life in a cage
by Douglas Messerli
Eugene O’Neill The Hairy Ape / Los Angeles, The Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, the
production I saw was on Sunday, July 24, 2016
I have to admit, I have always had
trouble with Eugene O’Neill’s early plays, particularly his 1921 work, The Hairy Ape. American Expressionism
(not nearly as sophisticated and developed as the German version—at least until
it found its way into the American film noir)
is just not my favorite kind of theater. And with his heavy typologies and his
embarrassingly clumsy use of dialect, O’Neill’s younger works always slightly
embarrass me, as opposed to his great later family dramas.
Berkoff, known for his very physical
productions, did not disappoint this time around, transforming the early
boozing and singing scenes into a series of choreographed movements for his 9
male ship firemen, at moments, with the percussion accompaniment of Will
Mahood, whipping them up into a kind of fiery frenzy, while at other times
slowing down the action to a kind of slow-motion line-dance as he lets his hero
Yank (Haile D’Alan) try to work out the reality, as the group’s leader, he
wants to convey to them.
It’s true that all of these men are
equally just a step up from the apes, their crouching positions and
gorilla-like muscles determined by their hourly activity of stoking coal into
the ship’s engines. And the play is not really about racial inequities, but
about issues of class.
In the early scenes Yank is proud of his
Prometheus-like role; it is, after all, he and his friends who make the big
industries possible; without their endlessly hard labor, there would be no
American industry, no ships to grandly sail into New York harbor, as their own
steamliner is about to do.
D’Alan is a splendid example of a human
being, a muscular specimen of a man who shows his physical stamina just by
performing, in this case, as a jazzed up actor: shouting out his lines yet with
emotional significance, he seems to be filled with boundless energy, as he
mocks his fellow workers, particularly the drunken elderly Paddy (Dennis
Gerstein) who nostalgically recalls the days of sail-driven ships, when the
sailors were at one with the sea, instead of being locked up in the dark
dungeon of the stove-hole.
Similarly, Yank has little use for the Marxian ideas of his friend Long
(Paul Stanko), for he is a believer, a man proud of his own physicality and
ability to cope.
Despite the appellation of a beast, it
is Yank, however, who is the true thinker, and the next scene finds him
pondering the events, while realizing that to her he was simply a “hairy ape.”
Although his friends attempt to console him, even ribbing him with the
possibility that he is in a funk because he has fallen in love, Yank suddenly
perceives his braggadocio for what it is: he as he friends are nothing but
small machine parts in a world that has little place for them.
The rest of O’Neill’s play is rather
didactic triptych, in which Yank attempts to explore what he can do to change
his life situation and to find a role in the general society. His first trip is
the Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, where the wealthy parade in surreal-like fashion
after church. His presence totally ignored by these “swells,” he finally
threatens a male of the group, as all present in the small buffalo herd call
for the police, who quickly arrive and beat him.
Berkoff has thankfully dropped the prison scene, and given the speech to
Long, the Marxist, to tell his friend of the IWW and the “wobblies,” who The New York Times reports are trying to
destroy American industry and society. Believing what he has read, Yank is
stupidly ready to sign up.
But in the second part of the triptych,
within the IWW headquarters, after being given a hearty welcome and membership
card, he is mocked when he makes his desires to dynamite factories clear. Not
only are the wobblies paranoid (suspecting him of being a policeman, a factory
stooge, or even from the FBI) but their activities, obviously, are quite
different from the newspaper reports. And they quickly toss Yank out into the
streets once more.
The inevitable and truly surreal ending is that he must become precisely
that which he has already been turned into by the dominant society. At the
Zoo’s gorilla cage, convincingly filled with chattering monkeys and a gorilla
performed by his former shipmates, Yank encounters the highly-developed
pectorals and muscular arms of fellow actor Jeremiah O’Brian playing the
Alpha-male gorilla. What Yank is to his fellow shipmates, this human-gorilla is
to his chattering monkey companions. It is almost love at first site, as Yank
determines to loose this fellow monster upon the world, breaking open his cage.
There is almost something horribly homoerotic about the act, as the gorilla
comes toward him in, what a first seems simply to be a hug. Indeed, Yank responds,
“I didn’t say you should kiss me,” before he gradually perceives that he is
being killed, his body stomped upon again and again until he finally finds his
place in death.
Berkoff’s production is far from
perfect, but then the play is, as both director and producer remind us, the
work of a very young playwright, still attempting to find his voice. And this
production, despite its many excellent moments, demonstrates, once more, why The Hairy Ape is so seldom revived. In
the end, I am glad a got to chance to see it—and still will look forward to
seeing the Wooster Group version. After all, it was that group which also
convinced me that O’Neill’s early sea plays were worth a second viewing.
Los Angeles, July 25, 2016
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (July 2016).