Eugene O’Neill revolutionized theatre in America. He was seen as our first original voice standing shoulder to shoulder with Ibsen and Chekhov, and, like Ibsen and Chekhov, his language is formal, lyrical, almost verse. He also worked in vernaculars that sound far from natural today.
O’Neill pursued challenging forms including attempts to create an American version of classical Greek tragedy. He dealt with big issues that often remain topical if not relevant 100 years later. Many of his works can feel melodramatic or unintentionally campy. In fact The New York Neo-Futurists intentionally mined laughter from a production that cut everything but the stage directions from several O’Neill plays. The biggest question facing anyone attempting to produce O’Neill is how does one sell Eugene O’Neill to today’s audiences?
Director Wilder Nutting-Heath provides an incomplete answer to this question in Ghost Light Theatricals’ production of The Hairy Ape (at Ballard Underground through May 5). This Expressionist play has a storied production history, from a London production featuring Paul Robeson in the title role, to the Wooster Group production with Willem Dafoe. It is man-against-society, the rage of the forgotten classes.
In a time when the disenfranchised are starting revolutions and committing acts ranging from civil disobedience to terror, this script could make for a vital theatrical event. But though this production does a lot of shouting, we don’t feel the fury — or much of anything else, for that matter.
The show begins with a choreographed depiction of life in the boiler room of a steam ship, effectively, Stomp with shovels. Richard Carmen establishes the central character of Yank with a bravado worthy of hip-hop. The play tracks the unraveling of that self-assurance into a loss of identity, then final destruction. A chance encounter with a socialite shakes Yank’s identity and topples him from the highest levels of society — to a jail cell, to the Wobblies, and to the zoo.
Subtitled “A Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life in Eight Scenes,” this production misses the comedy almost entirely in large part because it misses the Expressionist side of the production. As O’Neill notes in the play’s opening stage directions: “The treatment of this scene, or of any other scene in the play, should by no means be naturalistic.” Correspondingly, the most naturalistic scenes in this production are the biggest failures. Nutting-Heath occasionally allows his ensemble to leave the confines of realism and tiptoe into abstraction. Unfortunately they do so with such timidity that the effect is nearly lost. The Fifth Avenue promenade scene with its wind-up socialites comes closest to the fulfilling the script’s needs, but even this feels hesitant.
The ensemble is consistent and never overshadows the hero. Carmen portrays Yank with impressive energy, which he expresses both physically and vocally, mostly by shouting. This delivery varies little throughout the show. It’s as if a fire hose of verbosity has been turned on the audience.
The actual hairy ape in this production is nicely portrayed in shadow puppetry. Glimpses of the puppet creating that shadow provide the kind of half-revealed insights that might enliven some other script. This play doesn’t go in for subtlety; it requires strong contrasts. Even the puppet is lost to monotony as the looming image never risks a lively stillness but heaves incessantly like an antique medical ventilator.
There is an acting class adage never to let your work be visible. Nutting-Heath claims to have applied psychodrama techniques to this production (and I have argued in the past that psychodrama offers useful training and directing techniques that may result in more immediate and fulfilling performances), but in this case, such techniques would be more useful unmasked, adage or not. Any of the spontaneity or audience connection associated with psychodrama (a relative of group therapy and role-playing exercises) is missing here. A profitable balance might be found between visceral, emotionally-connected acting and stylized performance, but it isn’t evident in this production.
