| . | 05/10/2009
Desire Under the Elms
By: Deirdre Donovan
Desire Under the Elms is Eugene O’Neill’s most virile play, and under Robert Fall’s streamlined production at the St. James, that masculine feeling comes through with solid impact. This fierce energetic drama involving a defiant farm boy, his tyrannical father, and the father’s new sexy wife is still riveting to watch. Although this is a second-tier O’Neill play, this Goodman Theater production offers theatergoers a streamlined version of the play and a breathtaking set by Walt Spangler.
Like many of his other plays—Beyond the Horizon, Long Day’s Journey into Night, A Touch of the Poet--a blood tie binds the story together, and underpins its meaning. One of the characters has been dead over a decade, Eben’s mother, whose ghost haunts the story and influences the other character’s actions. Eben Cabot (Pablo Schreiber), in particular, feels her ghost. He resents the fact that his mother died when he was only 15, forcing him to grow to manhood without her love. He blames his father Ephraim Cabot (Brian Dennehy) and his 2 brothers, Simeon Cabot (Daniel Stewart Sherman) and Peter Cabot (Boris McGiver), for sending her to an early grave. “Why didn’t ye never stand between him ‘n my Maw when he was slavin’ her to her grave?” demands Eben in an early scene with his 2 brothers. He reminds his brothers of her kindness to them, a human quality that is presently absent from the Cabot home.
There’s a strange idiom in the play. Part Puritan language, part colloquial vulgarity, part New England backwoods talk, but it altogether will pull you into this American story. Early on we listen to Eben’s burning hatred of his father Ephraim. He quotes from the Bible with a sardonic chuckle (“Honor thy father!”) and soon follows it with a fatal wish (“I pray he’s died.”). Similarly, Ephraim will use Old Testament language to emotionally express himself, especially when he learns that his young bride wants a son to please him (“An’ God hearkened unto Rachel! An’ God hearkened unto Abbie!”). The use—and misuse--of Holy Scripture is peppered into this play to powerful effect. And even when a character like Ephraim cites from the Bible earnestly, the irony of his words will horrifically return in later scenes.
Beyond the religious overtones, the play’s frank sexuality offended theatergoers and the public when it first was staged in 1924. City officials dubbed the drama “obscene” and tried to ban it. Some objected to its Freudian insights and Oedipal lust. Police even threatened to close the play because of its impropriety. Of course, the moral outrage seems stuffy when one considers Broadway’s current fare. To be sure, Desire Under the Elms is not a sex play. O’Neil simply was intent on creating a work that spoke openly and truthfully about sexuality. And he succeeded.
There’s no hero in the story, and no redemption offered to any character. O’Neill has aptly captured in this play that time in the 19th century when the American way of life had not gelled yet. The North and South were still recovering from the Civil War, and the California gold rush was beckoning many hard-working New Englanders to enjoy wealth and an easy life in the West. At the very heart of this play, in fact, is the conflict of Americans attempting to gain more profit and power from their land and inheritance, only to learn too late about the invaluable blessing of love. The real tragedy imbedded in Desire Under the Elms is that the possessors becoming the dispossessed.
The acting is excellent. Brian Dennehy inhabits the flinty old New England farmer Ephraim with a Puritan spirit and a rock-solid demeanor. We have come to identify Dennehy playing protagonists in many of O’Neil’s works, including The Iceman Cometh, A Touch of the Poet, and A Long Day’s Journey into Night, the last which won him a Tony Award. He has the intensity of concentration, and the unwavering grip of a man who has built his life out of “nothing.” Pablo Schreiber is in total command of his character Eben, the youngest son who’s battling with his lust as well as fighting for his inheritance. But Carla Gugino, as the slatternly Abbie, gets the real star turn here. Once she enters the story, one can hardly take one’s eyes away from her feminine wiles and cunning actions.
O’Neill purists might object to all the cuts in the play, and there are many. This 3-act play has been whittled down to one spare act—with no intermission. True, theatergoers won’t squirm in their seats or look at their watches in this production. But at times it felt like the equivalent of a microwaved O’Neill production and not a slow-baked one. Not to second-guess the renowned director Robert Falls (who directed a great Talk Radio on Broadway a few years ago), but adding a few more scenes from the original play might have allowed O’Neill enthusiasts to savor a bit more of his genius.
Don’t expect to see big elm trees towering over the Cabot homestead on stage. Instead what we see is the Cabot home suspended from the flies, and rocks spread about on the ground everywhere. Incredibly, Walt Spangler’s set design works uncannily well. It may seem at first that it erases an important metaphor of the play (the elms!). Not so. The play’s central metaphor, in fact, is not the elms but the farm. Which actually symbolizes America circa 1850, a land with toxic lesions and domestic strife following the Civil War.
Desire Under the Elms—O’Neill’s first great work-- never achieves the clarity of O’Neil’s masterpieces like A Long Day’s Journey into Night or A Touch of the Poet. But the play does poignantly illustrate O’Neill’s belief that there was an American tragedy unfolding in the national landscape. O’Neill was constantly exploring through his drama the sacred admonition: “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” And, at the close of evening, we see a stunning example of this truth in the character Ephraim. He may physically possess his New England farm and the land surrounding it, but what we really see is a man living in a material world with spiritual barrenness.
Desire Under the Elms, which usually is burdensome as theatre, comes alive in this production. The inspiration for this magic must have come from Falls, the director. In his capable hands, a 1924 drama is reworked and made relevant to our contemporary life.
At the St. James Theatre, 246 W. 44th Street 212 239 6200
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