O'Neill Festival in Chicago

It's been ages since a Philadelphia theater company staged an O'Neill opus and New York produces only occasional late, personal pieces, such as Long Day's Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten. But Chicago's Goodman Theatre is nearing the end of a two-month, eight-play festival that concentrates on O'Neill's early works"“ the oeuvre that made his reputation as America's leading playwright.

The plays in the celebration include Desire Under the Elms, The Hairy Ape, Mourning Becomes Electra, Strange Interlude, The Emperor Jones and three one-acters known as Sea Plays.

Only The Emperor Jones production was familiar to me. (It's the stylized version by New York's Wooster Group that was included in the 2008 Philly Fringe Festival, in which a white woman wears blackface and does a minstrel exaggeration of O'Neill's idea of Negro dialect.) The Sea Plays, based on O'Neill's experience in the merchant marines, are performed by a Brazilian company. Mourning Becomes Electra, O'Neill's version of the Aeschylus tragedy set in post-Civil War America, is put on by an Amsterdam group.

This is quite an impressive range of work. Due to the festival's schedule, I could only see two of the productions during my four days in Chicago: The Hairy Ape, a grisly indictment of class warfare from 1921, and Robert Fall's staging of the tragedy Desire Under the Elms, which stars Brian Dennehy and Carla Gugino and will arrive on Broadway in April.

An allegorical Desire, without the elms


Falls has condensed O'Neill's three-act Desire Under the Elms into 100 minutes without intermission. The controversial element in this Desire is its absence of elms. No trees are visible. Instead, we see a rock-strewn landscape, a barren homestead. "His face is as hard as if it were hewn out of a boulder," O'Neill wrote of the owner of this property. To emphasize the allegory, Walt Spangler's intriguing set places many rocks hovering in the sky. The production is a clash of allegory with realism, as when we see a huge pig sliced open and its entrails removed, and then we smell bacon being fried.

When 70-year-old Ephraim Cabot brings his young bride Abbie home to their New England farm, his youngest son at first hates the newcomer, but then commences an affair with her. Abbie gives birth to a baby, and we're not sure who has fathered it. The plot contains elements from the Bible, Greek myth and Freud, albeit with an unexpected denouement.

Carla Gugino's moment of revelation

Although Dennehy (as Ephraim) is the big name in the cast, the most important character is Abbie, played by Carla Gugino (better known as an agent on the TV series "Entourage" and a cartoonish heroine in the action film Watchmen). She is the wild card, the young woman of mystery with shifting motivations and desires. Gugino is a revelation. Gugino's personality and sensuousness are more striking than any Abbie I've seen and also more vivid than anything in Gugino's previous work. Pablo Schreiber (Liev Schreiber's brother) is good enough as Ephraim's son.

Desire Under the Elms is known to much of the public, though not with this much sizzle. The Hairy Ape, on the other hand, is largely unknown. It was written in 1921, three years before Desire.

A nightmare of class warfare

The late New Yorker critic Alexander Woollcott (better known to me as my predecessor as columnist for the student newspaper at Philadelphia's Central High School), called The Hairy Ape "a bitter, brutal, wildly fantastic play of nightmare hue." The central character is Yank, a big, brutish-looking coal stoker on an ocean liner whose sense of self is shattered when society brands him a beast.

The Hairy Ape was written at a time when a few Americans were amassing great personal wealth so they could indulge themselves in luxuries like the sea cruise depicted in this play, and The Hairy Ape remains timely today. We see the desperation of ordinary people whose lives are controlled by the rich and well connected. Yank and his co-workers forge the steel and drive the pistons that make the capitalist machine run, but they reap no rewards.

Sean Graney has staged this work stunningly in a small theater on multiple levels as if the set is an ocean liner and we, the audience, are on the furnace-room level. Miles Polaski's soundscape, including ships' bells and foghorns, heightens the mood.

Yank is played superbly by Chris Sullivan. When he wields his razor in the final scene, it conjures comparison with Sweeney Todd.

I would have loved to see the six hours of Strange Interlude again, after many years. And I wish audiences had a chance to see O'Neill's first Broadway play, which won him his first Pulitzer Prize: Beyond the Horizon (1920); it wasn't included in this festival. But I'm grateful for the Goodman's favors. Other cities rarely see this great playwright's work.



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