The Group Theatre's 'Johnny Johnson'

(19 November 1936-16 January 1937)

[When I was a grad student at New York University, I wrote a paper in May 1984 for a class called 20th-Century Mise-en-Scene, an examination of the staging techniques in modern Western theater taught by the late Michael Kirby  (1931-97).  The paper was a reconstruction of the Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson, the company’s only musical, with book and lyrics by Paul Green and music by Kurt Weill.  The play ran at Broadway’s 44th Street Theatre from 19 November 1936—83 years ago tomorrow—to 16 January 1937.  

[In the course of my research, I read all the reviews I could locate and as many accounts from participants and later scholars as I could find.  I pored over photographs of the production and studied the ground plans of set designer Donald Oenslager.  

[I made slides of the photos and took them with me to Brooklyn (along with a rented portable projector) to interview Tony Kraber, one of the few cast members then still alive, so he could render commentary on the pictures, which I hoped would jog his memory of the then-47-year-old production.  I was also fortunate that at that time, I was acquainted with Sam Leve, a retired set designer, who had been Oenslager’s assistant.  In the end, I pieced together a description of the production from all these sources, picking out performance and staging details wherever I could glean them.  

[Kirby, then the editor of The Drama Review, proposed that I submit the paper to the journal, which was planning a Group Theatre issue, and the reconstruction was published as “The Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson (1936)” in the winter issue of 1984 (28.4 – T104).  It was my first published article.

[This post is a combination of my original typescript and the TDR version.  I have also revised it a little for Rick On Theater.]

Introduction

On Thursday, 19 November 1936, the Group Theatre (1931-41) opened its only musical play.  Johnny Johnson, with book and lyrics by Paul Green (1894-1981) and music by Kurt Weill (1900-50), played at the 44th Street Theatre on Broadway for a scant nine weeks—a total of only 68 performances—closing after the matinee and evening shows on Saturday, 16 January 1937.  It was an unusual play in many respects, and certainly would have had a startling effect on its audiences, who couldn’t really have known what to expect. 

According to Green:

The story of the legend—that is what I like to call the play—is the musical autobiography of a common soldier whose natural common sense runs counter to a sophisticated civilization.  The first act is a comedy, the second a tragedy and the third a satire.  That sounds crazy and maybe I can’t get away with it but that is what I have tried to write.

Green communicated his antiwar message in a succession of expressionistic scenes, pervaded by songs, ballads, marches, and hymns by Kurt Weill.

The play, subtitled “The Biography of a Common Man,” told the story of Johnny Johnson, an honest, truth-loving fellow who volunteered to be a soldier in the “war to end all wars.”  Green explained his choice of the leading character’s name in the News-Week review: “The character is named Johnny Johnson because war records show that there were 30,000 Johnsons in the American Army.  Three thousand of them were John Johnsons.” 

Johnny, a tombstone-carver, is introduced at the dedication of a peace monument he’d carved, just at the moment President Woodrow Wilson proclaims war.  His romantic fiancée, Minny Belle Tompkins, is enraptured by the glories of prospective martial heroism, and Johnny goes off to enlist at the local recruiting office. 

He’s put through army training with some difficulty and shipped off to France.  At the front, he contracts a private peace with a young German soldier, whom Johnny sends back to carry a message of peace and brotherhood to the other German soldiers. 

Wounded, Johnny is sent to a hospital from which he escapes with a canister of laughing gas.  He doses the Allied Supreme Command with the gas and temporarily succeeds in calling off the war.  He’s sent home to a lunatic asylum where a mad psychiatrist diagnoses him with as suffering from “peace monomania.”  Finally released, Johnny’s reduced to selling toys on a street corner—not very successfully, however, since he doesn’t carry tin soldiers.

The Origins of the Project

Johnny Johnson was a departure from the Group Theatre’s usual realistic and naturalistic productions coming “out of the Group Theatre’s suggestion, stimulation and actual assistance.”  The idea was spawned early in 1936 after Kurt Weill arrived in America.  The Group had become intrigued with Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, and they befriended him.  Stella Adler (1901-92) eventually suggested Weill write a musical play for the Group, and Weill proposed an American version of Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Schweik, which had been done with some success in Germany by Erwin Piscator in 1927.

Harold Clurman (1901-80) visited Paul Green, who’d written the Group’s first play, The House of Connelly (1931), at his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  While he was there, Clurman learned that Green had fought in France in World War I and “had an intimate acquaintance with the American soldier of that day.”  He passed on Weill’s proposal, and Green expressed interest.

Returning to New York, Clurman told Cheryl Crawford (1902-86), who, with Clurman  and Lee Strasberg (1901-82), made up the Group’s ruling triumvirate, that Green was the playwright for the job.  When Green definitely agreed to collaborate, Crawford and Weill went to Chapel Hill to start work on the scenario.  Crawford served as “coordinator” and the project became her “adopted child.”

Money being in short supply, the Group customarily spent the summer at an adult camp.  This time it was Pinebrook Club Camp in Nichols, Connecticut.  Clurman was named managing director of the Group, assuming authority over executive decisions.  As he and the Group tried to work out some internal problems, they awaited the arrival of the playwright who’d promised them scripts.

When Green arrived  with his script of Johnny Johnson, it was still unfinished.  It needed more work, and Green took it back to Chapel Hill.  At the summer’s end, Green returned to Pinebrook with the finished rehearsal script, and work began only a week or so before the Group moved back to New York.

The Music

The play that Paul Green wrote for Kurt Weill’s music was what he had come to call “‘symphonic drama’ . . . a ‘sounding together’ in the true meaning of the Greek word.”  From the very start, he said, “I wanted a musical score to be part of the script,” for “without music there could be no war . . . .  Music has always been an integral part of fighting.” 

Weill’s music, the first he wrote for the American stage, was based on American folk and popular songs.  It ranged over several genres, but filtered through his own European sensibilities.  It was variously described as “haunting,” “tuneful, gay and touching,” “lovely,” “seemingly careless, really profoundly sensitive,” “weird,” and “dramatic.”

The musical style itself wasn’t as striking as the way it was interwoven with the book.  A Group advertising flyer for the production explained:

While this is a play with songs, it is not a musical show.  The singing arises naturally from the situations of the imaginative story and the verses of the song flow as simply as the prose of the speech.

In  a theater more accustomed to operettas (Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Show Boat, generally considered the first American book musical, was presented only nine years earlier) and revues, such a production would doubtlessly attract attention.  The Brooklyn Eagle remarked, “All through the proceedings, the players stop at intervals to sing . . .,” and the New York Post called it “a new form in Broadway theatre . . . in that it introduces songs and incidental music regularly through the performance in an artless, haphazard manner . . . .”  The clearest description of how Weill’s music melded with Green’s script is provided by composer Marc Blitzstein:

. . . Weill has practically added a new form to the musical theatre.  It is not opera, although it partakes of the ‘number’ form of Mozart.  And it is decidedly not revue-form.  It owes something to the movies, but it is much more attached to the script.  Take the spot where the exasperated Sergeant tries to put Johnny through all the military paces, and winds up saying—“and you won’t learn, and so the hell with you!” [Act I, scene 4].  As he starts (speaking), the music insinuates itself into his speech, and his enumeration of the maneuvers gains momentum and dash by becoming rhythmical and percussive—until the final expletive, when the music drops out.

As for the performance of Weill’s music, critics nearly unanimously agreed that the Group’s actors weren’t trained singers.  The New York Sun said simply, “They act better than they sing.”  The production’s intent, however, was to present ordinary characters who sing—not professional singers.  The Group had no intention of presenting, nor did Green and Weill write, the usual sort of musical comedy.  Green intended to make the music an integral element of the play—his meaning of “symphonic drama.”  Speaking of Roll Sweet Chariot (1934), his first attempt at this kind of play, Green explained:

I found that in trying to express the inner lives and turmoilings . . . I was having to call upon nearly all the available elements in modern theatrical art . . . .  Folk song and poetry were needed here.  Likewise dance and pantomime and chorus voices.

Lehman Engel (1910-82), musical director of the production, described his encounter with the cast in rehearsal: “There were no singers in the cast, and the songs were worked on chiefly from an acting point of view.”  This, in fact, was precisely what Green wanted and what Weill had written.  As proof of this, there are two independent pieces of evidence. 

In the 1957 MGM Heliodor recording of Johnny Johnson, performers not generally known as singers were cast in the lead roles.  The record producers were probably trying to be true to the Green and Weill’s intentions using people such as Burgess Meredith (1907-97), who sang Johnny, over “legit” singers.  In addition, Lotte Lenya (1898-1981)—who was married to Kurt Weill—also sang on the record, and her unique performance style sounds unmusical to the uninitiated, as were 1936 critics. 

Even the musically knowledgeable could misjudge this new this new style, as Lehman Engel noted with some embarrassment.  He had just met the Weills, and didn’t know that Mrs. Weill was Lotte Lenya.  They were having tea at Engel’s Greenwich Village apartment:

In my desperate need to make conversation, I spoke of The Threepenny Opera with sincere enthusiasm but added that the female singer on a recording I had was terrible!  The Weills smiled indulgently and said that I must have the French recording.  No, I persisted, I had the German one.  It was then I found out that the singer was Lotte Lenya, my guest!  In my young life I held pear-shape vocal tones sacred, and it was to be many years before I could comprehend any other kind of singing.  When I did, I was to worship at the shrine of Lotte Lenya.

With this realization, it’s understandable that the Group would not bring in outside singers to enhance their vocal quality and that as “actors first and singers second, they would have delighted [Bertolt] Brecht with their lack of musical sophistication.” 

The Sets

As soon as the Group returned to New York, construction began on the scenery.  Donald Oenslager (1902-75), who’d been engaged as set designer, determined that “the first act . . . required poetic realism . . . .  The second act . . . employed expressionism . . . .  The third act . . . required distorted settings.”  There were problems, however, putting his concepts into practice. 

First, after Oenslager had made plans for the set according to his own design principles—an outgrowth of the New Stagecraft of Adolphe Appia and E. Gordon Craig—the Group directorate insisted he reconceive the production from an expressionistic point of view.  This caused some difficulty for Oenslager, who was not particularly interested in Expressionism. 

The second problem developed when Oenslager, in a hurry between appointments, left his new drawings in a drug store.  Having lost his second set of plans, he quickly drew a third set in time for construction to begin.  He felt his last-minute rush might have given his designs some serendipitous spontaneity. 

The production was out-of-the-ordinary for the Group, whose reputation had been built on Realism and Naturalism.  Johnny Johnson was “the only Group play that turned away from naturalism in all its elements . . . .”  Lee Strasberg, however, maintained that this was not as unusual as the public thought: “In many of our shows, we really used the principles of abstract art . . . .  [I]n productions like . . . Johnny Johnson, we used modern art forms.”  The overall effect of Oenslager’s “geometric setting”—which suited Green’s three-divisional script—was striking:

The warped perspective created by the exaggeratedly raked floor of the interior platform setting for this play, somewhat derivative of [Nikolai] Akimov’s work in the Soviet theatre after the First World War, helped create the mad whimsy of the play.

This, of course, was not how every critic saw it.  Blitzstein, who admired the music so much, didn’t respond to what he called “the hodgepodge scenic styles in the staging of the Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson . . . .” 

The scenery was mostly drab colors, gradations of black and white with a “sepia tint.”  The only sets with bright colors were the most starkly mad scenes: the Allied Supreme Command at the Château de Cent Fontaines, which had red, white, and gold appointments; the psychiatrist’s office, with its “red and white desk slanting at an angle of forty-five degrees . . .”; and  in the forensic arena in the insane asylum, also appointed in red and gold, and draped with American flags. 

In the remaining scenes, color was mostly absent, except for the opening celebration scene where color accent was provided by costume pieces such as ribbons and bows, mostly on the little girls.   

Furthermore, to enhance this subdued appearance, the show was spot-lit, illuminating small areas of the stage while leaving the rest in ambiguous darkness.   Even the indoor scenes had the appearance of being lit from one source that pinpointed a particular spot on the set, such as the psychiatrist’s raked desk, with the rest of the stage in increasing shadows receding into darkness.

This shadow effect was exaggerated by the vast stage at the 44th Street Theatre.  By all estimations, the theater was too big for the show.  The large musical house, with its 20- by 30-foot proscenium opening, necessitated that Oenslager design sets too big for the play.  Even with the vast sets, however, the stage area had to be reduced for what was primarily an intimate show, and this was done with lighting, enhancing the ambiguity of the space surrounding the performers.

The Rehearsals

Shortly after returning to New York, Clurman found that his duties as managing director as well as some personal difficulties were overwhelming, and he relinquished the directorship of Johnny Johnson to Lee Strasberg.  Rehearsals had already begun at Pinebrook with the Group’s usual discussions about meaning and content with Green and Weill, who were both in residence by this time.  Sessions continued in New York at the Belmont Theatre, a small house on 48th Street, with improvisations and experimentation.

The Group acting style, a heightened Realism, had by this time been set, and Strasberg saw no cause to develop a different style for Johnny Johnson.  (It’s worth noting here that Strasberg was one of the principle developers of the Stanislavsky-derived acting style known as the Method.)  Sam Leve (1908-99), Oenslager’s former student at the Yale School of Drama and assistant for Johnny Johnson, recalled that though the sets and physical production were heavily expressionistic, the acting, for the most part, was realistic.  In fact, only the “eccentrics” of the play were in any way exaggerated—the High Command, the psychiatrist, and the Brothers in the asylum debating society.

The music, too, was rehearsed in the Group’s usual manner.  Lehman Engel recalled:

The preparation of Johnny was unique among musical shows,  Since it was done with actors saturated in the Stanislavsky Method according to the gospel of Lee Strasberg, the show was studied, improvised, and dissected for  period of about three months prior to the beginning of actual rehearsals.

Many of the songs, in fact, were not even assigned to specific actors until just before performances began.  The whole cast learned and rehearsed the score, except a few songs that had been specifically written for certain performers, such as Private Harwood’s “Cowboy Song: The Rio Grande,” which had been written for Tony Kraber (1905-86).

The ensemble work that the Group had established over the five years of their existence was evident in their rehearsals, as well as the subsequent performances.  Again, Lehman Engel recalled that the company members “were especially considerate of each other’s neuroses and idiosyncrasies, which were legion.”

Then the production moved from the 500-seat Belmont to the 1400-seat 44th Street Theatre.  Lehman Engel described the consequences:

I recall one dress rehearsal when the actors had to encounter Donald Oenslager’s scenery for the first time.  The chief problem suddenly became one of self-preservation in climbing out of World War I trenches and of making costume changes with no allowable time.  The acting problem then became secondary despite the protest of the director.

In this state, Johnny Johnson went into previews.

The Previews

The show was conceived and rehearsed on an intimate scale.  Spectators at Belmont rehearsals were “very moved.”  In the smaller theater, “the production seemed charming: informal, unpretentious and sweet.”  But the company had no choice—only the 44th Street Theatre was available.  Johnny Johnson moved in and was “suddenly dwarfed and the light-handed informality of the performance lost its effectiveness.” 

Clurman’s fears of the effects of the larger theater were borne out: “Our actors’ voices sounded so small they were occasionally inaudible; Donald Oenslager’s sets . . . now appeared monstrous; the performances now looked amateurish.” 

The move to an unfamiliar space, the large set—19 scenes—and the Group’s financial problems all conspired to make the previews a disaster.  The orchestra was under-rehearsed, the actors got lost; “after the first five minutes . . . half the audience left.  By the end of the performance there were no more than twenty people in the auditorium.”

The opening was delayed for two days.  Musical numbers were cut and sets were abandoned (“New York Harbor” and “A road somewhere in France”).  The company stayed up every night till early morning “polishing, cutting and revising . . . .”  According to Clurman, the show improved each night, and by opening night had gone from 19 scenes to 13.  Clurman was astounded: “The performance went smoothly, and the audience appeared wildly enthusiastic.” 

The Response

The press response to Johnny Johnson ”was critically favorable, but discouraged all but the cognoscenti from seeing it.”  The audiences, however, generally enjoyed the show so much, many returned several times.  In the words of the New York Post reviewer, the audience “stood up and whooped loud applause for a good ten minutes . . . when the curtain fell on the opening of ‘Johnny Johnson’ . . . .”  Paul Green came out on stage to more applause, and Clifford Odets, Walter Huston, and Burgess Meredith were “overheard bellylaughing at the gags.” 

Of course, not everyone was this enthusiastic.  Some didn’t care for the comedy that ran through the play.  Some found the play touching; some laughed at the humor.  One reviewer said that “like a revue-goer, you enjoy some [scenes] and are bored stiff by others.”

The Performance

The diversity and strength of the reactions from both reviewers and theatergoers was due as much to the production’s uniqueness as to its quality.  Paul Green’s new form—the “symphonic drama”; Kurt Weill’s “non-musical” score; the ingenuousness of the performance, particularly the singing; and the three-styled expressionistic sets combined to make an event unprecedented on Broadway.  Like it or not, it was different.  In a promotional piece, Lee Strasberg wrote:

We meant to do an American folk legend, full of the humors of old vaudeville and the provincial family album, sharpened with poetic comments on the madness of contemporary life.  We felt that fantasy, extravagance, and dramatic music were intrinsic to such an exciting and ambitious experiment.

An advertising flyer for the show concluded that “the Group Theatre believes Johnny Johnson to be the most unusual and entertaining play it has presented thus far.”  There’s little doubt this was the case.

Paul Green’s attempt to combine various theatrical elements while juxtaposing dramatic genres didn’t always sit well with spectators.  The New York Post complained that “the play . . . leaps from straight drama to the maddest sort of farce and hence into pure fantasy with great abandon.” 

Others found the mélange pleasing: “The piece is built of dialogue, movement, scene, music, all together.  It is a promising—and needed—example of theatre that passes from one to the other of these with equal ease.” 

Despite the diversity of material and the number of scene-changes—which rose from 12 to 13 between opening and closing—an attempt was obviously made to keep the production in motion.    An unidentified reviewer in a weekly review of current plays called Margaret Wentworth's Sign Post remarked on the “quick-changing scenes” and Douglas Gilbert of the New York World said, “Lee Strasberg has staged the piece with a feverish continuity that matches the script.” 

The show’s pace seems due in part to a revolving set.  Though no reviewer mentioned this fact, the Alfredo Valente photographs of the set and Donald Oenslager’s floor-plans clearly show a turntable.  The sets shown in the drawings were specifically designed for a revolve with several back-to-back scenes indicated. 

Oenslager’s sketches suggest that sets were changed behind a blind—a painted backdrop, simple drape, or tall piece of constructed scenery—while a scene was in progress on the other side.  Sam Leve confirmed that this was the case.

What the audience saw was a central set piece—ranging from the complete, realistic front porch of the Tompkins home in Act I, scene 2, to a simple ramp with a painted backdrop for the camp drill-ground in Act I, scene 5—with the rest of the stage closed off by returns and two sets of wings.

In more complex sets, such as the porch, the recruiting office (Act I, scene 3), and the front-line trench (Act II, scene 1), small set pieces were run out from the wings.  It’s obvious from this set-up why spot-lighting was both necessary and desirable to close down the huge stage of the 44th Street Theatre.

The scenes changed so quickly that Russell Collins (1897-1965), who played Johnny, couldn’t completely change from his civilian costume in Act I, scene 3, to a full uniform in scene 4.  Photographs clearly show he was still wearing his civilian trousers under his military tunic until Act II.  It’s possible that some scenes might have revolved into view as the previous scene was ending.  Some photographs of Act I, scene 1, are taken with the scene 2 front porch in the background.

(This isn’t confirmed by any source.  Another explanation, perhaps more likely, is that some photographs of this scene weren’t taken in performance, and for one reason or another were shot before the scene 2 set.  Remember, though, that Lehman Engel recalled actors “making costume changes with no allowable time” in dress rehearsal.)

The acting, as has already been suggested, was primarily realistic.  Like Sam Leve, who witnessed several rehearsals, critics found this detracted from the performance when too much Realism “inhibited freedom of treatment”: “A certain heaviness was apparent in the production of Johnny Johnson, and despite the fine fantastication of Lee Strasberg’s production idea many performances seemed slack and pedestrian.”  The most blatant indictment of this problem came from John Mason Brown, who felt the Group Theatre’s actors

. . . set about the business of being funny with as much self-consciousness as if they were . . . a Greek chorus . . . . 

They reach for the ridiculous with a grim seriousness which does not add to the lightness of the lighter portions of “Johnny Johnson.”  They are all desperately in earnest.

The play opened on the dedication of Johnny’s monument to peace.  The script describes the scene: “The ground is covered with a carpet of green grass, and at the right a quaint young arbor-vitae tree is growing.”  Photographs of this scene show little of such realistic touches.  A certain backdrop bisected the turntable, and except for the Mayor’s bunting-draped “soap-box,” the stage was bare.  Several shots of this scene, including the Mayor speaking from his soap-box, and the confrontation of Johnny and Minny Belle with his rival Anguish Howington, were taken in front of the porch set for scene 2.  There was no documented explanation of this occurrence.

The porch setting was apparently substituted for the living room location described in the script.  The little evidence afforded by photographic records indicates the scene proceeded predictably in all other respects.  Both the setting and performances appeared essentially realistic in detail. 

The same was true of scene 3 in the recruiting office, except that the office was number 596673 in performance, instead of 18659 as indicated in the script.  (This change was apparently also made after the previews, as the 17 November program used the same number as the script; the opening-night program made the alteration.)  

Scene 4 seems to have been added in performance (or deleted from the published script).  It was set at an army training ground:

But the army takes [Johnny].  Then we see him being made into a soldier.  He can’t learn very well because the regulations sound silly to him, and besides he’s left-handed.  Everything is harder in the Army for a left-hander . . . .  He is finally taken off to war, against the better judgement of the whole army, because he seems to have won more favors from a favor-dispensing woman war worker than his sergeant and his captain.

The set for the scene was a virtually bare stage, with a raked platform across the center of the turntable, bisected by a drop painted with a row of military barracks.

The Statue of Liberty scene, originally scene 4, was cut after previews but reinstated sometime during the show’s run as Act I, scene 5.  In the scene, after Johnny sang a declaration of his peaceful intentions and his faithfulness to Minny Belle (“Johnny’s Speech”) to the Statue, the Statue sang a response of haunting sentiment (“Song of the Goddess”).  The song was omitted from the published version and there are no photographs of the scene.

In Act II, the first scene, set on “A road somewhere in France,” was apparently cut as a separate set, and the moment—virtually without dialogue, but with a column of wounded French soldiers returning from the front (“Song of the Wounded”)—was performed as part of the next scene, “The front line trench.”  In this new scene 1, an English Sergeant sang about “Tea.”  The program and published script list Jules (later John) Garfield (1913-52) as having played the part. 

As photographs clearly show, and Kraber clearly remembered, the role was played by Luther Adler (1903-84), and at least one reviewer recorded this reaction to the moment: “. . . and one perfectly atrocious [performance] by the Group’s best actor, Luther Adler.  He is for a few terrible moments a Cockney sergeant.”  The scene ended with Johnny in the trench with his company, who “. . . writhe their limbs in troubled sleep. [while] three great cannon bathed in green light rise over the parapet, and ghoulishly croak a lament . . . .”

In the hospital (Act II, scene 3, in production; scene 4 in the script), the set was minimal: a folding screen and a hospital bed set on the forward quarter of the turntable backed by the same drape used to divide the stage in Act I, scene 1.  The rest of the space appears ambiguous, though one photograph shows empty beds protruding from behind the drape divider.

The Château de Cent Fontaines (Act II, scene 4), set of the Allied Supreme Command, was the first brightly colored set in the show.  A very stylized drop of red and gold panels and a set piece resembling a large fan at the center rear formed the back “wall” of the set, bisecting the turntable.  The commanders all sat in plush-covered chairs of ornate design as they outbid each other for the number of casualties their forces would suffer.  There was an apparent attempt to make the actors in this scene look like their historical counterparts—although the characters are not named either in the script or in the program.

The scene designated in the scripts and the preview program as scene 7 didn’t exist as a separate scene by opening.  It may have been incorporated into the previous scene (“The edge of a great battlefield”).  This scene was a striking visual and musical moment that Charles Dexter of the Daily Worker described: “. . . in the climax, an English [sic – the script and program both say “American”] and a German minister [pray] as the bayonettes flash in the dark . . . .” 

In fact, the two priests chant and sing the same prayer in counterpoint, each in his own language.  (Only the English version of the prayer is in the published script, though the stage directions indicate that the German Priest utters the prayer in German.)  By opening night, this was the last scene in Act II.  The second New York Harbor scene was dropped and remained deleted throughout the run.

Act III opened in the State Hospital in the office of Dr. Mahodan: “. . . The examining psychiatrist was barricaded behind an enormous, crazily-aslant table and, as played by [Morris] Carnovsky [1897-1992] with deliberately jerky and angular gestures and body movements, seemed decidedly crazier than the patient . . . .”  This was the second scene with bright colors.  The raked red-and-white desk, placed in the set’s left front corner (on the turntable), sloped from five feet on the rear left down to three inches at center stage.  The lighting was very bright only on the desk; the rest of the set dimmed considerably.

The third colorful scene was Act III, scene 2, set in “the forensic arena in the house of balm.”  The set, with its sharply angled rear wall, was festooned with flags and brightly lit.  As the Adelphi Debating Society engaged in its discussion “Albert Van Deckers [sic - Dekkers] . . . as a mad gentleman . . . knits while the Senate is in session . . . .”

Finally released from the asylum, Johnny was reduced to selling toys “along a street symbolically leading nowhere.”  The stage was very dimly lit and nearly bare, with only a banistered flight of steps at the front right and an unlit lamppost at the front left.  The light seemed to have emanated from off stage in the rear right corner, leaving the playing area in deep shadows.

The floor plan of the scene shows the slanting rear wall was the same as the walls of Act III, scenes 1 and 2.  It bisected the turntable from eight o’clock to two o’clock in all three scenes, giving further evidence of the use of the revolving stage.

The play’s final moment is indicative of how blackouts were used between the many scenes:

The Paul Green-Kurt Weill musical Johnny Johnson borrows the [Charlie] Chaplin fade-out as its hero, momentarily defeated, goes off whistling, “a little more clearly now, a little more bravely” or (on the record) singing “We’ll never lose our faith and hope and trust in all mankind . . . .”

Conclusion

Visually, thematically, and musically unusual, Johnny Johnson was undoubtedly a controversial event, even among those who simply didn’t care for it.  It spawned discussion among leftists, pacifists, humanists, and adherents of many other causes and philosophies, each espousing Johnny Johnson’s point of view as their own.  Audiences were less confused by the play than critics: “Almost everyone who saw Johnny Johnson was charmed by it. . . .  [I]t had a subtlety and wit which were thoroughly engaging.”

Had the theater been smaller, the success of the production would probably have been assured, not only from a financial standpoint, but a critical one as well: “In a theatre suited to its scale, it would have come across with much greater bite; on that huge stage, it seemed weak.”  (Kraber estimated that the production came within $1,000 of its “nut” every week.  They just couldn’t fill the 1,463 seats of the 44th Street Theatre.

Johnny Johnson was an excellent example of Paul Green’s feeling that “The narrow confines of the usual Broadway play are not fitted to the dramatic needs of the American people.  They cannot contain the richness of our tradition, folkways, singing, dancing and poetry.”  It’s ironic that the thing most responsible for Johnny Johnson’s failure wasn’t a theater too small to contain it, but one too big for it to fill.

[The original production of the Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson included a number of company members who went on to become well known on stage and on film.  Among these, in addition to those named in the article above, were Phoebe Brand (1907-2004), Lee J. Cobb (1911-76), Elia Kazan (1909-2003), Will Lee (1908-82), and Sanford Meisner (1905-97).

[After the original 1936-37 production of Johnny Johnson by the Group Theatre, there were several revivals of the play.  From 21 October through 28 October 1956, there was an Off-Broadway production presented at the Little Carnegie Playhouse at Carnegie Hall directed by Stella Adler and starring, among others, James Broderick as Johnny Johnson and Gene Saks as the Mad Psychiatrist.  A Broadway revival directed by José Quintero opened, after 10 previews, on 11 April 1971 at the Edison Theatre, and closed after one performance.  The cast included Ralph Williams as Johnny and Alice Cannon as Minny Belle.

[Johnny Johnson was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company on 6-15 August 1986 at the Almeida Theatre, London, directed by Paul Marcus.  In 2009, a concert version was staged in London by the Discovering Lost Musicals Charitable Trust, with Max Gold in the title role.

[The ReGroup Theatre Company presented two staged readings of the play directed by Estelle Parsons at the 47th Street Theatre in New York on 12 December 2011.  In November 1956, the MGM recording I mentioned above (which was unrelated to the contemporaneous Off-Broadway staging) was released and in November 1996, Erato Records released another album of Weill’s score for Johnny Johnson.

[I’ve written a little about this research and the writing of the report twice before on ROT.  First, because it was my first published essay, I included it in my discussion “Writing,” posted on 9 April 2010; then I included it in a compilation I called “Short Takes: Research Coups” on 5 August 2011 because I made  a  discovery in my research—Oenslager’s use of a turntable in the set design.]

'The Hairy Ape'

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.”