Reviewed by Will
Stackman
The
general moral for tragedy, proposed by Sophocles at the end of "Oedipus
Rex" is roughly "Count no man happy until he's dead." America's
only Nobel prize winning playwright, Eugene O'Neill, simplified that to "Count
no man happy" and pursued mythic tragedy through his long and seemingly
painful writing career. "Desire Under the Elms" is generally considered
his first great tragedy, overcoming the blatant symbolism of his earlier plays
such as "Welded" based on his failed first marriage or before in
"All Gods Chillun Got Wings,"with a coherent if not especially
accurate historical context. Hungarian film and stage director, Janos Sz_sz, who is associated with the
ART/MXAT Institute, previously directed a modern dress overly-atheletic
production of "Mother Courage", and highly revised versions of
"Marat/Sade" and "Uncle Vanya" for the ART. This time out,
O'Neill's folk tragedy has been edited down to a two-hour Absurdist exercise,
once again influenced by contemporary theatre practice first instigated by
Grotowski in Poland. The result only vaguely resembles O'Neill's saga of the
Cabot's and their elm-shaded farm.
Not
that the original, influential in its day as part of the Art Theatre movement,
could easily be produced as written today, even if some version of the author's
staging famously realized by Robert Edmund Jones was revived. O'Neill's 19th
century Puritans, transplanted to Vermont so as not to reflect on his
Ridgefield Connecticut neighbors where the play was written, conform to popular
rural stereotypes. His dialogue, which ventures into vernacular poetry, uses a
dialect that owes as much to rube traditions on the American stage as to rural
New England patois. O'Neill, the product of an Irish-Catholic theatrical
family, was still writing within period confines, while trying to assimilate
the taste for Greek tragedy gained during his studies under George Pierce Baker
at Harvard and the Freudian influences washing over American intelligentsia in
the 1920s. ART dramaturgs Ryan McKittrick and Stella Goblin have worked with Sz_sz trying to
find contemporary correlatives, but three-quarters of a century and immense
social revolution have made the psychological insights attempted by O'Neill the
stuff of daytime drama. The result plays like a bad imitation of Sam Shepard in
a context derived from the tradition of "Tobacco Road" (19??) updated
to the era of bad-mannered T.V. talk shows.
The
patriarch of the Cabot clan, seventy-six year old Ephraim, is played by
Off-Broadway veteran Raymond J. Barry, doing his best to rise to the role which brought
Canadian Walter Huston out of vaudeville and touring Shakespeare to prominence
in his forties on the New York stage. Barry delivers what's left of O'Neill's
poetic attempts with conviction, which can't be said most of the time for
ART/MXAT student Mickey Solis playing his twenty-something youngest son, Eben, born to
his second wife. Solis was more convincing as the unfortunate title character
in "Olly's Prison", the ART's effort in April. As Abbie Putnam,
Ephraim's third wife and the woman between them, Amelia Campbell, with ample Broadway and Off-Broadway
credits, seldom sounds believable speaking the play's diction. She's further
hampered by a peculiar iridescent short dress, lace-up boots and knee-pads. The
latter are necessary when crawling about on the gravel-strewn set. Costumer Edit
Sz Sz_cs'
choices for this modern dress version are generally acceptable, if somewhat
off-the-rack, but Abbie's get-up was clearly chosen mainly to make stimulated
copulation more believable. It's a constant distraction in a production
over-stuffed with blatant symbols. Since O'Neill was praised at the time for
submerging this tendency in a coherent playscript, the current staging is a
step backward.
The
two older brothers, from Ephraim's first marriage, are played merely as part of
the exposition in grubby farm clothes by Shawtane Bowen and Peter Cambor, also ART/MXAT students. While
the play has clearly been updated into the second half of the 20th century at
least--there's a rusting pickup truck decorating the set up left--references to
the Gold Rush of the 1850's are left unchanged. The ensemble,Richard Gilman, Zofia Goszczynska, Risher Reddick, and Rachel Redpath, who show up for a peculiar
dance celebrating the birth of Abbie's child are even less distinguished.
Wearing almost suburban dress, these four briefly try their best, backed by
sound designer David Remedios' primitive percussion. Adding to the problem is the
Absurdist wasteland achieved by another of Riccardo Hernandez' abstract sets. The production's
visual attitude towards the original play is clear. The only elms visible are
either standing dead or felled.
The
famous multi-room house which defined the flow of the action has become a flat
floating symbol looming full-sized over the stage. As part of Christopher
Akerlind's
rather theatrical lighting plot, individual windows can be lit to indicate
where a scene, most of which are played down front and center, might be taking
place. If the audience notices, this effect is seldom essential. What is
evident and over-done are the stones which serve as the production's primary
props.A somewhat inspired use of these primitive artifacts occurs when Ephraim
stacks up a small tower, somewhat distractingly and for no good reason, which
then comes to symbolize Eben's dead mother. This totem is knocked over when the
boy lies with Abbie, then become their baby's tomb after she smothers it. Eben
rebuilds it during the finale while Abbie walls herself in an imaginary prison
to his left using another cluster of small stones. They're both repeating lines
heard earlier while Ephraim babbles upstage wandering along the wall which the
three brothers were working on during the first scene. And covering a plywood
rake with gravel merely creates additional work for the housekeeping staff. The
novelty wears off, and requires the afore-mentioned kneepads. There's also no
greenery evident on Ephraim's "purty" farm.
O'Neill's
plays from the '20s certainly require editing and careful stagecraft to
overcome period limitations. Thus they may not be the best raw material for
radical modernist staging, except for advertising purposes. Perhaps the ART's
dramaturgical staff should consult European counterparts to find
auteur/director Sz_sz plays from the Continental tradition relatively unknown
in the West for further experimentation, perhaps those by Horvath. This current
effort can be classed as another interesting failure at best, essentially
wasting talent and resources. Most of the hard-working cast would have been far
more convincing in a conventional production set in the author's chosen period.
At least this production only runs two hours sans intermission.