Festival considers O'Neill in the 21st century

For someone who was written off as passe long before he died in 1953, Eugene O'Neill still has an uncanny ability to grab headlines and spark debate among theater critics.

Robert Falls -- artistic director of Chicago's Goodman Theatre, and known as an O'Neill specialist -- has an appreciation for that ability and used it to assemble a two-month festival aimed at bringing America's only Nobel Prize-winning dramatist back to center stage.

"O'Neill is frankly my favorite writer," Falls said in a recent interview. "Here's an author who was very much formed in the 19th century and defined American drama in the 20th century. I wanted to see if these plays are still relevant in the 21st century.

"His work is hard, and his work is tough, and it tends to be pessimistic, but I look at O'Neill as an artist for all time," he said.

Falls, who has previously mounted festivals celebrating the work of Edward Albee, David Mamet, August Wilson and Horton Foote, said it took only 18 months to assemble the offerings, "which is surprisingly short for the way festivals are put together. But it indicates how much interest in O'Neill there still is worldwide."

In choosing the productions, Falls said he deliberately avoided the later naturalistic plays such as "The Iceman Cometh" and "Long Days Journey into Night" that did so much to restore O'Neill's reputation posthumously. Instead, he concentrated on earlier -- and more experimental -- works written while O'Neill was still in thrall to European expressionism and Greek tragedy.

Here are some of the things he chose (and how they were retooled): a production of 1920's "The Emperor Jones" with the black male protagonist played by a white woman in blackface and drag; a sequence of early plays, done in Portuguese; the 1865-set "Mourning Becomes Electra" done in Dutch and minus all references to the Civil War; "The Hairy Ape" done with the audience on the stage and the actors in the seating tiers; and the nine-act, 7 1/2-hour "Strange Interlude" performed by a troupe most famous for doing 30 plays in 60 minutes.

The menu sounds provocative -- and it is.

Most of the works have engendered a certain amount of controversy; none more than Falls' own production of "Desire Under The Elms." That production, which moves to New York in April, has what seem to be tons of stage boulders, plenty of scratching, spitting and drooling -- but no elms.

Several critics complained about the lack of trees, and noted that O'Neill's stage direction describing the trees is famous in its own right as an example of dramatic Freudianism.

But Falls defended his decision to ax the elms.

"The elms in O'Neill's world represent the influence of the dead mother, but I have chosen to embrace the paternal world of the play -- a hard place of rocks," the director said.

And while the critics had high praise for the actors in "Desire," several complained about the dialect they employed. Two sides of the family triangle, Carla Gugino and Pablo Schreiber, sounded Southern, they said, while Brian Dennehy, as patriarch Ephraim Cabot, sounded Irish.

"It's written in dialect -- a very rigid New England dialect -- and it's not a recognizable dialect to today's audiences," Falls responded. "O'Neill was trying to recreate an accent he heard in his youth from older people. It has Celtic elements that would relate to some Southern accents."

"Desire" has the reputation of being an extremely difficult play to perform, and Falls, who said he had never seen a stage production of the work, agrees with that assessment.

"It demands an enormous amount from its actors," he said. "O'Neill's asking them to touch the gods. He's attempting Greek tragedy, but he's setting it in the very commonplace -- and even inarticulate -- language of impoverishment. He's then putting them in what some would call a melodramatic situation. There's a very fine line between tragedy and melodrama, and for actors it's a very tricky line to walk."

"Desire" runs through March 1, but Gugino had to miss the final two weeks because of a prior movie commitment. She was replaced in those performances by Chicago actress Amy Carle.

The original cast will be reunited for the production's New York engagement, which begins previews April 14 at the St. James Theatre for a 13-week run. It opens April 27.

The festival, titled "A Global Exploration: Eugene O'Neill in the 21st Century," began Jan. 7 with a revival of the New York-based Wooster Group's "The Emperor Jones," with Kate Valk doing a bravura turn as Pullman porter turned Caribbean dictator Brutus Jones. (The redoubtable Paul Robeson once played that role.) Several black groups protested the Goodman production because of the blackface and drag.

The plays in Portuguese were performed, to great critical acclaim, by Companhia Triptal, a troupe based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. English subtitles were provided for that production, as they were for "Mourning Becomes Electra" by Toneelgroep of Amsterdam, the largest repertory group of the Netherlands.

The festival's expressionistic production of "The Hairy Ape" was the work of Chicago's Hypocrites Theatre Company.

The final production, "Strange Interlude," comes from another Chicago company, the Neo-Futurists, and is something of an act of deconstruction.

"We once did 'The Last Two Minutes of The Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen,' and I suspect Bob Falls expected something similar when he invited us," said Neo-Futurist director Greg Allen. "When I told him we wanted to do 'Strange Interlude,' he looked at me as if I were crazy. But we're doing it -- all nine acts and a dinner break."

Allen describes "Strange Interlude" as "outrageous and "preposterous," quickly adding, "that's why I love it."

"It has all these crazy asides where the characters speak their inner thoughts on stage, and we're doing those -- sometimes directly and sometimes in voice-over," Allen said. "And O'Neill has all these elaborate stage directions and descriptions, so sometimes we'll read those aloud and not bother with the dialogue."

One act, he promised, would have nothing but adverbs.

"Strange Interlude" runs March 6-7, closing out the festival.