Theater: A weekend with Eugene O'Neill
One of the great things about New York is the opportunity to indulge in artistic themes, with and without a ticket. For example, last Friday evening, after singing in my choir's service and walking down Columbus Ave. to the subway, I passed a bearded man in a woolen coat, dragging a 12 foot crucifix along the sidewalk, presumably after some Good Friday service-tableau-pageant. He was texting someone with his off hand (the one not supporting the cross). Then on the train home, I sat across from a yuppie couple from Connecticut. They were returning from a shopping/dining expedition to Manhattan, and bemoaned that the maitre d' at their chosen upscale restaurant did not spontaneously offer them his business card, their mark of status achieved in several other notable restaurants. This put the woman in a funk, saying "Why do we only get cards from restaurants which aren't the ones we need to get cards from?". Her well dressed 6 year old slept in her lap as she and her mate poured each other a fine glass of cabernet sauvignon (on the train), while an inebriated man in ragged clothing slept in the aisle behind them.
These unintentionally symbolist-expressionist street scenes were echoed last weekend in two early Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) plays that I saw, each stunningly staged and performed. The Emperor Jones (1920) at the Irish Rep is a short, intense, shocking play in which a black American (ex-slave?) becomes emperor of Haiti (after arriving as a stowaway). The play dispenses with exposition and immediately chronicles his fall from grace, quickly moving from the throne room to the jungle, where he is hunted by the now-angry locals. As he staggers through the underbrush, he loses all: his clothing, sanity, and life. On the way, he dreams (hallucinates?) episodes from his ancestral past, including a slave auction, transport in a slave ship, and African tribal rituals. The play does not make Brutus Jones a sympathetic character, but also resists racist stereotypes rife in the 1920's. He is a symbol of overreaching. The focus of the play on the powerful emotions of a black man would have been shocking to the audience at the premiere. What shocks now is that the play resists making him a victim. His downfall comes as much from within as from any sense of racism (e.g. he is pursued by other black men). Like many later O'Neill protagonists, Jones ruins himself as his fatal, innate flaws bring him down, reflecting Freudian early 20th century themes of repression. What is different here is that unlike Strange Interlude or Mourning Becomes Electra, the decline and fall occurs over a shockingly compressed 70 minute time period, not the 4-6 hours of the later plays. The stunning production, directed by Ciarรกn O’Reilly, used brightly painted, creepy small-to-life-sized dolls to represent slave auctioneers, tribal priests, crocodiles, and other elements of Jones' delirium. This is essentially a one man play, and the British Obi Abili played Jones to the visceral, frightening hilt, in a magnificent performance.
The Park Avenue Armory is known for hosting art requiring large spaces, and did so for the Old Vic London production of The Hairy Ape (1922), starring the primal Bobby Cannavale (Will and Grace, Blue Velvet) as Yank, another O'Neill disintegrating man. We watch the decline of Yank, as the factory worker turns from a proud American who lauds the work ethic and the superior standing of manual laborers into a man demeaned as a "hairy ape" by a rich child, then spurned by a socialist union for his crudeness, and finally killed by an ape in the zoo. Just as in The Emperor Jones, this play uses expressionist exaggeration and crude dialogue to make its point. At times the workers adopt ape like clambering and grunting in their workers' cage. Each scene is non-natural and symbolic, yet intensely representative of a real human dilemma--how does one retain pride in an economic class system? In this The Hairy Ape seemed like an American take on 19th century German expressionist theater like Woyzek (later to become the Alban Berg opera Wozzeck). Both Yank and the hapless Woyzek are abused and laid low by society, without really knowing what hit them. In this, there is great resonance with the current unhappiness of the working class across the US and Europe, so the play seemed very timely.
The production was innovative and provocative. While the downtown The Emperor Jones production relied on a small, dark, claustrophobic theater and close contact with the actors to achieve its power, this Armory production instead used an enormous set of bright yellow bleachers to seat the audience, set within the enormous blacked Armory space. The bleachers were surrounded by a giant motorized ring stage that constantly rotated new sets in front of us, setting up a sort of spatial disorientation, and moving the eight scenes seamlessly together, avoiding the compartmentalizing theater conventions of a proscenium arch and set scene changes.
Director Richard Jones and designer Stewart Laing used space and color brilliantly here. While on arrival to the brightly colored seats the color yellow seemed just a bold aesthetic, in fact the production used yellow as a metaphor for the workers' repression: yellow animal cages, yellow factory walls, etc. So we in the expensive yellow seats are part of the problem, and of the repression.
These two outstanding productions shined contemporary light on these early O'Neill plays, written two years apart. I came away from these plays without any thought of their being student efforts, or early examples of a developing style. Instead I reflected that, much as how Beethoven could compose successfully in both the classical and new romantic styles then meld a distinctive Beethoven style, O'Neill could write great plays in both expressionist and naturalistic styles, but later fuse these to create the great plays (A Long Day's Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh) which became his most famous legacy.
These unintentionally symbolist-expressionist street scenes were echoed last weekend in two early Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) plays that I saw, each stunningly staged and performed. The Emperor Jones (1920) at the Irish Rep is a short, intense, shocking play in which a black American (ex-slave?) becomes emperor of Haiti (after arriving as a stowaway). The play dispenses with exposition and immediately chronicles his fall from grace, quickly moving from the throne room to the jungle, where he is hunted by the now-angry locals. As he staggers through the underbrush, he loses all: his clothing, sanity, and life. On the way, he dreams (hallucinates?) episodes from his ancestral past, including a slave auction, transport in a slave ship, and African tribal rituals. The play does not make Brutus Jones a sympathetic character, but also resists racist stereotypes rife in the 1920's. He is a symbol of overreaching. The focus of the play on the powerful emotions of a black man would have been shocking to the audience at the premiere. What shocks now is that the play resists making him a victim. His downfall comes as much from within as from any sense of racism (e.g. he is pursued by other black men). Like many later O'Neill protagonists, Jones ruins himself as his fatal, innate flaws bring him down, reflecting Freudian early 20th century themes of repression. What is different here is that unlike Strange Interlude or Mourning Becomes Electra, the decline and fall occurs over a shockingly compressed 70 minute time period, not the 4-6 hours of the later plays. The stunning production, directed by Ciarรกn O’Reilly, used brightly painted, creepy small-to-life-sized dolls to represent slave auctioneers, tribal priests, crocodiles, and other elements of Jones' delirium. This is essentially a one man play, and the British Obi Abili played Jones to the visceral, frightening hilt, in a magnificent performance.
The Park Avenue Armory is known for hosting art requiring large spaces, and did so for the Old Vic London production of The Hairy Ape (1922), starring the primal Bobby Cannavale (Will and Grace, Blue Velvet) as Yank, another O'Neill disintegrating man. We watch the decline of Yank, as the factory worker turns from a proud American who lauds the work ethic and the superior standing of manual laborers into a man demeaned as a "hairy ape" by a rich child, then spurned by a socialist union for his crudeness, and finally killed by an ape in the zoo. Just as in The Emperor Jones, this play uses expressionist exaggeration and crude dialogue to make its point. At times the workers adopt ape like clambering and grunting in their workers' cage. Each scene is non-natural and symbolic, yet intensely representative of a real human dilemma--how does one retain pride in an economic class system? In this The Hairy Ape seemed like an American take on 19th century German expressionist theater like Woyzek (later to become the Alban Berg opera Wozzeck). Both Yank and the hapless Woyzek are abused and laid low by society, without really knowing what hit them. In this, there is great resonance with the current unhappiness of the working class across the US and Europe, so the play seemed very timely.
The production was innovative and provocative. While the downtown The Emperor Jones production relied on a small, dark, claustrophobic theater and close contact with the actors to achieve its power, this Armory production instead used an enormous set of bright yellow bleachers to seat the audience, set within the enormous blacked Armory space. The bleachers were surrounded by a giant motorized ring stage that constantly rotated new sets in front of us, setting up a sort of spatial disorientation, and moving the eight scenes seamlessly together, avoiding the compartmentalizing theater conventions of a proscenium arch and set scene changes.
Director Richard Jones and designer Stewart Laing used space and color brilliantly here. While on arrival to the brightly colored seats the color yellow seemed just a bold aesthetic, in fact the production used yellow as a metaphor for the workers' repression: yellow animal cages, yellow factory walls, etc. So we in the expensive yellow seats are part of the problem, and of the repression.
These two outstanding productions shined contemporary light on these early O'Neill plays, written two years apart. I came away from these plays without any thought of their being student efforts, or early examples of a developing style. Instead I reflected that, much as how Beethoven could compose successfully in both the classical and new romantic styles then meld a distinctive Beethoven style, O'Neill could write great plays in both expressionist and naturalistic styles, but later fuse these to create the great plays (A Long Day's Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh) which became his most famous legacy.
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