waterwell rightly submitted in program notes that "O'Neill's play was born out of his reaction to the American post-war boom of the 1920s, a time of capitalist triumph and commercial imperialism. It was the time, O'Neill thought, to recognize that the majority of the world didn't necessarily embrace The American Way." As the title suggests, excessive Western materialism is the play's predominant theme, one compounded by the fact that Marco Millions tackles "head on," as Waterwell also pointed out in the notes, "questions of class and race that are as important now as they were in 1928 . . . or 1271." But to my mind, this veneration for O'Neill's social intuitiveness is undercut by the subtitle's alternate reference—the production itself, as opposed to the original text. By taking the starch out of America's "foremost playwright," in a sense they accomplished precisely what O'Neill had in the 1928 premiere against the big business giants of the time. Just before act 2, scene 3, in which O'Neill unaccountably interposed a series of poetry chants while Marco transports the Cathay princess Kukachin to Persia, one of the actors, Kevin Townley, dropped out of character to explain this weird turn in the play. He halted the action, stood downstage, and made a brief tongue-in-cheek speech in the role of the creator: "Hello. I'm Eugene O'Neill. I just came by to say these kids are doing a terrific job. When I wrote this in 1926, this is exactly what I had in mind." Townley continued, still playing O'Neill, that the only thing harder than working as a merchant mariner (as O'Neill did) is performing the same show night after night; and the only thing more difficult than that is "writing it, especially transitions." The group then plunged into an impromptu, self-described "poetry slam" with pseudo-intellectual posturing about exploring the "dark and intricate corridors of our souls"—another dig at the often ponderous soul-searching one finds throughout the O'Neill canon. After a bit, Mr. Townley brought it back around by hilariously announcing that "Arian Moayed will now perform a scene from Eugene O'Neill's Marco Millions."
The production overflowed with such asides as correcting each other's pronunciation, intentionally bad singing, loosely-timed vaudevillian choreography, anachronistic references, and bawdy jokes about all the nations of the world "unloading their wares into her [Venice's] grand canal." They apologized for offensive language with the excuse that the year 1295 "was not the height of political correctness." Indeed, when Marco's uncle Maffeo—splendidly performed by straight man Tom Ridgeley, who also directed the play—first guides his nephew through many nations of the East, he referred to, and I'm only slightly paraphrasing here, towel-headed, camel-fucking, Jew-hating Arabs and smelly, cow-fucking, oversexed Indians. This grotesque display of Western ethnocentrism is certainly true to O'Neill's acerbic script, though his actual language took up a relatively small percentage of the dialogue. The production may have gone a little overboard when describing chopsticks as "retarded" compared to forks, then having Mr. Townley take up the role as a mentally retarded lackey whose outbursts Marco subdued by plying him with marshmallows during a press conference. Waterwell didn't entirely sacrifice drama for belly laughs, however. Lauren Cregor's original music, played live by a fine young jazz ensemble roosted on a precarious-looking platform upstage, enabled the troupe to present the play's more tragic moments straight. One striking example was the singing to music of Princess Kukachin's letter from Persia declaring her heartbreak after losing Marco to his Venetian fiancée Donata. Once Kukachin's body arrives back to Cathay in a casket draped with a white pall, Rodney Gardiner, as the grief-stricken Chinese emperor Kublai Kaan, Kukachin's grandfather, performed a sublime dirge while the others dolefully wept in chorus, all of which beautifully captured the heart-rending loss of the beloved princess. The love scenes between Marco and Donata (his fiancée in Venice played by the aptly-named Hanna Cheek, as in "cheeky") and Marco and Kukachin (also played by Cheek) were brilliantly done. Both cast members stood apart, downstage right and left respectively, and faced the audience. In the scene when the preadolescent Donata vows to stay true to Marco until his return, Ms. Cheek and Mr. Moayed, a perfectly boyish, desperately naive Marco, performed an easy but delightful trick to accentuate the illusion that they faced one another: Donata proffered a gold medallion to Marco, who then released it from his own hand. The scene when Kukachin attempts to prod the practical-minded "man of action" Marco to acknowledge her love was equally well done. The play concluded with a cabaret number in which Marco and his uncle return home with their "millions" and shower the guests at their homecoming banquet with coins and cash while Kublai Kaan looks on in disgust through a magic crystal. The "money" song consisted solely of every imaginable intonation of the word and included a self-consciously stupid rendering of the theme song to Donald Trump's reality show The Apprentice. In the intimate seating of the Lion Theatre, I happened to be seated next to an Israeli woman from Haifa, then under siege by Hezbollah rockets, who had just arrived to the US with her family. They came to New York in large part to flee the Israeli conflict with Lebanon, a war decidedly emboldened by Western meddling in the Middle East. That afternoon, Friday, August 11, the Israelis had just escalated the month-long assault on southern Lebanon, and before the show she told me that the distinction between what was then taking place and the previous war with Hezbollah is that this time "it's global." After the actors took their well-deserved bows, she clutched my arm and exclaimed with delight, "They pulled it off! They called themselves `kids,' and they really are, but they pulled it off!" Seeking respite from a nightmarish geopolitical situation, she happened to find it at the Lion that night. But as funny as Marco Millions can be, and as extremely entertaining (if often juvenile) as this production truly is, the play is scarcely, at bottom, an evasion from the horrors igniting across the Middle East. This is particularly true when we take into account the West's profiteering "men of action." Our latter-day Marco Polos have precipitated a chain reaction of wars among vastly foreign cultures to their own; and like the fabled thirteenth-century adventurer, our leaders are just as arrogant as their early progenitor, indelibly interfering with religions and cultures they don't understand, and in regions where they don't belong. If there's any question of the falsity of Bogard's assertion about Marco Millions's historical obsolescence, consider the opening of act 1, scene 3: As Maffeo mulls over business prospects in the Middle East, he reads from the notes of his previous voyage East that says, "there's one kingdom called Mosul and in it a district of Baku where there's a great fountain of oil. There's a growing demand for it. (then speaking) Make a mental note of that."
Robert M. Dowling
"ANNA CHRISTIE," directed by Cailin Heffernan. The Boomerang Theatre Company, 48 West 21st Street, New York City, 24 September 2006. The Boomerang Theatre Company, under the direction of Cailin Heffernan, mounted a spirited production of Eugene O'Neill's 1920 play "Anna Christie" as the company's first production of the fall season. With the help of a talented cast the production resounded with vigorous voices, assertive characterizations, and numerous heartfelt and tense scenes. The response of the audience at the end of the performance showed that it had been exposed to a moving and realistic slice of life wherein fate can deal brutal blows to the innocent. Only the redeeming power of love offers any hope in the fallen world of "Anna Christie." Jennifer Larkin presented a compelling interpretation of the tortured Anna Christopherson, who, ill and abused from working in a brothel, returns to visit her father. Ms. Larkin spoke her lines with an edge in her voice. Her delivery, consequently, was aggressive and defensive. Her firm chiseled features complemented her expressive voice that revealed her desperate state. No wonder: sent out west by her father to relatives that did not want her, raped at sixteen by her cousin, forced to work in a brothel, and then sentenced to thirty days in jail. And no wonder she hates men and can drink like a trouper. Her father, played sensitively by Dunsten J. Cormack, an old salt of a Swede with a thick accent and a great relish for whiskey, befriends his forlorn daughter and tries to be the father he never was when he was sailing the seven seas. Mr. Cormack acted a good drunk, performed a good sailor's dance, and sang a jolly sailor's song. Ms. Larkin slowly shows Anna softening her hard demeanor as she learns from her father how "dat ole davil sea," O'Neill's symbol of fate, gave her father a relentlessly hard life. Consequently, Ms. Larkin's hard fixed gaze relaxed when Chris told her of his sad life, that his mother died alone, and two brothers and two sons were drowned at sea. Anna's new understanding of her father goes far in allowing her to accept a man in her life, a change that prepares the way for the arrival of Mat Burke, the burly Irishman who is smitten at the sight of Anna. Mr. Aidan Redmond's characterization of Matt Burke is that of a most formidable Irish seaman. Tall, burly, loud, and aggressive, he dominated the stage with his larger than life presence that immediately turned O'Neill's plot in a new direction. He falls in love with Anna at first sight, and kisses her minutes after he meets her. He is wild at the sight of "this fine handsome girl." Anna is overwhelmed when Mat "proposes" to her the following day and when he announces to her father, "I'm marrying your Anna before this day is out." Mr. Cormack played admirably when he showed Chris reacting angrily at the prospect that Anna would put her life in jeopardy by marrying a sailor. The subsequent conflict between a loving and protective father and an obsessed and love-stricken suitor was well acted by both actors. Chris's resort to a knife and Matt's threat of violence and spitting on Chris's hand reveal the violence and raw emotions that prevail in O'Neill's naturalistic waterfront world. But Ms. Larkin's confessional speech in which she reveals that Anna cannot marry Matt is one of the highpoints of the drama. Again Mr. Redmond expressed the violence of Burke when he threatens to kill Anna, his heart shattered into pieces plunging him into shock. This capable cast raised some titanic emotions on the stage of the small black box theatre they were playing in. Anna tearfully decides, after a torrent of abuse from Matt ("I'll see her roast in Hell"), to leave her father's home. In a subsequent tearful scene, Mr. Cormack played a sad and forgiving father who blames that "ole davil sea" for life's misfortunes, and reveals that he desires to leave also and signs on a merchant ship. Again, in the final scene of the play, Mr. Redmond dominated the stage when he staggered in after a two-day bender, showing an emotionally wounded Matt, disheveled, unshaven, soiled, and sporting a black eye. After making Anna swear on a cross and fear the "blackest curse of God" that she remain a reformed woman, they both agree to be reconciled. Since, in a moment of despair, both Chris and Matt signed on to work on the same ship, reconciliation will be a year hence. In spite of the turn of events, the three characters have a drink together on the stage. Yet, the closing scene was strange considering the fact that the play ends in a scene of reconciliation. As the lights were about to go out signaling the end of the play in the absence of a curtain, the three actors stood far apart on the stage. Play endings have historically signaled the path of future events of the characters, but this ending showed them standing far apart with no kiss, embrace, hug or smile. Was the director suggesting that their future is unsure or at least unpredictable? Chris, certainly, would nod in agreement with that notion, since, as the last speaker in the play, he says that because of the fog, "You can't see vhere you vas going," but "Only dat ole davil, sea—she knows!" One last comment should be made about the bar in the first scene of the play. The furniture and the décor were not that of a waterfront dive frequented by sailors, but of a suave cocktail lounge in a chic neighborhood. It looked clean and respectable where ladies could perch on a barstool and enjoy a cool grasshopper. However, this inconsistency can be easily overlooked since the actors gave their hearts and minds to create a moving performance.
Robert S. McLean
TAKE ME ALONG, by Joseph Stein and Robert Russell, music and lyrics by Bob Merrill. Directed by James Morgan. York Theatre Company at the Theatre at St. Peter's, 54th Street just east of Lexington Avenue, New York City, 13-15 October 2006. Take Me Along is a "musical in mufti" based on Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness!, book by Joseph Stein and Robert Russell, and music and lyrics by Bob Merrill. This popular play, produced by David Merrick, opened on 22 October 1959 and ran for 448 performances. "Musicals in Mufti," is the York Theatre's name for musicals in staged concert performances "in street clothes; without the usual trappings." Frankly, this reviewer is not a follower of musicals, but I readily admit that I enjoyed this free and amusing adaptation of O'Neill's play. The lively energetic cast functioning without a sound system belted out a variety of amusing and entertaining songs, vigorously presented a series of gay and lively dances, and got off a slew of jokes and funny remarks. To be sure the writers Stein and Russell loosely followed the outline of O'Neill's plot, very loosely, widely departing from O'Neill's dialogue. More importantly, they changed some of the characters and altered some of the plot. For example, to heighten the comedy, Sid Davis, played by the formidable David Schramm, becomes more amusing than the original humorous figure by O'Neill. The new Davis was a perfect vehicle for Mr. Schramm, with his huge protruding stomach, quick wit, and nimble dance steps, a comic part originally played by the venerable Jackie Gleason. With Mr. Schramm's comic gifts, his quick reply to young Richard Miller's radical opinions came across hilariously: "God save the Republic!" In the feel-good tone of this revival the dark tones of O'Neill's original play are never sounded. Sid successfully woos the reluctant Lily, played by Susan Bigelow. When Sid prepares to leave on a train to begin his job, Ms. Bigelow breaks out in the song "Take me along," joyously making up her mind to marry her suitor after all those years. To make the dialogue more contemporary, the writers got off a number of erotic cracks that O'Neill was probably afraid to utter. Mr. Schramm got a lot of laughs when he proposed a date with Lily, that they have dinner, dance a little, and then go up to the bedroom "and bust a few bedsprings." Acting the role of an inhibited early-nineteenth-century woman, Ms. Bigelow has an amusingly hysterical fit when she hears this proposition, or proposal? The acting was uniformly appropriate for this send-up of O'Neill's play and very effective as one could judge by the laughter of the audience. For a three-day run the cast performed smoothly and confidently, easily evoking a tale of turn-of-the-century, idyllic, small-town life in America, of old fashioned husbands and wives, and fathers and sons. In addition to those already mentioned, the cast included Melissa Bohon, Ken Cavert, Matthew Crowle, Ryan Driscoll, Jay Aubrey Jones, Jacob Levy, Lorinda Lisitza, Robyne Parrish, Andrew Rasmussen, Deborah Jean Templin, and Nick Wyman. The York Theatre Company received last spring a special Drama Desk Award for its "vital contributions to theater by developing and presenting new musicals." It has also received an Outer Critics Circle nomination, a Drama League citation and four Drama Desk Award nominations.
Robert S. McLean
THE EMPEROR JONES, directed by Arthur Adair. The First Floor Theatre at La MaMa E.T.C., 66 East 4th Street, New York City, NY, 11 Feb. 2006. THE EMPEROR JONES, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte. The Wooster Group, St. Ann's Warehouse, 38 Water Street, Brooklyn, NY, 24 March 2006. When La MaMa's founder and artistic director Ellen Stewart asked resident artist Arthur Adair to direct a production of The Emperor Jones in celebration of Black History Month, it might, at first, have seemed like an unusual choice. Written by Eugene O'Neill in 1920, The Emperor Jones contains the touchy issue of the "Negro dialect" as specified in the script, and then the problem of the controversial nature of the hero himself. Additionally, neither the La MaMa production nor the Wooster Group production was directed by an African American. Moreover, only one of these productions featured a black male actor playing Jones. Were these productions reifying cultural stereotypes? Why not choose a play by an African American that clearly celebrates Black history in America? One answer is that The Emperor Jones has huge historical significance in theater history, and particularly in African-American theater history. In 1920 when the Provincetown Players moved its production of the play to Broadway with Charles Gilpin in the title role, it was the first time a black actor had been seen portraying a black character in a leading role on Broadway. Previous to this, white actors would be "blacked-up," an acceptable convention at the time. The 1933 film starring Paul Robeson continued to publicize the play. Is there anything more than historical importance for this play? The following two productions, widely varying in stylistic choices, give us a resounding "yes" to this question: this is certainly a play that proves to be ripe for reinterpretation. Both of these highly conceptual, Brechtian productions used O'Neill's script only as a starting point. One production evocatively used spoken and sung stage directions, and the other production comprised a riff on the script using technology, blackface, and Asian costumes. Both of these productions gave a fortunate modern audience a new way to read a compelling, though at times troubling, play which might otherwise be forgotten in the modern canon of O'Neill's works. In the first of these productions, at La MaMa, Arthur Adair as director and light, set and sound designer, stacked wooden platforms to form three different elevated playing areas. The production began on a low, elongated platform, stage left, which was not used after the beginning of the play. The platform on which most of the action took place was approximately ten feet square, raised about fifteen feet off the ground, and accessible only by two ladders. This configuration heightened the audience's concern for the actors, since there was throughout the production the danger that they might fall off the platform, especially as it is a fairly physically active play. This set worked extremely well to deliver on two levels the sense of the "precarious position" in which Jones finds himself. The audience itself was also raised, the lowest seats being about ten feet off the ground. A fairly typical actor and audience relationship was retained because everything was taking place high above the ground, involving the audience spatially in the elevated world of the play. The third playing area, stage right, was about twice the height of the main, square platform. Other than the "islands" of these platforms, the great cavernous space of the La MaMa First Floor Theatre was left resoundingly vacant to resonate with the spatial and psychological isolation depicted in the play. Historically, lighting has always been an important component of this play, as it is with all expressionistic drama, going back to the original 1920 production, which used a plaster dome modeled after the Kuppelhorizont in Max Reinhardt's Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin, the first of its kind in America. Although lighting remained relatively unobtrusive for most of the La MaMa production, during scene 7 in the script, when a witch doctor conjures up a crocodile, saturated sea-green lights flooded the entire space, including the balcony, and reflected off the bright tin ceiling of the entire theater space. The lighting effect was bizarre and dramatic, and reinforced Adair's ability to involve the entire environmental space, including the audience, in the production. A single chair, the "throne," was placed on the main platform. When Smithers took the throne off the platform and walked all the way upstage to the back of the auditorium, he smiled directly at the audience as he opened a door into what was clearly offstage storage to put the chair away. Here was yet another enactment of Adair's use of Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt: breaking down the theatrical conventions of actor and audience separation, onstage and offstage separation, spoken dialogue and stage directions separation, all standard conventions of the theater so invisible as to be part of the very fabric in which an audience member attends the theater and constructs meaning out of the experience. Here, and in the Wooster Group's production, the deconstructed theatrical experience elicits the realization that, as the theater experience is constructed out of convention, so too is so much of society's construction of race. Once we understand the conventions that drive the deliberately invisible constructions, we can take further steps toward dismantling racism in all its myriad forms. The most interesting, and initially the most troubling, aspect of this production was that the actors read all the stage directions in the script. O'Neill, like Chekhov and Shaw before him, makes elaborate and poetic, not to mention liberal, use of stage directions; indeed, some of the later scenes in The Emperor Jones are comprised predominantly of stage directions. For example, in one edition of the script, in scene 7, I counted only seven lines of dialogue, but over fifty-five lines of stage directions! Though this use of Brecht's alienation effect worked well at the top of the play, it became distracting as soon as scene 1 began. O'Neill's description differed from the set in front of the audience, and the contrast between the two created an interesting tension. However, once the play began in earnest, this tactic seemed distracting and repetitive. This was particularly the case in the first scene, where the stage direction merely described exactly the way the actors were speaking, and with O'Neill there can be a description after every short sentence: "judgmentally," "pleadingly." These descriptions, even as a distancing effect, can be tedious unless the information comments on itself in some way. Moreover, the actors seemed to be waiting for the directions to be read, and because of this, it was a little difficult to judge the acting since they were, I found out later, trying something out for the first time. Brian P. Glover as Henry Smithers, with less than a completely accurate British dialect, seemed stilted and perhaps the most thrown by the new situation. It seemed as though the audience was watching a rehearsal; I found out later, although it was the last performance in the run, we were. However, the second part of the play, which is in many ways comprised of an aria, became deeply moving. As the play progressed, the scenes that are virtual and virtuosic monologues by Jones demand an aria of acting by the actor. As Xander Gaines in the role of Jones gave himself over to it, he took tremendous risks as an actor, and his performance became increasingly riveting and daring. Likewise, as Sheila Dabney gave herself over to singing the directions and no longer just speaking them, the production proved greatly effective. The words suddenly took on an interesting cadence against the tom-toms. Dabney's beautiful a cappella singing, the sort of scat singing that has a long, resonant tradition in black culture, became really soulful and poignant as Gaines sweated and clawed his way from one haunting fantasy to terrifying reality: the slave market, the chain gang, the inability to recall where the food cache was hidden, the pursuit by the islanders, and seemingly by the forest itself. At the curtain call the director came out and made the announcement that Ellen Stewart had suggested right before the evening's performance that the actors try singing the stage directions instead of reading them. This was a brilliant suggestion, and it at once explained the fact that the production seemed a little like a rehearsal, with the actors in the beginning seeming unsure of themselves and their relationships to one another. When there was an attempt to go beyond what had happened before, the production soared and the audience was treated to a heart-rending performance. Adair kept O'Neill's "Negro dialect," which Adair said struck him as an alienation effect since it seemed like "a period version of Negro dialect." It was, in fact, like many aspects of the play, based on real events. In this case the way a real man, Adam Scott, who was both a bartender at a bar that O'Neill frequented as well as an elder of the Shiloh Baptist Church, actually spoke. Furthermore, Jones is often regarded as a difficult hero, superstitious, self-serving and cynical. However, as Adair states in the program notes, "What comes out is a character of integrity and nobility who falls from power into grace." A quick word about the music in this production: the "tom-toms" in O'Neill's production are specifically mentioned, and while a directorial choice can go against anything stated in the production, there must always be a compelling reason to do so. The drums in Adair's production stopped at an early point in the production, so that the threat of the music, which is what they so clearly are in the text, gets undercut. Moreover, accompanying the drums were soft vocals that sounded like Tibetan chanting. Again, this softened the threatening effect of the music as specified in the script. The Wooster Group production was also performed by three actors, and much of the difficult script was also cut. Kate Valk, playing Brutus Jones, and Scott Shepherd, playing Smithers, were joined, as listed in the program, by the "Stage Assistant" played by Ari Flakos, who alternated roles nightly with Scott Shepherd. The stage of the Wooster Group production was bare and reminiscent of a Noh stage. This production was startling in the risks that it took: Valk in a grotesque black face that looked quite artificial and fake, like heavy black shoe polish on her face. Are we at a point where we can use parodies like this in reclamation of past history, or contemporary comment upon it? The Wooster Group has a history of using blackface and stirring concomitant controversy as a result.
Then there are the "Orientalist" aspects of the production. The Wooster Group is known for a wildly avant-garde use of media and technology in its productions as well as notoriously savaging scripts. The Wooster Group is also known for flagrantly disregarding and even dismembering conventions. Perhaps political correctness has become such a convention that to reenact things in an extreme manner causes us, at once, to see the original production and the racism of its time, as well as the rigidity of our own. It has been a hallmark of the avant-garde movement that it does appropriate signs and symbols from other cultures. In this production, director Elizabeth LeCompte uses Asian-esque costumes and an Asian-suggested set, combined with a heavily-cut script from America's foremost playwright, all reduced to a set of theatrical conventions. Some are familiar conventions and some are caricaturized, but this use of theatricality, as in Adair's production, becomes a means of undermining the conventions of the theatre, and so, of society itself. In this Wooster production, the bare stage was surrounded by rigging, metal poles about ten feet high and joined together at the top. The one piece of "set" furniture was a fairly small TV. Interestingly, in the same manner as court theaters in the past privileged certain seats in the house at the expense of others, the screen could not be seen clearly by most audience members in the huge expanse of St. Ann's Warehouse. The Wooster Group's production made the woman in the play absent, though in a different way she was present through Valk. When Jones took off his coat, the audience gasped, since the essential woman-ness of Valk was vaguely visible through the shirt she was wearing. As she removed the coat, as specified in the script, the audience, with a collective intake of breath, was wondering if her breasts would emerge, if her femaleness and particularly her white femaleness would burst though the magnificent illusion that she had created. This, in turn, added to the Brechtian wrenching of the audience out of whatever complacency it might have allowed itself to enter watching an actor in grotesque blackface. Along with the voyeuristic fascination with Valk's body and the threat of its breaking through the theatrical illusion, it also became clear at this point that the audience would have loved to see something real and essential in the midst of this wildly constructed world. Strikingly, while the Wooster Group's production of The Emperor Jones was cast against the race and gender of the central character, the supporting player Smithers was cast according to race and gender. The role of the "Stage Assistant," created by the Wooster Group, in theory could be any race and gender, although alternating, as it did, with the role of Smithers, it was similarly played by a white male actor. The casting further highlighted LeCompte's choices: only one character was cast against race and gender, while the remainder weren't. In this way it was difficult to forget or normalize Valk's casting, projected as it was, against the essential sameness of the men. This was the most compelling and disturbing aspect of this production. To see Valk in blackface and padded in a partial KathiKali-esque costume, whereas Smithers wore a robe that seemed more like Japenese-esque costuming, continued a theme of incomplete racial and cultural marking. The production continually confounded cultural convention. The production began with a faded black and white video broadcast over the small TV of someone, possibly Valk herself, as a kind of Topsy-esque character telling someone that the Emperor was asleep. Snoring was heard. In the play as written, the character of "An Old Native Woman" talks to Smithers. Here, Smithers was behind the stage, clearly visible though seemingly unanimated at that moment. Valk as the Emperor Jones then came out in a large, red, padded gown and sat in a padded wheelchair. As Jones began to speak in the magnificently large and rounded tones of, say, Paul Robeson, he used a microphone on a pole that was shaped like a croquet mallet or a crutch. Occasionally Jones threw himself into the wheelchair and wheeled quickly back as far as the edge of the stage, where the "Stage Assistant" caught the chair. It was as though there were servants everywhere whose sole purpose was to catch the ranting Emperor before he injured himself. During the production, when Jones fired his gun, the soundtrack got very loud, painfully so, and a cartoon-like image of an explosion was projected from the TV. The drums, so specified in the script, were present here, although the music was not threatening except by volume. Although the haunted forest was less of a character in this production, and the actual slave market scene had been cut, it was replaced by a cartoon-like ship sailing, possibly a slave ship, projected from the TV, and some very haunting music. This scene was simple but exceedingly effective. Again, here, we see not the enactment of the scene, as O'Neill wrote it, but an image, a cipher really, that evokes in our collective unconscious the deceptive simplicity of the complacent world agreeing to transport humans against their will across the ocean for profit. At the end of the Wooster Group production, Smithers says something like "Stupid Negroes, the lot of them." Although this is the gist of how O'Neill's script ends, not the exact line of the ending, it is still startling to hear this comment from America's great playwright. What the evening has brought us is a renewed, complicated sense of who "the lot of them" is, and a sense of our complicity in construction of the racial "other." These two productions had interesting elements in common: the reduction of the script to three actors, the alteration of the music, so specified in the script, and the use of Brechtian alienation. These similarities, played out so differently in each performance, inspired reflection simultaneously on O'Neill's play itself, as well as on contemporary culture. These productions confirmed that this play has a profoundly important position in the theatrical repertoire of today, as well as in the O'Neill canon. They also provided truly exciting evenings in the theater.
Sarah Ann Standing
MILES TO BABYLON, by Ann Harson. Directed by Tom Thornton. Evensong Associates, The Sargent Theatre at American Theatre of Actors, 314 West 54th Street, New York City, 12 October 2006. Ann Harson's new play, Miles to Babylon, "loosely based on the mother of Eugene O'Neill and her struggle with morphine addiction" (program notes), is an interesting and gripping drama. Returning to the very convent and room that she lived in as a young girl, this unhappy addicted woman stages the battle of her life in the familiar surroundings of her youth and in the company of at least one of the women that she grew up with. However, there are few known facts about Ella Quinlan O'Neill's conquering her drug addiction. We know that she was addicted for twenty-five years, failing numerous times to give up her addiction. We know that she went to a sanatorium or a religious institution where she was freed from dependence in 1914. We know that she lived seven more years without a relapse, and that she resumed her girlhood faith as a practicing Catholic. We are not sure where the institution she experienced her release was located, although Louis Sheaffer suggests that Ella went to a convent, perhaps in Brooklyn, rather than to a sanatorium. He also says that her return to her childhood religion helped strengthen her will not to relapse again. Stephen Black says that Ohio is another possible place for Ella's cure but, whether she was cured in Ohio, Brooklyn, or somewhere else may never be known. Accordingly, Ms.Harson had to rely on her imagination to tell a moving and credible drama, rather than upon the sparse written record. Ms. Harson places Ellen in the Ursuline Academy in Cleveland, Ohio, the very school that she grew up in to show how her girlhood faith was revived, and how this faith strengthened her will to recover. Secular institutions had cured Ellen of her morphine addiction previously, but could not sustain her will to reject the drug. But the experience of reliving her schooldays, the emotional support of caring people, and the resumption of her religious practice gave her the resolve to remain free of addiction. This is the supposed narrative that Ms. Harson skillfully builds upon to write her successful play. The result is a drama that reveals suffering, strong friendship, and ultimately the rebirth of a lost soul, who will live out the rest of her life without shame or suffering. This narrative is, in large part, true, and reveals a person of more determination and strength, than the forlorn and mad wretch depicted by her son in Long Day's Journey into Night. As the program notes assert, Eugene O'Neill was not kind to his mother. A talented cast of characters told this story with sensitivity, sincerity, and feeling. Ella O'Neill was well played by Karen Gibson, a veteran actress of stage, film, and television. Ms. Gibson expressed a whole gamut of emotions to portray Ella's pain, remorse, cynicism, and even lust when she tries to seduce the simple-minded Archie in order to obtain access to the morphine concealed in her closet. The remorseful Ella has a heart full of pain and cynicism about her marriage, her sons, one a whoremaster and the other an atheist, the indifference of the deity, and other woes of a despairing woman. Acting Ella was a challenge that Ms. Gibson successfully met. She acts out Ella's verbal duels with Mother Dolores played by Angela Della Ventura, whom Ms. Harson makes a girlhood companion of Ella during their study at the Ursuline Academy. Ms. Ventura expressed the character well by standing by Ella in her painful withdrawal, and firmly insisting that she take the drug no more. The two women presented a number of moving and interesting scenes. Archie, a handyman, played by James Nugent, is placed in Ella's room in order to keep her from taking morphine. Mr. Nugent carried the role well, portraying a faithful man who must do what is best for Ella by staying in her room on Christmas Eve to protect her from herself. Ms. Harson's choice of Christmas Eve on the fateful night Ella overcame her addiction is symbolic, since Christmas Day will mark the birth of a new human being and her profession of her religion.
The supporting characters also contributed to the success of the production. The two young postulates, Catherine and Amelia, played by Rachel Schwartz and Nina Camp, showed contrasting personalities suggesting that all is not uniform behind the convent walls. Ms. Schwartz almost stole the show as the playful, exuberant youngster who cannot resist dancing with a broomstick while doing her chores when the spirit moves her. Apparently drawn in contrast, the character of Amelia, serious, sober, reserved and dignified, was well portrayed by Ms. Camp. Last, the title of the play, Miles to Babylon, comes from Mother Goose for those deprived readers whose knowledge of nursery stories is limited:
Evidently, Ms. Harson is telling us that Ella finished her journey safely.
Robert S. McLean (CONTENTS) |
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