'Judgment Day'

Performances at the Park Avenue Armory, also known since 2015 as the Thompson Arts Center, are more than just play productions, as you may see from my report on Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape from two seasons ago (18 April 2017) and before that, Théâtre du Soleil’s Les Éphémères (15 July 2009).  Productions at the Armory are either conceived for that huge, open space (the 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall) or specially adapted to it.  And when the director is someone like Richard Jones, who mounted The Hairy Ape and clearly knows how to use the space, it can be extraordinary.  (I included a very brief historical description of the Park Avenue Armory in my report on the art installation Drill, posted on Rick On Theater on 15 July 2019.)

So when I read that Jones, a British theater and opera director, was returning to the Armory for another production, my ears pricked up.  I wanted to know more.

On offer was the world première of a new adaptation (by 44-year-old Obie Award-winning American playwright Christopher Shinn, a Pulitzer Prize finalist) of Austro-Hungarian playwright and novelist Ödön von Horváth’s (1901-38) 1937 play Judgment Day (Der jüngste Tag), I was interested.  The whole package was intriguing.

I’d had a taste of Jones’s work and was interested in seeing more.  I’d been hearing about Shinn a lot lately, a theater artist who falls into that group called “emerging”—not quite famous yet, but on the verge.  All I knew about Horváth was his name, but there’s something fascinating about him.  He had the air of a ground-breaker, an iconoclast.  He was vaguely like Georg Büchner (1813-37) or Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), theater innovators who were poised to make a splash and then died young, leaving a handful of remarkable plays and unfulfilled promise.  (Büchner died of typhus at 23, but Mayakovsky died an apparent suicide at 36.  Horváth died in a freak accident at 37.)

So, I brought the production to the attention of Diana, the friend with whom I usually go to theater—I’m supposed to be touting her onto unusual productions—and we booked it for 8 p.m. on Friday, 3 January—our first show of the new year.  It was an excellent decision—Judgment Day was a fascinating experience. 

As you might guess, Horváth’s plays—he left about 18, maybe half of them available in English translation—are not frequently produced in this country.  Aside from the Armory’s Judgment Day, in New York City, I found only two productions of Don Juan Comes Back from the War (1936) Off-Broadway in 1979 and 1986.  I didn’t do a thorough search—he might be popular in regional rep companies, though I doubt it, or college and university theaters (more likely), but I can say that his name hasn’t otherwise arisen on the pro or semi-pro theater (Off-Off-Broadway) scene here in the 46 years I’ve been in New York.

Abroad, however, there has been something of a resurgence of interest in Horváth’s work.  In 2009, for instance, the Almeida Theatre in London staged Judgment Day in a translation by playwright Christopher Hampton (Total Eclipse, 1967; Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 1985) directed by James Macdonald.  Richard Jones himself previously directed Tales from the Vienna Woods, Horváth’s best known play, at London’s National Theatre in 2003, and in 2013, Berlin’s Deutsches Theater staged Tales. 

Last April in Berlin, the Maxim Gorki Theater presented an adaptation by Swiss writer Tina Müller of Horváth’s novel, 1937’s Youth Without God staged by Turkish director Nurkan Erpulat.  Last Summer, another staging of the novel by Thomas Ostermeier was seen at the Salzburg Festival in Austria and in 2018, an earlier production was mounted in Stuttgart.  That same year, Faith, Hope and Charity was presented in Vienna.

A three-act German opera adapted from Der jüngste Tag composed by Giselher Klebe (1925-2009) premièred in 1980 in Mannheim, Germany; the composer’s wife, Lore Klebe (1924-2001), wrote the libretto based on Horváth’s play.  English translations of Horváth’s text of Judgment Day are published in Judgment Day (Faber & Faber, 2009), translated by Christopher Hampton (b. 1946); and Ödon von Horváth: Plays (PAJ Publications, 1986); Judgment Day is translated by Martin and Renate Esslin.  Christopher Shinn’s adaptation of Judgment Day was released by Methuen Drama in 2019

Richard Jones’s Judgment Day was commissioned by the Park Avenue Armory—that is to say, the Armory commissioned Jones’s next project following the success of The Hairy Ape and he selected Judgment Day and got Shinn (Dying City, Where Do We Live?, and Now or Later) to make the adaptation.  It’s the Armory’s first foray into producing from the get-go; future commissioned projects will include work from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage (Ruined, 2009; Sweat, 2017) and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (twice Pulitzer-Prize finalist for Gloria, 2016, and Everybody, 2018).  The world première of the new Judgment Day started previews on 5 December 2019 at the Armory and opened on 11 December; the production closed on 10 January 2020.

Born Edmund Josef von Horváth on 9 December 1901 in what is now Croatia (then part of Austria-Hungary) into an aristocratic Hungarian family, the playwright and novelist, who wrote in German, lived in Berlin and Vienna during the 1920s and ’30s.  He preferred the Hungarian version of his first name and published as Ödön von Horváth.  In 1931, he was awarded the Kleist Prize for Tales from the Vienna Wood, Horváth’s most successful and best known play.  The Kleist Prize was the most prestigious literary honor in Weimar Germany, discontinued after 1933.

Horváth witnessed at first hand the rise of Nazism and his plays often explore popular culture, politics, and history, with a particular focus on fascism and its dangers.  Written on the eve of World War II, Der jüngste Tag (sometimes translated as The Last Day) is set in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.  That year, Horváth left Berlin and returned to Austria.  A prolific writer of plays and novels, Horváth’s works were banned when the Nazis came to power.  

Horváth’s last play (some sources say his next-to-last, but I can’t find one later), Judgment Day has been seen as an allegory for the indoctrination of Nazi ideology; it was published in 1937, a year before Austria’s Anschluss (annexation) with Germany.  The writer lived in a fraught part of the world at a particularly fraught time, and I suspect his plays, especially Judgment Day, manifest that. 

Of course, I am working through a filter—Shinn’s adaptation—so I may be misperceiving the evidence.  Indeed, the adaptor remarked that, though Horváth died at just 36, “As I adapted Judgment Day, he felt older to me—his dark, wry vision is startlingly mature.”  Shinn added that this play “still feels ahead of us in revealing who we are and where we might be headed.”

Horváth fled Austria after the Anschluss in 1938 and moved to Paris.  On 1 June 1938, he was struck by a falling tree limb and killed on the Champs-Élysées during a thunderstorm.  He was buried in Paris, but in 1988, on the 50th anniversary of his death, his remains were transferred to Vienna and reinterred. 

Christopher Shinn was born in 1975 in Hartford, Connecticut, and raised in Wethersfield; he currently lives in New York City.  He’s the author of Dying City (2007, Lincoln Center; 2008 Pulitzer Prize finalist), Where Do We Live? (2004, Vineyard Theatre; 2005 Obie Award for Playwriting), and Now or Later (2008, Royal Court, London; Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Play shortlist), among other plays.  The Royal Court Theatre in London produced his first play, Four, in 1998, garnering rave reviews. 

His most recent play, Against, had its world première at London’s Almeida Theatre in 2017, starring Ben Whishaw.  A revival of Dying City at Second Stage in New York City, directed by the playwright, ran from 4 to 30 June 2019. 

His plays have also been premièred by the Royal Court Theatre, Lincoln Center Theater, Donmar Warehouse, Goodman Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, Roundabout Theatre Company, Playwrights Horizons, Vineyard Theatre, South Coast Repertory, Soho Theatre (London), and Hartford Stage. 

Shinn graduated from New York University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Dramatic Writing in 1997.  A Guggenheim Fellow, he teaches playwriting at the New School.  His work is published in the U.S. by the Theatre Communications Group and in the U.K. by Methuen.

In a 2013 Los Angeles Times article about Shinn, Rob Weinert-Kendt, editor-in-chief of American Theatre and a theater writer for numerous national publications, explained, “If playwright Christopher Shinn has a signature character, it is the manipulative victim—the half-sympathetic, half-deplorable sort of person whose suffering is real but who uses it as rationale for bad behavior.”  

This description fits the playwright’s depiction of Stationmaster Thomas Hudetz, the central character of Judgment Day.  Whether the Hudetz on view at the Park Avenue Armory is Shinn’s creation or whether the adaptor adopted him from Horváth’s original is irrelevant: Shinn is working in familiar territory.

In the same article, Shinn was very explicit about his dramatic focus:

We’re living in a time where people think of themselves as victims, whether they’re oppressed or the oppressor, whether they’re doing violence or violence is being done to them.  This is what compels me and keeps me going: I’m so sympathetic to the way trauma shapes people, but as a dramatist I’m also interested in questions of agency and responsibility.

This is precisely what Jones’s production of Judgment Day explores.  It sounds to me as if Jones found his perfect collaborator in Shinn—and perhaps, at least for Judgment Day, Horváth’s doppelgänger.

Shinn’s version of Judgment Day, rendered from a literal translation (by Tessa Keimes-Kin and Susan Salms-Moss), is performed in one 90-minute act divided into seven scenes.  The year of the setting isn’t specified in the program, but the clothing worn by the characters and the use of Frakturschrift (sometimes called the “German alphabet,” the official typeset of the German-speaking world until 1941, when it was abandoned by the Nazi government) for all signs and banners on the set put the period in the mid-to-late ’30s. 

Other aspects of the clothing—dirndls for some of the young women, shorts with long socks and short, sturdy boots for some men—suggest southern Germany or Austria (the costume design was by Antony McDonald); the mix of German (Frau Liemgruber, Herr Koller) and Hungarian (Thomas Hudetz, Pokorny) names pinpoints the locale as most likely Austria.  (Late in the play, a wanted poster offers a reward of 1,000 schillings, the former currency of Austria—except for the World War II period—before the euro was introduced.  Germany’s currency in the 1930s was the Reichsmark)

At the train station in a small Austrian town (Scene I), several prospective passengers are waiting for the delayed train. Frau Liemgruber (Harriet Harris), the town gossip, and a local lumberjack (Andy Murray) are sharing rumors about their fellow townsfolk with a traveling salesman (Jason O’Connell).  

The station manager, Thomas Hudetz (Emmy Award-winner Luke Kirby of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), a dutiful civil servant, is on duty.  Frau Hudetz (Alyssa Bresnahan) says goodbye to her brother, Alfons (Henry Stram), the town pharmacist, who was visiting her.  She complains about her husband.  

The waiting passengers gossip and Frau Liemgruber is pleased to tell everyone that Frau Hudetz is 13 years older than her husband and that he no longer goes anywhere in town, but stays in the station, where the couple have a comfortable apartment overlooking the tracks with a view of the surrounding forest.  

A couple of express trains hurtle through the station (portrayed by flashing lights and the loud sound of a speeding train, courtesy of lighting designer Mimi Jordan Sherin and sound designer Drew Levy) and the stationmaster throws the lever that sends the all-clear signal down the track.  Fearing they might be late, a young man, Ferdinand (Alex Breaux), a butcher from a nearby town, arrives in a rush with his coquettish fiancée, Anna (Susannah Perkins), whom he’s been visiting. 

When the local arrives and all the passengers board and the train leaves, Anna, who’s the innkeeper’s daughter, starts flirting with Hudetz and finally kisses him.  Frau Hudetz watches the scene from their apartment window. Another express train passes and the station manager, distracted by Anna’s advances, forgets to give the caution signal.  There’s a horrendous collision with a freight train down the track.  Eighteen people, including the train driver, Pokorny, are killed; several more are injured, like the stoker (George Merrick).

At the scene of the accident (Scene II), people are gawking and the police start the investigation.  A drumhead tribunal is set up at the base of a viaduct and the injured stoker swears to the prosecutor (Maurice Jones) that his train driver has never run through a signal.  Hudetz repeats that he’s “always been a diligent official” and that he’s not to blame.  Anna testifies in his favor, but Frau Hudetz charges her husband with lying.  Hudetz is arrested.

Four months later (Scene III), a reception is being prepared in The Wild Man inn to celebrate Hudetz’s acquittal and release from jail.  (In German, the inn’s name is Der Wilde Mann, which can also be translated as The Savage Man or The Crazy Man.)  The waitress, Leni (Jeena Yi), is hanging a banner saying “Willkommen Herr Stationsvorstand” (Welcome Mr. Station Manager) as the innkeeper (Tom McGowan) makes the preparations for the party.  

Hudetz is wheeled into the inn in triumph, standing in a railroad luggage cart—like a Roman hero in a chariot—with banners on the sides reading “Herzlich Willkommen” (Hearty Welcome).  At Anna’s urging, Hudetz agrees to meet her at the viaduct the next evening.  

Alfons, Frau Hudetz’s brother, comes to the inn to talk to his brother-in-law.  He’s become a pariah in town because of his sister’s betrayal of Hudetz and is almost attacked by the gathered party-goers who’ve turned into a vengeful mob, but Hudetz stands up for him.

The next evening, Hudetz waits for Anna at the base of the viaduct (Scene IV).  A policeman (Charles Brice) atop the overpass calls down to him in a challenge.  When he recognizes Hudetz, the guard warns the stationmaster of roaming Gypsies.  Anna appears and expresses remorse over her perjury and because of the train accident for which she feels partly responsible.  As the two cast huge silhouettes against the monumental viaduct, she tells Hudetz that she loves him.

In the inn (Scene V), Hudetz drinks a glass of wine, contrary to his habit.  Anna has gone missing; Leni, the waitress, is worried.  The policeman brings the news that Anna was found dead at the viaduct.  Hudetz, now suspected of murdering Anna, hastily sets off to hide from the search parties.  

Frau Liemgruber, shopping at Alfons’s pharmacy, talks about Anna’s funeral (Scene VI).  She’s brought along a photo of her dead body.  She also reports that Hudetz is the suspect.  But Alfons doesn’t want to take part in the gossip.

Frau Hudetz now lives with her brother in his apartment above the pharmacy.  While the two are eating, Hudetz shows up.  He’s being hounded and wants to flee, but he can’t hide in his railroad uniform.  He asks Alfons for a suit.  When he discovers the picture that Frau Liemgruber left behind of Anna lying dead, he runs out without the suit.

The entire town—both men and women, many carrying rifles—is out hunting down Hudetz  The innkeeper and Ferdinand, Anna’s fiancée, are with the police looking for Hudetz near the site of the train accident (Scene VII).  Alfons reports that his brother-in-law had been at his apartment.  The search of the viaduct is shifted to the accident site.  

Pokorny (Jones), the locomotive driver, and a trackworker (O’Connell), two fatalities of the accident, appear to  Hudetz.  They encourage him to kill himself, but the spirit of Anna appears and tries to persuade him to live.  When the police come back, Hudetz faces his arrest. 

We never learn how Anna died, whether she committed suicide over her false support for Hudetz in the accident inquiry or whether the station manager killed her to keep her from recanting her testimony or whether someone else, like Frau Hudetz, who was jealous of her youth and her attraction for Hudetz, killed her.  The play never reveals the truth.

I haven’t entirely come to grips with Horváth’s play—or Shinn’s rendering of it.  The adaptor himself finds that it’s “very hard to know what the play was saying. There’s no character that you can look at as a stabilising point.”  Shinn continued: “It feels like our society is without a centre. Nobody quite knows where to look for how it will get better.”

But Jones’s production is astonishing.  It’s stunning.  (Talk about the opposite of “simple setting,” as my friend Kirk Woodward writes about in “Gospel of John in Stage,” posted on ROT on 11 January.)  There’s not a lot of scenery, but what there is hardly “simple.”  Wait and see (assuming I can describe it accurately!  That’ll be a challenge.)

The play is peculiar—at least in the adaptation—but deceptively so.  It looks at first encounter like a typical translation from German of a pre-World War II script—a little stilted, tinged with German Expressionism, but fundamentally Realistic.  (The production picked up a number of little “Germanisms” that rang especially true—like what I saw in the film The Big Lift about which I blogged on 13 August 2017: little formal bows people made when greeting or departing from one another, for instance, or the small leather pouch the waitress at the inn had at her waist for collecting payment or making change—such identifiably German cultural things.)   It turns out that it’s not so simple—at least not in Christopher Shinn’s version.  

Judgment Day’s physical production is more than just a performing environment.  I don’t want to give the impression that the set is more important somehow than the acting or the writing, but I will venture that it’s an equal partner.  Theater and opera scenic designer Paul Steinberg created a monumental set, towering at over 25 feet high. 

When we enter the Drill Hall, we’re confronted with a huge, wooden structure facing the seats.  Diana and I were on the far left of the first row, so the wall, which stretched all the way across the front of the bleachers, was only a few feet in front of us.  This is the train station and platform; the tracks would have been under us and there’s a door to the office in the wall on our left, a ticket window (“Fahrkarten”) just to the door’s right and a window, which turns out to be the Hudetzes’ apartment, high up on the far right.  The fateful levers for the train signals are on the platform at the left end, almost in front of where Diana and I were sitting.

We were so close that I felt a little uncomfortable, thinking that if any scenes took place at the right end of the set, we’d have to strain to see them.  The wall’s already extreme height was greatly exaggerated by our closeness to it.  Diana asked if I thought the set was going to move, and I figured it was—little did I know—because it appeared to be flat—that is, two-dimensional—looked as if it were sitting on wheels, and was encircled on the sides and back by trees which would only be truly visible if the wall weren’t there.

As I observed, the Drill Hall is lined on three sides by a forest of trees—some flat, cut-out silhouettes and others look like unsold Christmas trees—shrouded in ground-hugging fog.  A huge, ominous clock hangs above it all in the rear of the space, lit like the moon.  The floor of the Drill Hall, as big as a quarter of a Manhattan city block, is covered in a glossy, black material, making the set seem to be gliding on black ice.  This gave the performance an air of a dream—perhaps a nightmare.

After Scene I, the wall moves around the space by means of a hydraulic cart driven by a stagehand.  Another architectural set piece, the arch of a viaduct, also moves into place.  The company of 17 also moves onto the stage at the same time, moving in large groups, sort of marching (but not quite like soldiers) between the sliding wooden behemoths. 

My thought was that the technical rehearsals for Judgment Day must have been something to see—and that the production must have begun rehearsing the scene changes—there are six of them—from the very first day.  Not just the actors, but the set pieces, described by Helen Shaw of Vulture and New York magazine as “like a giant’s building blocks,” really had to be choreographed by movement director Anjali Mehra (for the actors), and production stage manager Lisa Iacucci and stage manager Janet Takami (for the set pieces).

Angled obliquely for Scenes III and V, the long wall, with the addition of a blond wooden bar, becomes the back of The Wild Man inn, with the viaduct in place perpendicular to it as a sort of tunnel leading to the inn.  In Scene VI, the wall opens like a pop-up book to reveal the two-story interior of Alfons’s pharmacy downstairs and apartment above.  The set pieces, in a way, are two giant characters in the play.  (I can see how this might get in the way of the performance, and some reviewers felt it did, but I didn’t.  On the other hand, as I’ve confessed before, I’m a sucker for theatricality.)

Mimi Jordan Sherin’s lighting does more than create the illusion of speeding trains with the help of strobe lights—an excellent conceit, incidentally: effective in a practical sense and, at the same time, artistically and theatrically satisfying.  (And, since Diana and I were seated right where the “train” was traveling, it was also a teeny bit scary—especially the first time.)  Since Jones’s production leans toward Expressionism—I’ll address how I think this applies to the acting shortly—Sherin’s lighting adds to this stylistic choice.  Some scenes, like the train depot, The Wild Man inn, and Alfons’s pharmacy, are bright, almost blazing, and mostly white. 

These contrast with scenes like the viaduct, the crash site, streets, which are shadowy and gloomy, somewhat menacing.  The background of the forest, where occasionally spooky figures lurk, are always in semi-darkness so that, with the shiny black ground, it creates the impression that the town is isolated from the rest of the world, like a sinister Brigadoon.

Sound designer Drew Levy, like Sherin, contributes to the passing-train effect, a significant contribution to the production considering how the railroad, the trains, the viaduct, and the crash loom over the town and its citizens.  (If the set is another character in Jones’s Judgment Day, then so is the invisible train.) 

The Armory’s Judgment Day has two sound designers; the other one, Daniel Kluger, is also responsible for the music.  Though, like a movie sound track, the production’s musicscape uses various period-evoking types of music, the most prominent is the oompah sound of German traditional music.  It’s so identified with Germany and Austria that it inevitably establishes a cultural milieu. 

(When oompah music is played in The Wild Man, I was immediately transported back to the early-1960s in Koblenz, Germany, when my teenaged friends and I used to hang out sometimes at a restaurant/Weinstube called the Weindorf—literally ‘wine village’—where that kind of music was the regular accompaniment.  It was positively Proustian!  I wrote about this eatery in “An American Teen in Germany, Part 2,” 12 March 2013)

I’ve delayed writing about the Horváth/Shinn play as long as I can now.  As I said earlier, it’s deceptively straightforward, for all intents and purposes the story of a horrific train accident near a small town for which the local stationmaster is blamed.  He’s exonerated on the perjured testimony of a young woman who’s later tortured over her lie.  When she’s found dead, the stationmaster is accused of her murder.  It’s almost Hitchcockian—a sort of The 39 Steps with psychological overtones and a film noir dynamic.

But the twist, dramatically speaking, is that the townspeople develop a mob mentality that’s flexible: they fit up anyone who threatens their collective sense of moral responsibility, irrespective of its validity.  At first, the town backs Hudetz in his claim of innocence, supported by Anna’s testimony that he pulled the signal lever on time as always. 

They never liked Frau Hudetz (“a really hateful woman,” says Frau Liemgruber) whom they consider an older woman who seduced a young man (“the most wonderful man”) and then kept him tied to her out of jealousy, so when she testifies against her husband, the townsfolk believe Anna and Hudetz, who’re lying, and ostracize Frau Hudetz, who tells the truth, and her brother, Alfons.  Alfons’s mere appearance at The Wild Man is enough to generate the people’s anger and a mob almost attacks him but for Hudetz’s intercession.

Later, when Anna is found dead, the town turns on Hudetz, suspecting him of murdering her because she was about to recant her testimony from the accident investigation.  Now the townspeople stalk the town carrying rifles and axes, searching for Hudetz like a lynch mob (or the villagers in Frankenstein hunting for the monster).

This is all supposed to represent a fascist mentality, but it doesn’t come across to me.  It’s mob justice, a kind of mass paranoia and hysteria—sort of like what Arthur Miller exposed in 1953’s The Crucible.  But Miller (1915-2005) was writing specifically about Joe McCarthy (1908-57) and commie witch-hunts of the 1950s and the analogy he’s drawing is clear.  Fascism doesn’t say “mob mentality” to me, so the connection is weak.  Fascism to me means a regimented society, required to follow orders blindly.  There’s no Duce or Führer in Judgment Day telling the townsfolk whom to believe or what to do.

What is clear from the play is that the train wreck represents the National Socialist take-over of Germany’s government; Horváth wrote Judgment Day after fleeing Germany when the Nazis took power.  Hudetz, as an official of the state, symbolizes the Weimar government that was unable to stop Hitler and his party before they seized power because it was, as it were, asleep at the switch.  Note how the waiting passengers on the platform flatten themselves against the station wall as the rushing train barrels unstoppably through town. 

The townspeople are the citizens of Germany who run from one power base to another, believing whatever dogmas promise them what they want at the moment and putting the blame for the country’s woes on whichever suspect is convenient.  (This is the consequence of a small-town version of Hitler’s technique of the Big Lie, which advocates telling a lie so immense that no one will believe that someone would be so audacious as to think he could get away with it.) 

Meanwhile, Hudetz’s conflict over his responsibility for the accident and even Anna’s death is a reflection of the conflict the German people felt collectively over their complicity in the Nazi horrors.  Isn’t that the plot of Judgment Day, reduced to a skeletal outline?

I know what Horváth and Shinn want to say in this production; if it’s not clear from Horváth’s rep as a writer—though he was never affiliated with any political movement, he was sympathetic to the left and his writing often exposed the dangers of fascism—the Armory production’s publicity made it explicit.  But it isn’t in the play as far as I can tell.  The thing I don’t know, though, is whether it’s in Horváth’s original but lost in Shinn’s adaptation, or if it’s missing from both.  (Max McGuinness, theater reviewer for the U.S. edition of the Financial Times, says that Shinn “sticks closely to the original text while adding occasional Americanisms.”)

If Judgment Day  had been set in 1950s Poland or Czechoslovakia (or Horváth’s ancestral Hungary, where an anti-Soviet uprising took place in 1956), it could be read as an anti-communist play.  In Iran in the 1980s or ’90s, it could be in opposition to the Ayatollah’s theocracy.  Hell, you could put it in Louisiana in 1928-32 and say it’s an exposé of Huey Long’s (1893-1935) reign as governor.  This Judgment Day is only anti-fascist because someone says it is!

Movement director Mehra does her bit, with the coordinated movement of the cast in groups as if they were some sort of paramilitary cohort; in a couple of sequences, they come awfully close to goose-stepping (which, of course, is indelibly associated with Nazis—but which many totalitarian armies use, including the Soviets and their satellite states, Iran, and North Korea).  Mehra and Jones have Luke Kirby’s Stationmaster Hudetz moving around the depot performing his duties in a walk that’s stiff and march-like (he even squares his corners); I could almost hear a snare drum marking the cadence.  (In the New York Times, Jesse Green likens Kirby’s movements to “a figure that got loose from a Swiss clock.”)

It’s not really fair—or even accurate—to speak of individual performances in Jones’s Judgment Day.  Kirby and Susannah Perkins as Anna set a tone, under Jones’s guidance, but the whole cast works as a unit stylistically to establish and maintain the world of this play.  In fact, there are moments when the entire cast is the world of this play—say, when they are about to gang up on Alfons in The Wild Man or, more pointedly, when they are prowling the streets like a demented posse.  (That latter bit was clearly set up by movement director Mehra.)

Together, the company works to sustain the atmosphere of the little town under the thrall of groupthink.  I’ve spoken of the way they move, but their speech, though subtly, follows a similar pattern.  Jones has not guided his cast into eccentric performances, but there is a sort of automaton-like quality to their speech—not so much like robots but living Stepford people.  There’s a kind of soullessness in their voices.  It works rather well for the most part, though occasional jolts occur when an actor encounters one of Shinn’s anachronisms.  (I’m pretty sure that no one in 1930s Austria ever said anything about “downsizing.”)

My survey of the published criticism of Richard Jones’s Judgment Day at the Armory will include 14 reviews from various outlets.  Unlike the review round-up for my last report, for One November Yankee on 6 January, this one includes several print notices, along with numerous on-line reviews and one radio review. 

In the Financial Times, McGuinness remarked that this Judgment Day “seems particularly timely.”  McGuinness reported that scenic designer Steinberg “aims to give the set ‘a dreamlike quality’ using the reflective floor, while the forest is intended to supply ‘a fairytale aspect’ reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm.”  This “otherworldly vision suggests a counterpoint to the language of the play, which is deliberately flat and clichéd,” found the FT reviewer. 

McGuinness observed that “there is no mention of the Nazis, nor any political discussion in Judgment Day, which helps give Horváth’s play its lasting allegorical resonance.”  He also felt that all the characters “seem rudderless and lacking in self-awareness,” which “supplies a parallel with the contemporary US.”  The FT journalist ended by warning that this “guilt trip into the twisted psyche of 1930s Europe promises to illuminate the corrosiveness of our own time.”

“With ‘Judgment Day’ . . . [Richard] Jones seems eager to top his previous achievement,” asserted Green of the New York Times.  “The Armory production . . . feels even more monumental than ‘The Hairy Ape,’ both larger and grimmer.”  Green described Steimberg’s set as “a giant’s playthings,” which, “[l]it gorgeously by Mimi Jordan Sherin . . . slide and twirl about the huge space in various combinations that fascinate and appall the eye, like de Chirico paintings come to life.” 

Then the Timesman lamented, “If only the play would come to life too.”  Green found that “Horvath’s brand of social critique and political allegory . . . feels overwhelmed here by the physical production.”  He reported that “Jones makes exciting stage pictures out of that group chaos” and that “[a]urally, too, the production tells a coherent and emphatic story of people too easily manipulated by their drive for excitement.”  Green continued, however: “But with a few exceptions, the characters’ interior lives are invisible and inaudible to us.” 

“Clearly,” added Green, “this is Jones’s way of dealing with the strangeness of the play, which isn’t amenable to naturalism.”  The Times review-writer affirmed that Jones’s Judgment Day is “not the kind of drama that expresses itself best in subtle acting, even aside from the monumental staging with which the actors must fend.”  He felt that the leads didn’t present the kind of “great-face bigness—the kind you see in silent movies” needed to convey Horváth’s point, several of the supporting characters did, naming Alyssa Bresnahan’s Frau Hudetz; Jeena Yi’s Leni, the barmaid; and Harriet Harris’s gossip, Frau Liemgruber. 

Asserting that in a vast venue like the Park Avenue Armory, “[y]our patrons expect epic art that exploits the scale of the building (not to mention its history of wealth and militarism) to comment on a meaty issue,” David Cote extolled Judgment Day as “a fairly obscure German drama about guilt and mob mentality, , , , staged with smart, handsome efficiency by veteran English director Richard Jones” in the New York Observer. 

Cote put Horváth, had he lived, in a category with interwar German and Swiss dramatists like Frank Wedekind (1864-1918), Carl Sternheim (1878-1942), Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), and Max Frisch (1911-91), whom he labeled “unsentimental social critics who mingled gimlet-eyed satire with surreal or grotesque effects.”  Cote also compared Horváth with visual artists of the Weimar era Otto Dix (1891-1969) and Georg Grosz (1893-1959), “who saw decaying flesh, venality, and creeping fascism everywhere they looked.”  (I don’t know Dix’s art, but I’m well acquainted with Grosz’s grotesque caricatures of German life, and the connection to Horváth, at least as exemplified by Judgment Day, is spot on, I think.)

Of the visual effect of Steinberg’s set design, the Observer writer affirmed: “The imagery is stark, monumental, and very German.”  He added: “Lighting designer Mimi Jordan Sherin’s chilly shadows and Daniel Kluger’s ghostly sound designs contribute to the overall morbid, tense atmosphere of repression and dread.”  The reviewer’s final assessment of the production, which he tarred with “pretentious gigantism that is the unfortunate byproduct of Armory presentations,” is:

The cast is solid; Jones’s direction is clean and forceful; the design is impressive and engaging; and Horváth’s cautionary message comes through clearly in Shinn’s lean script.  But Judgment Day is, finally, a small play in an oversize production that dilutes any ripple effect the fable might have in 2019. 

“The human element feels like an afterthought in Richard Jones’s staging of Ödön von Horváth’s dark morality tale,” wrote Elisabeth Vincentelli in the New Yorker.”  The set is “pharaonic,” the lighting is “stunning,” and “[t]he over-all effect is breathtaking, with the actors often looking like figurines in a giant model.”  With the exception of Harriet Harris’s “vicious gossip,” however, “the performances are haphazard, which defangs the story.”  Vincentelli concluded, therefore: “The extravagant design is never less than entrancing, but we are far from Jones’s 2017 masterstroke, ‘The Hairy Ape.’”

In Vulture/New York magazine, Helen Shaw declared, “On the bright side (or maybe the dark and primeval side), Judgment Day at the Park Avenue Armory is a visual feast.”  After describing in detail the visual and aural production (“It’s entrancing”) and naming the accomplished artists in the creative team, however, Shaw continued:

And . . . yet . . . the big names and the big set don’t quite come together to make a big production.  The dancing architecture works, but the human components seem unchoreographed; any time there’s more than four people onstage, the mise-en-scène looks sloppy and astray.  More importantly, the expressionist environment asks for stylization from the actors, but Jones seems to have left them confused about what that should look and sound like.

The review-writer was also displeased with the adaptation, reporting that “Shinn, perhaps with his mind on Brecht, deliberately leaves the stilted tenor of translated text in place:  Speakers can sound as though they’re shouting subtitles at each other.”  With the exception of Harris (“as exaggerated as a George Grosz painting”), “everyone else, even strikingly fine actors, seems stranded.”  Shaw found that “Jones seems to be moving his cast from image to image rather than moment to moment.”  Her conclusion?  That “the show seems to have been made from the perspective of the huge, beautiful monoliths: It’s vast and slow and cold, and not, ultimately, all that concerned with the people on the ground.”

Zachary Stewart labeled the Armory’s Judgment Day “a jaw-dropping production” on TheaterMania.  “Even if you are turned off by the icy chill of the script,” Stewart promised, “Jones’s production draws you toward its bewitching flame.”  Shinn’s adaptation into modern English is “a surprisingly excellent job” that still “maintain[s] the prewar tone of the piece.”  Stewart found, “There's a lot to chew on in Judgment Day,” including instances of “contemporary resonance.”  In Stewart’s eyes, “Judgment Day is a withering take on the tribal instinct, and the centrality of myth in reinforcing that instinct.  When everyone in the room believes one thing, it is almost certainly not the truth.”

On Broadway World, Michael Dale felt that “Judgment Day, may seem on paper to be an introspective drama about guilt and punishment,” but he asserted that “such intimacy doesn’t fly on the massive stage of the Park Avenue Armory’s Drill Hall.”  The BWW reviewer posited, therefore, that director Jones, adaptor Shinn, and set designer Steinberg “have created a huge, cold, emotionally stark production that is chilling in its inhumanity.”  Dale reported that “Steinberg’s imposing set pieces, harshly lit by Sheri[n], emphasizes an attitude of individual insignificance deferring to the greater good as enormous structures appear choreographed along with the movement of actors.”  The review-writer concluded his notice by pointing out:

As with any political piece or social commentary, there's the temptation to compare the era of the play with contemporary times.  Certainly, themes of technological advancements diminishing opportunities for workers, the dangers of mob mentality and society's leanings towards gender-based sympathies are still with us.

David Finkle credited Jones with “[e]stablishing his own fearlessness” on New York Stage Review, finding that the director’s “staging [of Judgment Day in the Armory] gives it an enormous size and scope.”  The production’s “locomotive pace holds Judgment Day to a parable’s effectiveness.”  The NYSR writer found that “the drama is as efficient, yet as narrow, as an arrow hitting a target’s center.”  In conclusion, Finkle judged:

There’s no denying that in his momentous Judgment Day production, director Jones knocks patrons over the heads.  It’s an alert from a sober decade in which a fascist leader was blowing heavy clouds over the Continent and the globe.   When ostensible autocratic leaders appear to be emerging in growing numbers today, it seems as if von Horváth’s work has a potent relevance to a swelling contemporary plight.

In NYSR’s second review of Judgment Day,  Elysa Gardner exclaimed:

Let us now praise melodrama, at least conditionally.  Coarser examples—say, soap operas, or mega-musicals involving bloody wars or misunderstood creatures besotted with nubile women—may not offer much to recommend the form.  But approached with imagination, skill and a clear sense of purpose—and a few dashes of knowing irony, where appropriate—it can provide riveting and even thought-provoking entertainment.

“A case in point is on ravishing display at Park Avenue Armory,” Gardner wrote, calling Judgment Day a “socially, morally and psychologically charged thriller [that] has become a triumph of overstatement in service of plain but difficult truths.”  She specifically praised the design team, “who have turned the vast space at the Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall into a glorious (and essentially minimalist) landscape” and said that the actors all “deliver memorable individual performances.”  The overall production, which the NYSR reviewer labeled “breathtaking,” “leav[es] us jarred and mesmerized throughout.” 

“Once in a while, a powerful play blows in from the past to hit you with the force of a gale wind,” wrote Carol Rocamora on Theater Pizzazz, referring to Horváth’s “chilling . . . moral fable.”  Judgment Day is “a thrilling production directed by Richard Jones,” Rocamora continued; “it’s a dark play for dark times—both then and now.”  The TP reviewer asserted, “The astonishment of this production is its jaw-dropping scale,” with a “dazzling design . . . by Paul Steinberg.”  “Jones’s sweeping directorial style,” she declared, “combined with an exquisite attention to detail and precise timing of so many moving parts, is incomparable.”  Additionally, Rocamora praised all the designers:

Enhanced by Mimi Jordan Sherin’s dramatic lighting design, Antony McDonald’s colorful costumes, Daniel Kluger and Drew Levy’s powerful sound design (including bells, whistles, screeching brakes, and crashing train sounds), and Daniel Kruger’s haunting music design, the cumulative, larger-than-life results are overpowering—more impactful than anything you’ll see on a New York stage this season.

“Shinn’s timely adaptation of Judgment Day leaves you with haunting questions about truth, conscience, and responsibility to society despite the personal cost,” concluded Rocamora.  “These are the very questions that resonate sharply and urgently in today’s turbulent times.”

On TheaterScene.com, Arney Rosenblat characterized the play as a “cautionary parable's over-arching themes of the complicit nature of guilt and destructive nature of mob mentality,” which “has been cleanly and effectively adapted by Christopher Shinn.”  Rosenblat reported that director Jones “choreographs, with the aid of Movement Director Anjali Mehra, a character ballet across the shifting stage to establish an unrivaled visual experience.”  The reviewer explained, “To fill both the enormous space of the Armory and the larger than life goals of the parable, Jones encourages his actors, for the most part,  to give larger than life performances.”  Rosenblat gave extra praise in this regard to Harriet Harris for her portrayal of Frau Liemgruber, but he generally complemental all the cast. 

Elyse Sommer of CurtainUp proclaimed, “Christopher Shinn . . . and director Richard Jones . . . have given von Horváth’s work a slick production that feels remarkably of the moment.”  It’s staged with the “operatic grandeur the Armory’s vast stage calls for,” she affirmed, but added, “For all its pertinent issues and stylistic diversity, Judgment Day doesn’t quite make the grade as a memorably great play,” in part because “the spectacular staging does tend to upstage the actors.”  Nevertheless, “the entire cast meets the challenge of playing to the top row of the Drill Hall’s raked seating area.” 

Victor Gluck, reviewing for TheaterScene.net (not associated with the similarly-titled TheaterScene.com, quoted above), dubbed the Armory’s Judgment Day “a superb production” that “seems as powerful and relevant as if it had been written in this decade, not 80 years ago.”  Gluck added, “The production makes this expressionistic drama as contemporary as if this style were newly born.”  Interestingly, Gluck, like a number of his colleagues in criticism, noted, “The monumental set pieces . . . dwarf the characters,” but found method in this set-up, “suggesting that people are pawns in some cosmic pattern bigger than themselves.”  His ultimate assessment of the Armory staging of Judgment Day was: “Richard Jones’s huge production gives the play the breadth that it needs to tell its story with stunning visual effects.”

“Ödön von Horváth is in fashion these days, because he wrote about how the threat of fascism affected ordinary people,” noted WNYC’s Jennifer Vanasco in a radio review, continuing, “But this production of his 1937 play ‘Judgment Day’ . . . fails to make that threat feel real, or important.”  Vanasco explained that Judgment Day “should be an interesting morality play about the fickleness of crowds, yet the story doesn’t wrestle with guilt or complicity in an interesting way.” 

“Horváth’s point is that everything is connected, that every wrong action sets off a chain of additional bad actions.”  But the reviewer on the New York City outlet for National Public Radio felt:

This doesn’t really make sense.  But then, a lot of the play doesn’t.  It’s never clear why Anna kisses the stationmaster to begin with.  More importantly, some of the villagers are survivors of the crash, but they don’t seem upset about the incident.  No one is mourning those whose lives were lost.  Instead, they just gossip about why the train barreled through the signal.

Vanasco reported that “the Armory stage is enormous and the actors are dwarfed by the impressive set,” a sentiment shared by several other review-writers.  “The structures are a wonder,” she affirmed, observing that “[a]t the close of the first act, one of them smoothly recedes into the distance—and Anna gets smaller and smaller.”  Vanasco added, “Unfortunately, so do our hopes for a meaningful performance.”

The WNYC reviewer thought, “It could be that in a more intimate space, the audience would more easily connect with the characters.  Perhaps the play would feel relevant and hot-blooded, instead of the chilly work we have here.”

'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.”