Following
the success of The Emperor Jones in
1920, Eugene O’Neill’s first experiment with Expressionism in dramaturgy and
one of the first uses of the artistic style in U.S. theater, the great American
playwright returned to the stage with The
Hairy Ape in 1922, his starkest example of expressionistic drama.
Expressionism
came into being in Europe just after the turn of the last century, first as a
movement in visual art, then in literature and drama. Swedish playwright August Strindberg (1849-1912)
was one of the principal practitioners of expressionistic drama on the
Continent, along with German dramatist Frank Wedekind (1864-1918). Expressionism came to fruition around the
start of World War I, especially in Germany, and eventually migrated across the
Atlantic to achieve a small foothold in North America. O’Neill (1888-1953)—on whose writing Strindberg,
whom John Gassner called “the father of the expressionism in O’Neill’s work,”
“left a strong impression”—was the first important American writer to work in
the style, followed by Elmer Rice (1892-1967; The Adding Machine, 1923), George S. Kaufman (1889-1961) and Marc Connelly (1890-1980; Beggar
on Horseback, 1924), and John Howard Lawson (1895-1977; Processional, 1925).
According to Oscar G. Brockett and Robert R. Findlay’s Century of Innovation, Expressionism
has several characteristics, of which many are pertinent to O’Neill’s plays of
the style. Most expressionistic plays
are message-oriented, organized around an idea, theme, or motif instead of
cause-and-effect. The plays are
structured as a search and the scenes are “stations” along the way. The world of expressionistic dramas is
materialistic, hypocritical, and callous and the central character is often
martyred by the behavior of others. The
main character, through whose perspective the play is often seen, is usually
the only one who appears throughout the play and therefore acts as a unifying
figure. The elements of the production,
both visual and conceptual, are often abstracted to their essential details and
events are reduced to demonstrations of an idea or argument, while characters
are presented as generic, representational figures. The dialogue, both as written and as spoken,
is frequently stylized and telegraphic, while movements are choreographed and
also reduced to their essential components; mime and pantomime are common. Aspects of the performance, such as behavior,
sets, props, lighting, clothing, make-up, and so on, are sometimes distorted
and even bizarre, with symbolism a strong element in the production and
writing. Elements of fantasy, magic,
dream or nightmare, hallucination or vision, and even psychosis are prevalent, and
the whole presentation is meant to evoke the feelings, emotion, or
psychological state of the central character, as if the entire world were
reflecting the character’s perception.
Some or all of these elements are present in an expressionistic play or
production, and I hope you’ll recognize that they’re part of the O’Neill
performance I saw the other night.
The
Hairy Ape is not one of O’Neill’s more popular plays. Since its premières in 1922, first at the
Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village on 9 March and then when it opened
at Broadway’s Plymouth Theatre on 17 April, I’ve only been able to identify two
major subsequent productions in New York City: a 1996 staging by the Wooster
Group at the Performing Garage in SoHo (Willem Dafoe played Yank), which the
next year played at the Selwyn Theatre (now the American Airlines Theatre) on
West 42nd Street in the Theatre District; and a revival by the Irish Repertory
Theatre in 2006. (O’Neill’s Emperor
Jones is currently also in revival at the Irish Rep in Chelsea through 23
April,) In the past baker’s dozen years,
there have been at least seven revivals (not counting college shows) around the
country: San Antonio (2004), Buffalo (2009), Chicago (2009), St. Louis (2012),
Philadelphia (2015), Los Angeles (2017), and Colorado Springs (2017)—plus one
in Ottawa (2015). (There was also a
somewhat bowdlerized film in 1944, starring William Bendix as Yank—called Hank
in the movie for some reason—and Susan Hayward as Mildred.)
In October and November 2015, however, the
venerable Old Vic Theatre in London produced The Hairy Ape under the
direction of Richard Jones (on Broadway: David Hirson’s La Bête, Titanic)
to great acclaim, and it has come here to the Park Avenue Armory (co-producer
with OV) for a limited run. Recast with
U.S. actors but retaining Jones’s original OV design team, the show’s been
reconceived for the 140-year-old armory’s recently created Thompson Arts Center
in the former Wade Thompson Drill Hall. (One of the largest spaces in the city
constructed without columns, the drill hall is 55,000 square feet of unobstructed
floor space with an 80-foot vaulted ceiling.) The restaging began previews on 25 March and
opened on the 30th; it’s scheduled to close on 22 April. My usual theater companion Diana, and I met at the armory at 67th Street
and Park Avenue in the Silk Stocking District on Friday, 31 March (in a full-on
downpour), for the 8 p.m. performance.
(The
7th Infantry Regiment of the New York Militia—now a unit of the New York
National Guard, redesignated as the 107th Infantry Regiment—that occupied the
armory was known as the “Silk Stocking Regiment” because of the large number of
members who were part of New York City’s moneyed class—ironic considering the
subject of this O’Neill play. The
wood-paneled period rooms in the rest of the one-block-square armory, festooned
with historical portraits of uniformed officers of the regiment, have been
maintained in their original late-19th-century appearance and are open to
visitors as bars after the performances.)
The
90-minute one-act unfolds in eight scenes.
In the firemen’s forecastle, the crew’s quarters below decks, of a transatlantic
liner that has just sailed out of New York, the off-duty stokers are drinking, talking,
and singing. It’s a wildly multinational
gang, with nearly every imaginable accent and dialect (coached by Kate
Wilson). Yank (Bobby Cannavale), depicted
as a leader among the men, is confident in his strength to fuel the engines that
make the ship and the world run. The
stokehole may be Hades, but Yank is its Pluto.
He comes down particularly hard on two of his companions: Long (Chris
Barnow), a Cockney with unabashed socialist beliefs, and Paddy (David
Costabile), an old Irish salt who rhapsodizes about the days of sailing ships. When Yank demands, “Who makes this old tub
run? Ain’t it us guys? Well den, we belong, don’t we?” declaring of
their habitat below decks on a steamer, “Dis is home, see?” Paddy responds,
“Twas them days a ship was part of the sea, and a man was part of a ship, and
the sea joined them all together and made it one,” harking back to the old days
recounted in O’Neill’s famous sea plays—and the days when man and nature were
linked.
(The
characters’ designations aren’t all generic as in the paradigm of Expressionism,
but with names like Yank and Paddy, they’re
pretty close. The cause against which O’Neill
is arguing in Hairy Ape is the
replacement by mechanization of skill and lore—such as seamanship—with brute
strength and repetitive labor. He’s also
campaigning against the disconnection of man from nature. The stokers may make the ship run, but in
their windowless world below deck they sail the sea without ever seeing it. Paddy laments that these sailors are “caged
in by steel from a sight of the sky like bloody apes in the Zoo!” Seamen on the clippers about which Paddy
reminisces worked on deck or aloft in direct relation with the sea and the wind
and the elements.)
On the
second day at sea, Mildred Douglas (Catherine Combs), a steel tycoon’s spoiled
young daughter, and her aunt (Becky Ann Baker) are talking on the promenade deck,
the ship’s top outside level—far above the haunt of the stokers. (Behind the women are huge blue letters, 14 feet
high, that spell out “DOUGLAS STEEL,” Mildred’s father’s company which owns the
ship.) Mildred disdains her aunt and her father, but holds up her
great-grandmother as a maverick because she smoked a pipe and her grandfather
because he was an iron puddler in a foundry. Mildred and her chaperone argue
over the dilettante’s desire to engage in “the morbid thrills of social service work,”
ending only when the ship’s Second Engineer (Mark Junek) arrives to accompany
her below decks for her planned visit to the ship’s stokehole, the compartment where
the firemen shovel coal into the ship's furnaces, to “investigate how the other
half lives and works on a ship.” The aunt
calls her a poser, but the heiress and her two escorts end up going below deck
regardless.
In the
stokehole, Yank and the other firemen (Barnow and Costabile, with Tommy Bracco,
Emmanuel Brown, Nicholas Bruder, Jamar Williams, Amos Wolf), stripped to their
waists, their bodies and faces smeared with coal dust, are shoveling fuel into
the ship’s furnaces. The scene is bathed
in red light, as if from the glowing coals in the furnaces. Mildred and her escorts have arrived at the
stokehole’s entrance—to peer at the men as if they were exhibits in a kind if
living diorama—and when the men notice her in her white dress standing behind
Yank, they freeze in place. Yank doesn’t
notice Mildred and shouts threats at the unseen engineer above signaling the
men to keep stoking the furnaces. Wondering
why the others have stopped working, Yank turns to discover Mildred, at whom he
glares menacingly and raises his shovel.
Shocked by his appearance and gesture, she screams, “Oh, the filthy
beast!” and faints.
Back in
the firemen’s forecastle a half hour later, the men are showering off the coal
dust. Yank, however, is sitting “in the
exact attitude of Rodin’s ‘The Thinker,’” still blackened from work, brooding over
the incident in the stokehole. “Lemme
alone,” he growls. “Can’t youse see I’m
tryin’ to tink?” He’s never had to do
that before and the other men laugh mechanically, puzzled by his fury, and ask if
he’s in love. Yank is infuriated at
Mildred for claiming that he resembles a “hairy ape.” He becomes enraged and tries to charge after
Mildred in revenge. However, the men pile
on him and wrestle him to the ground before he can get out the door. Mildred’s insult has shaken Yank’s confidence
in his place in the world as he knows it.
He begins to want more than anything to understand his confusion.
Three
weeks later, the ship has returned to New York from its cruise. Yank looks for Mildred in her upper-class
milieu, determined to figure out where he belongs in this world. (This is the search paradigmatic to
expressionistic plays. Words like
“belong” and “fit in” become letimotifs
in the dialogue.) On the upper crust’s “private
lane,” as Long calls Fifth Avenue in the 50’s—not far from the armory that
Frank Scheck in the Hollywood Reporter
characterized as “ground zero of the one percent”—Yank and Long argue over the
best way to attack the ruling class while admiring how clean the street is
(“Yuh could eat a fried egg offen it”). The
men stand before two expensive shops, a jeweler and a furrier, each with
display windows showing off upscale finery for huge prices; a “monkey fur”
garment goes for “two t’ousand bucks”—the equivalent of $28K now. (I looked it up: monkey fur was actually used
in that era; it’s illegal today in most states.)
Yank is
still obsessed with taking revenge against Mildred, but Long explains to him
that she’s “on’y a representative of ’er clarss. . . . There’s a ’ole mob of ’em like ’er, Gawd blind
’em!” as he points out at us in our sulfur-yellow seats, the same color as the
set cages (as are the programs). Yank
rudely accosts a group of Upper East Side churchgoers, all dressed in identical
black formal suits and gowns, the men in black toppers, as Long flees. The swells all wear white, characterless masks
(almost like surgical wrappings) covering their faces and move in unison like a
“procession of gaudy marionettes, yet with something of the relentless horror of
Frankensteins in their detached, mechanical unawareness.” Some are also wearing yellow gloves, others
yellow shoes, linking them to us in our yellow seats, for we, too, represent
part of Mildred’s “clarss.” Yank punches
one toff, who doesn’t even react (imagine a live version of one of those
inflatable bounce-back toys), in the face and is arrested.
The
following night at the prison on Blackwell’s Island (a precursor to Rikers
Island, now called Roosevelt Island), Yank has begun serving a 30-day sentence. Seeing the prison as a zoo, he tells the
other inmates how he wound up there. One
of them (Cosmo Jarvis) tells him about the Industrial Workers of the World, a
Marxist-oriented labor organization, and urges Yank to join. Enraged by the thought of Mildred and her
father again, Yank bends the bars of his cell in an attempt to escape, but the
guard turns a fire hose on him. (This is
a nifty little theatrical trick, by the way.
The hose doesn’t spray water, of course, as that would make a mess. It’s some kind of vapor, though it’s not
smoke and obviously not steam, as that would scald the actor. It’s more like dry-ice vapor, but I’d love to
know how it’s propelled though the hose—which stretches back behind the seating
risers—with sufficient force to make it look enough like spraying water to make
the theatrical point.)
Almost
a month later, on his release from prison, Yank visits the local office of the IWW
(also known as the Wobblies) to join the union.
(The local is envisioned by Stewart Laing as a communist bookstore lined with
shelves of red-and-white books. I wonder
if the designer knew about Revolution Books that used to be off Union Square near
where I live.) The Secretary (Henry
Stram) is at first happy to have Yank in their ranks because not many ship’s
firemen are Wobblies. However, when the
stoker expresses his desire to blow up the Steel Trust, they suspect him of being
a government provocateur and toss him out of the building. In the streets, Yank has another run-in with
a policeman; this one shows no interest in arresting him (“I’d run you in but
it’s too long a walk to the station”) and tells him to move along. Now he counts for so little, he’s not even
worth rousting! “Say, where do I go from
here?” asks Yank, and the cop replies, “Go to hell.”
The
following evening, Yank visits the zoo.
If the sea as Paddy experienced it is the world of nature where man
either worked with it or struggled against it, and the New York City of
Mildred’s Upper East Side is the world of modern man, denaturized and artificial,
where nature, like the monkey’s fur, is turned to man’s service, the zoo is an
uneasy and artificial juncture of the two worlds—and harks back to Mildred’s
urge to see the stokers at work in their habitat. The place itself is a construct of man, built
for his purposes, but the animals that reside there are creatures of nature—and
Yank senses, falsely it turns out, that this is where he fits in. He sympathizes with a gorilla (Phil Hill),
thinking they’re “both members of de same club.” He breaks open the animal’s cage and goes in to
introduce himself as if they’re friends.
The gorilla attacks Yank, fatally crushing his ribs, and throws Yank around
the cage. Mortally injured, the stoker
laments, “Even him didn’t tink I belonged. . . . Where do I fit in?” He pulls himself up with the bars of the cage
and with a mocking laugh, says: “Ladies and gents, step forward and take a
slant at the one and only—one and original—Hairy Ape from the wilds of——” and
with those words, Yank dies.
I read The Hairy Ape years ago, though I’d
never seen it on stage. (I can’t remember for sure, but I may have seen
the 1944 film with Chester A. Reilly—errr,
William Bendix.) All together, it was a curious experience at the
theater, but I’m very happy to have seen the play. Before I say anything
else, though, I have to comment on Stewart Laing’s set design.
When I
was in college, our theater director, Lee Kahn, talked about his dream theater.
He called it a “theater in the donut” and it was kind of a reverse arena: the
stage was a ring around the audience who sat in swivel chairs so they could
watch the action all around them. Well, the Jones-Laing environment
for Hairy Ape at the armory was exactly what Lee described—except
without the swivel chairs. (Laing’s original set for the Old Vic was
designed for a standard proscenium house.) To be precise, the action only takes place in
front of the stationary bleacher seating, from what would be stage right
to stage left, but the ring revolves not only to rotate set pieces—mostly
self-contained (bright sulfur-yellow) boxes usually containing the
actors already in place—into view, but also to accommodate movement as the
actors walk in the reverse direction of the revolve so that they remain in
place with respect to the spectators. (Think of walking up a down
escalator.)
The
stage is like a giant, flat, black luggage carousel at an airport—although
a conveyor belt might be a more thematically apt allusion, reflecting O’Neill’s
commentary on industrialization. It’s
140 feet in diameter (about 440 feet around), the largest ever used in New York
theater history says Paul King, the armory’s director of production, in an on-line
report by Erik Piepenburg in the New York
Times. The belt, constructed of
almost 50 tons of steel, moves about a half a mile, or 2,640 feet, over the
hour-and-a-half run of the show. That
comes out to a speed of 29⅓ feet per minute, including standing time. Ben Brantley called the stage a “semicircle”
in his Times review, but of course
it’s a complete circle, going all the way around the the 800-seat, 80-foot-wide,
and 26-foot-high bleacher. The 16-member
stage crew completely changes the scenes, including costumes and makeup for the
15 actors—who wear 59 different costumes—from a loading dock behind the risers. The stage ring is only out of sight of
the audience for less than a minute.
The set
boxes (as opposed to “box sets”; Edward Rothstein of the Wall Street Journal likens them to shipping containers), almost all
sulfur yellow (Yank frequently hurls “yellow” as a label of contempt at anyone
he disdains), are apparently made of metal.
(Laing, whose designs infuse Expressionism with elements of Russian
Constructivism, asserts that “the most alien space that you could put human
beings into would be a bright yellow, completely minimalist metal space.” The designer adds, “At several points early
in the play, the men talk about being in hell, this industrial world.” Sulfur yellow “has a sort of hellish
connotation.” Also known as brimstone,
sulfur, in the form of sulfur dioxide, one of the most dangerous air pollutants,
is a byproduct of the burning of coal and sulfur is a frequent contaminant in
iron ores, used in making steel.)
The
boxes are used very effectively, both symbolically—they’re like big cages, even
when that’s not literally true—and theatrically. The forecastle and
stokehole have solid ceilings and one solid long wall and one short wall; the
other long wall is open and serves as the front of the setting. The other short end is barred and has a
barred door in it. (The end with the
bars is, for instance, the entrance, on the stage-right side, which makes the
forecastle and stokehole subliminally evoke a cage or cell in which the
animal-like stokers, treated as subhuman by the ship’s officers and
passengers—and, I’d assume, upper-deck staff like stewards and cooks. It’s through this entrance that Mildred
encounters Yank, a confrontation that’s echoed when Yank goes into the
gorilla’s cage at the zoo.) The jail
cell and gorilla cage boxes are entirely enclosed by bars.
Other
sets that come out on the conveyor-belt stage are the IWW bookstore—there are no
bars and there are doors in both side walls, out of the one on stage left Yank
is thrown—and the Fifth Avenue set of the beige shop frontages. (The Fifth Avenue set, which is also
accompanied by 14-foot letters reading “NYC”—one of the several
constructivistic aspects of the production design—is just a façade; there’s no
interior.) In all but the store fronts,
the actors in the scenes are already in place, frozen in an attitude as if
participating in a tableau vivant,
when the set boxes rotate into position.
Now, I’m
something of a sucker for staging innovations, so this delighted me
irrespective of any other theatrical or dramatic aspects of the
production. And there are several. The rest of the black expanse of
the (stationary) drill hall floor above the rather narrow revolving runway
(Matt Windman described this as “an empty abyss” in am New York) is used for non-dialogue scenes of large group
movements like the churchgoing swells and a parade of workers in union suits
and hard hats, carrying yellow tool boxes.
(Laing also designed the costumes.) The crumbling brick interior of the hall’s front
wall (through which we’d entered the TAC), resembling a deteriorating building
façade, is used expressionistically as well, with catwalks up high and down
near floor level across which actors occasional scramble mysteriously. The façade is painted a kind of grayish blue,
but when unlit in Mimi Jordan Sherin’s lighting scheme it looks black and
shadowy, rising ominously in the night like a looming hulk of a building with
dark windows barely visible. .
The
acting, both the vocal work and the movements, is expressionistically choreographed—and extremely well executed by the cast. (The production has
a choreographer, Aletta Collins, who also did the OV staging.) As I
noted, the actors arrive in the set boxes as if a film had been stopped, but
when they start to move, it’s often in a synchronized pantomime of work or
leisure. In the stokehole, for example,
the men feed the furnaces with large shovels, but there’s no coal, no furnaces,
and no furnace doors, though the men go through the motions of opening the
doors, turning upstage, digging a shovelful of coal, turning front, stoking the
furnace, and closing the furnace doors with their shovels, all in choreographed
rhythm. Earlier, in the forecastle, the
men sometimes speak in unison and when they laugh, it’s “HAH . . . HAH . . .
HAH,” also in unison. It’s remarkable to
watch the actors as they go in and out of this rhythmic speaking or moving
seemingly at random. It’s obviously been
rehearsed to a fine edge, but it doesn’t look like it. I could almost believe it was spontaneous.
Five
times O’Neill (and Jones) has Yank sit in the pose of Auguste Rodin’s famous
sculpture, The Thinker, telegraphing
his unfamiliar efforts to ponder his situation.
(In the final scene, Yank enters to find the gorilla sitting in its cage
in this same attitude. The implication
is unmistakable.) Yank is beaten on the
street by a crowd twice, once by the churchgoing swells and the police and then
by the Wobblies after they throw him out of the meeting place. (Thomas Schall is the fight director.) Not only are both choreographed mime
sequences, but they’re identical. The
work sequences convey that not only is the labor mindless and repetitive for
each shift, but the shifts are all routine and changeless. The beatings indicate that no matter where
Yank is, who he’s with, or what he’s done, his treatment is exactly the same. This is Expressionism at work!
In the
church crowd scene, the rich folk all wear masks that make them look faceless,
therefore without personality. (The
closest image that comes to my mind is Claude Rains as the title character in
1933’s The Invisible Man; they even
have blackened eyeholes that resemble the dark glasses Dr. Griffin wears in the
film.) A promoter of masks in theater, O’Neill
wrote, “I advocate masks for stage crowd scenes, mobs—wherever a sense of
impersonal, collective psychology is wanted.”
More broadly, he stated:
For I hold more and
more surely to the conviction that masks will be discovered eventually to be
the freest solution to the modern dramatist’s problem as to how—with the
greatest possible dramatic clarity and economy of means—he can express those
profound hidden conflicts of the mind which the probings of psychology continue
to disclose to us.
The
playwright later even affirmed:
In “The Hairy Ape” a
much more extensive use of masks would be of greatest value in emphasizing the
themes of the play. From the opening of
the fourth scene, where Yank begins to think, he enters into a masked world;
even the familiar faces of his mates in the forecastle have become strange and
alien. They should be masked, and the
faces of everyone he encounters thereafter, including the symbolic gorilla’s.
Within
the context of the expressionistic production, the acting’s excellent,
particularly the ensemble work. There
could be some argument about Combs’s portrayal of Mildred, the daughter of
capitalism who’s sort of Yank’s antagonist—at least his trigger. She can be seen as too 21st-century, too
assured, and a little too bratty toward her aunt and her father, but that’s a
matter of preference. Costabile is an overgrown leprechaun, an
appropriately stereotypical Irishman and old salt and the only man among the
crew who doesn’t kowtow to Yank’s bullying.
The
only actor with whom I had problems was Bobby Cannavale as Yank. He performed the role well
enough, but he just didn’t look right to me. First of
all, he’s not big enough—Yank’s supposed to be a brute, “broader, fiercer, more
truculent, more powerful . . . than the rest” (whom O’Neill depicts as having “the
appearance of Neanderthal Man”: “hairy-chested, with long arms of tremendous
power, and low, receding brows above their small, fierce, resentful eyes”), but
when Cannavale “makes a muscle,” it’s barely noticeable! He’s also too
young and, if you’ll pardon the expression, pretty. Even all smeared with
coal dust, he’s hardly someone you’d call a “beast” (as Mildred does) or an “ape”
(as others do). (The best image I can think of for the role is either Charles
Bronson or Neville Brand—who’s got the better voice for the part!—but I have no
idea if either actor could have done the part. Bendix, for a Hollywood
take on Yank, is also a viable image, and from time to time, Cannavale seems to
be channeling Bendix for line readings. (Yank’s dialogue is written all
in “Brooklynese”—dese, dose, youse, goils for ‘girls,’ and oith for ‘earth.’ Bendix, who wasn’t actually a
Brooklyner, was typecast as one because he mastered the speech so
stereotypically!) Since Yank is at the center of the performance almost
100% of the time, this problem has a weakening effect on the whole production.
But I’m
not sure how much of that could have been salvaged. Jones took everything
to the extreme—all the performance choices and character depictions; O’Neill’s early
shipboard scenes appear naturalistic—remember the U.S. audiences of 1922 were
just being introduced to stylistically experimental theater and might have been
confused by a performance that was 100 percent stylized. In New
York magazine, Jesse Green gives one likely explanation:
There’s something
about our time that doesn’t favor expressionism, especially in mainstream
theater. The distortion of perspective and the inflation of emotional state
that we may enjoy in paintings often feel onstage like gloomy satire. We are mostly realists—not in reality, of
course, just in our popular entertainment. We are more comfortable with the couch and the
bedroom than the jail and the smokestack.
Jones
makes the entire play expressionistic.
He does this, I think, because the play
doesn’t have the shock value in 2017 it had in 1922. The polemics and preachiness which O’Neill
wrote into the script would be enervating to a 21st-century audience, I think,
if played realistically. The socialism and anti-capitalism, the
anti-mechanization and separation-from-nature for which O’Neill proselytizes—and Hairy Ape does get preachy and verbose for a 90-minute play—is pretty much
old hat by now and we’ve either grown to accept it as truth or dismissed it as
pipe dreams. Once the play leaves the ship, it loses its—if you will—steam
and starts to march in place, like the actors walking against the rotating
stage.
Except
for that terrific scene—though it, too, goes on too long and is too talky in
the end—where Yank finds himself at the zoo and confronts the caged ape. The
actor in the ape suit, a frightening Phil Hill (I wonder if he knows Biff Liff
. . . or Lyle Vial?), is marvelous! If we hadn’t been in the front row, I
might have wondered if somehow they’d gotten a trained ape (until Yank goes in
the cage with it). Dramatically, it’s a
little too literal for me, but theatrically, it’s gangbusters!
(Think that old American Tourister ad, except with Cannavale as the
suitcase!)
Based
on 21 reviews (as of 15 April), Show-Score gave The Hairy Ape an average rating of 87,
with six high scores of 95 and nine 90’s.
The tally was 100% positive—not a single negative or even mixed
notice. My survey will cover 14 outlets.
In the Journal, Edward Rothstein described
Jones’s armory production of Hairy Ape
as “a stunningly beautiful (and expensive) staging” with “expert direction.” Rothstein further asserted that
if you temporarily
submit to the manipulations of O’Neill and Mr. Jones, you also come to see
that the play is both more and less than agitprop. It is more because there are magnificent
soliloquies in which we hear the rhythms and phrasings of actual people, rather
than the cartoons of ideology . . . . The
play is also less than agitprop, because it doesn’t fully accept the message it
begins to peddle.
Calling
the armory production of O’Neill’s play “mesmerizing,” the Times’s Brantley described it as “a serendipitous marriage of
theater and real estate.” Presented “amid
the blue-chip addresses where its title character roams and despairs,” the Timesman observed, “it would be
comforting to dismiss this 1922 drama as a fascinating anachronism”; however, “O’Neill’s
nightmarish parable of alienation and class conflict still feels close to home.” The revival is “ravishing enough to please
the sort of aesthetes who worship Robert Wilson’s exquisite dreamscapes,” asserted
Brantley. “But this production also
rings with the primal pain of a working-class American who, once stripped of
the identity of his job, discovers he belongs nowhere.” Brantley praised all the performances,
singling out Costabile’s Paddy and Becky Ann Baker’s “propriety-conscious
aunt,” but reserved special plaudits for Cannavale, of whom the reviewer
declared Yank “a part that has just been waiting these many decades for” the
actor to take up and which he performs “with both puffed-up arrogance and
shrunken resignation.”
Joe
Dziemianowicz dubbed the armory’s Hairy
Ape a “massive and mighty revival” in the New York Daily News, a “stirring production” in which “[j]agged beauty
abounds.” am New York’s Matt Windman declared, “Never again are we likely to
see such a massive, thoroughly designed, technically complex staging of an
early 20th century expressionist play as the stunning production of” the
armory’s Hairy Ape. The review-writer further reported that “everything
about it is huge: the venue, the mechanized set design, the seating
arrangement, the scale of the performances and the main character’s agony and
desperation.” Windman observed, “The
ensemble reinforces the play’s otherworldly style through synchronized
movement,” but singled out Cannavale for his “raw, layered and highly physical
performance.”
In the Village Voice, Zac Thompson delared that
The Hairy Ape, in a “muscular,
visually astonishing production,” is “a ninety-minute claustrophobic attack: There's
almost no fresh air in it.” Jones opts
for “a stylized mix of outsize emotions and daring spectacle” in his staging,
which “help the production transcend what seems at first a simple agitprop
premise, becoming something unruly and unreal.”
Thompson added, “The searching, restless fury in Cannavale’s knockabout
performance likewise pushes the production past an exercise in raising class
consciousness.” The New Yorker’s Hilton Als, characterizing The Hairy Ape as “awkward, false, and true,” sees Yank, played by a “stupendous" Cannavale, as “both a man and
an Expressionistic impression of a worker, an embodiment of the playwright’s
ideas about theatrical naturalism and how to elevate it beyond the proscenium
and make it deeper, spookier.” According
to Als, Jones “is interested in masks—in returning O’Neill to a dramatic style
that inspired him in the nineteen-twenties,” but “has a bigger palette, which
allows him to fully exploit O’Neill’s operatic urges.” The reviewer concluded, “Reading ‘The Hairy
Ape,’ you’d never imagine what Jones comes up with, and those surprises are the
reason the production is such a thrill.”
Jesse
Green cautioned in New York that the
play “is not just expressionist but aggressively and experimentally so,” and,
even “in a staggering, last-word revival,” is therefore “a difficult work to
put over.” Green explained, “O’Neill
lavished so much attention on its style that the content begins to seem naïve
by comparison.” What little content
there is is “more a timeline than a tale, a stop-motion autopsy of the working
class in the machine age.” Furthermore,
the dialogue is so heavy-handed, it “can give you a headache.” Cannavale “gets his mouth around the
exaggerated dialect and makes it sing,” though Green found that while
physically, the actor “is giving us expressionism[,] . . . his smooth
interpretation of the speech is giving us realism.” This, the man from New York asserted, “anchors a production, gorgeously directed by
Richard Jones, that is otherwise full-tilt expressionism on the grandest scale
imaginable.” With respect to the visual
aspect of Hairy Ape, Jones and Laing
“create compositions of such depth and painterly mystery that the usual
tediousness of the material is obviated,” with the complicity of “the superb
lighting designer Mimi Jordan Sherin.” Green
did have one complaint, finding that the cast’s “slightly brightened
performance level . . . matches the production’s design and refreshes the
emotional palate,” but he wasn’t “sure it matches . . . O’Neill.” (Despite what I said recently about Sam
Gold’s rendering of Tennessee Williams’s The
Glass Menagerie on Broadway—see 8 April—I don’t believe it has to,
especially if the production makes the author’s point. Different audiences and different eras may
need different presentations to get the ideas accepted.)
Time Out New York’s Adam Feldman called Hairy Ape “a visually stunning
Expressionist marvel” with an “estimable Bobby Cannavale [as] a beautiful beast.” Maya Stanton warned in Entertainment Weekly, “The experience of watching The Old Vic/Park
Avenue Armory co-production of The Hairy Ape . . . is an unsettling
one, both physically and metaphorically.”
Stanton added, “As it turns out, though, the cognitive dissonance
between a work of art and a setting [that is, the Upper East Side] that
inherently encapsulates the disparities at its heart is a jarring but
ultimately effective tool.” This “juxtaposition
between setting and subject matter only helps the play land its punches,” she
explained. In conclusion, the EW
reviewer affirmed, “In an era in which companies are given rights like people—and
actual people are still seen as cogs in the machine by multinational corporations
solidifying their power under what many see as a robber-baron presidency—O’Neill’s
cutting critique of American social and economic structures couldn’t be more
relevant.”
In the Hollywood Reporter, Frank Scheck’s
“Bottom Line” was “Cannavale’s visceral performance and the ingenious,
overwhelming staging will blow you away.”
Calling the revival a “landmark production,” Scheck declared, “Environmental
theater doesn’t come any more powerful than the staging of The Hairy
Ape” at the armory. Jones’s rendition “brings it to magnificent
life with a visually stunning, stylized rendition that gains resonance from its
overwhelming setting,” said the HR reviewer, adding that “you’ve
definitely never seen it like this.” The
director “exploits [the setting’s] artificiality by visually emphasizing the
elemental aspect” and “[i]maginative visual touches abound.” Cannavale as Yank, “a perfect casting choice,”
Scheck felt, “superbly brings his raw, macho physicality to the leading role.” The
review-writer concluded, “Admittedly, The Hairy Ape hasn’t
aged especially well, often coming across like a theatrical relic. But this landmark production provides a sense
of the bone-chilling excitement it must originally have generated.”
David
Finkle of the Huffington Post,
characterizing it as a “gorgeous, astounding achievement,” pronounced the Hairy Ape revival “without question the
production of the year.” For Jones’s
presentation, “Using the Park Avenue Armory’s Drill Hall with unbridled
imagination . . . vivifies the” play “in the ‘super-naturalism’ style the
33-year-old O’Neill favored.” Finkle
elucidated: “It’s as if O’Neill’s tragedy . . . has burst into a flowering
series of images that depict how destructive to the worried soul the American
class system can be.” The whole
production “is an event,” and the design team is “all full of marvelous
surprises.” Cannavale “is
heartbreakingly convincing” as Yank, Finkle affirmed, and concluded that “this Hairy
Ape looks like a million buck[s] (or, say, a billion). Sounds ironic, no? Maybe so, but all the same, it works like a
house afire.”
On Theater Pizzazz, Carol Rocamora
asserted, “Rarely does a production explode upon the theatre scene like Eugene
O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, now receiving an extraordinary revival.” Rocamora reported, “The setting is vast, and
the spectacle is breathtaking,” adding, “One scene after another brings
stunning visual images on the revolving conveyor belt.” The TP reviewer concluded, “This
special combination of directorial vision, design brilliance, choreography
(Aletta Collins), star power (Cannavale), and seamless ensemble work has
brought forth a unique revival.” Zachary
Stewart, dubbing the show “a muscular revival” on TheaterMania, asserted
that “director Richard Jones gets to the essence of the playwright’s intention
by giving this expressionist work a staging that is both clear and
confrontational.” Amid an ensemble of “angry
stick figures,” Cannavale’s Yank “is by no means a lovable character, but he is
an undeniably sympathetic one.” Jones
directs “with an appropriately heavy hand” and, with Laing, creates “a simple,
dreamlike quality throughout,” enhanced by Sherin’s “dramatic lighting.” The director “pulls no punches in this
gorgeous and forceful revival, which asks the question: Just how much
humiliation does it take to turn a begrudging acceptance of American inequality
into a desire to blow the whole thing up?”
In Stewart’s view, “This revival could not have arrived at a better
moment.”
CurtainUp’s Elyse Sommer warned, “Despite it’s subtitle—‘A Comedy of Ancient and
Modern Life In Eight Scenes’—there’s nothing to laugh about in O’Neill 1922
expressionistic play. But there’s plenty
to keep you enthralled as you watch those eight scenes unfold in this stunning
production.” She characterized the
production as “a splendid adaptation by Director Richard Jones and his
designers to make their innovative stagecraft and interpretation fit this grand
venue” of the Park Avenue Armory. The CU
review-writer acknowledged that “O’Neill’s dialect is a challenging mouthful,”
but found that the “incredibly watchable” Cannavale “ably tames it, and at the
same time meets the role’s ape-like physical demands”; “it all adds up to his
being an intensely heart-breaking, often gasp-inducing stage presence.” The ensemble cast is “superb,” and the “actors’
fluid back an[d] forth shifts between realism and highly stylized movements are
expertly enabled by choreographer Aletta Collins.” Sommer found, however, “Outstanding and full
of subtleties as the overall acting is, the staging contributes as much to
making this a not to be missed theatrical outing of this season.”
