Theater: An innovative Mourning Becomes Electra, with a fatal flaw

The mental preparation prior to seeing a performance of Eugene O’Neill’s five hour marathon trilogy Morning Becomes Electra is similar to what one does prior to Wagner’s Ring of the Niebelung or Parsifal. Considerations of clothing, temperature, hydration, and nutrition are paramount. You must prepare for “down” spots in the performance, where the author gives you time to recuperate from the intense surrounding drama. Most of all, you need to trust that these masters of extended drama will, in the end, use the extended length to achieve an ending apotheosis.

Target Margin Theater’s production of Mourning Becomes Electra failed on the last criterion. Despite many innovations and virtuosic elements and generally excellent acting (with one major exception), it in the end failed to trust that O’Neill would deliver. The play is an update of the Oresteia in which a civil war general (Ezra Mannon) returns home to an adulterous wife, a fanatically loyal daughter, and a damaged son. After guilt, carnage, Oedipal themes, the daughter Lavinia is left alone locked up with the Mannon ghosts in a shuttered mansion, one of the most devastating endings in theater. The roles of Lavinia and Mannon’s wife Christine are two of O’Neill greatest creations. O’Neill felt these timeless, classic tragic themes needed plenty of room to breathe, ergo the three-part, extended form. Unfortunately, what I saw was a Mourning Becomes Electra for a short attention span generation. To quote from director David Herskovits’ notes: “Early on we carefully walked through the play and staged a version of each scene that observed every one of O’Neill’s famously exacting stage directions…but you won’t see that play. Then we went through the scenes and created our own, quieter, and more personal versions of them; but at the same time we remembered those other scenes, the version we imagined O’Neill himself imagined……All the language is from Mourning…but there are sections where some of the dialogue is ‘compressed” by which we mean something like a cut in the text that acknowledges itself…not fully spoken.” What did all this mean in practice? Acts one and two had segments when an intense dialogue would “fade out” and some words would be replaced by music, soundless lip movement, gestures, and even motions that looked like Kabuki dance. I do not agree with the director that these cuts were “quieter”, since the physical gestures were often jarring, or there was accompanying pop music that did not fit the tone of the play. They were undoubtedly more “personal”, but this gave me the uneasy feeling that the actors jettisoned dialogue that they found uncomfortable and freelanced replacement words or nonverbal elements. While the idea of an aleatoric version of a classic play is intriguing, it does not seem to work here. Mourning is not just Desire under the Elms on steroids. Like Wagner, O’Neill carefully calculates the use of extended time, and the director tampers with this at risk. Fortunately, the great third part in which Lavinia forsakes society and is locked away with her ghosts was left more untouched by this gimmick; this was the hour in which O’Neill’s power returned to the stage, and I left with the same tingling that I have experienced in more traditional productions. This was in large part due to the best actor on the stage, Eunice Wong, chilling in portraying Lavinia’s denial and repression.

The director’s other innovations were variably successful. Best was the varying audience placement. The 50 attendees started at a distance in the balcony as distant “observers” in part 1 (where the history of the Mannons is laid out), and gradually moved closer to the stage as the drama progressed, ending in tight surround-formation onstage for the claustrophobic last act when Lavinia shuts herself away. As we got closer, the actors increasingly brushed up nearer the audience members, at one point making us stand or turn to let them walk across an aisle. The ending of the intense last act left us onstage behind a closed curtain, locked into the Mannon house along with Lavinia, with the “dead” characters peering from the distant theater seats. Also interesting was having one actor (a good Satya Bhabha) play all the male leads (father, son, lover), focusing even more attention on the two dominant women. The set was minimal (a few chairs, many hanging portraits of the oppressive paterfamilias Ezra Mannon), and actors gestured opening doors, moving furniture, walking around the house, etc.

This simplified things and added appropriate austerity and focus on the characters, but was sometimes distracting when actors appeared to be engaging in sign language of unclear intent. But the fatal flaw of this production, in the realm of “what was the director thinking?” was mother Christine’s apparel of big hair, big heels, and a sequined cocktail dress (others were in more period Civil War attire). This, with the actor’s overdone gestures and attenuated dialogue, often made her appear ridiculous rather than tragic, melodramatic rather than dramatic. Mourning without a strong Christine is like Streetcar absent a strong Blanche. The frequent audience laughter in Parts 1 and 2 was not a good sign--this play is not tragicomedy. With Christine gone in Part 3 (having committed suicide earlier) the whole thing improved. Taken together, this was a failed, gimmicky Mourning undone by too many innovations and by a distrust of the playwright. That O’Neill’s power could still ultimately emerge is a credit to him, not to the company.

Other notes: It was a nice touch to provide audience members a snack, then an entrée in the two intermissions of this marathon play that began at 4pm. I cannot, however, think of any dinner less appropriate to the play’s New England Civil War theme than pu pu platters with tofu (“healthy vegan!!”). This, with Christine’s sequins, caused what I sensed was the faint rumbling of Eugene O’Neill rolling over in his grave near Boston.