Wednesday, January 02, 2008

My (negative) review of Collage Production's "Long Day's Journey Into Night"

"Sloppy 'Long Day's Journey' makes an ordeal of O'Neill"
Published in the Chicago Maroon on November 4, 2005

Walking into the Gunder Mansion at the North Lakeside Cultural Center is like entering the year 1910. The location feels like the summer house of an upper-middle class family from a century ago, which lends itself perfectly to Collage Productions’ performance of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. In fact, it lends itself too perfectly: The production seems so realistic that it’s unsettling to sit through. This is not your typical setting for a play—setting a play in a beach house where the actors often stand with their backs to the audience is, shall we say, a tad ambitious. And that doesn’t even consider the fact that it is Clayton J. Horath’s directorial debut, or that Horath chose O’Neill, one of the most difficult playwrights to produce, for his initiation, or that he wrote a score for the play as well.

From the very beginning it’s clear that Horath has taken on more than he can handle, as the actors struggle to delve inside their characters and it becomes impossible to connect the spoken lines with the bodies who speak them. In a production of an O’Neill play, that disconnection can only produce one thing: disaster.

To be fair, much of the blame can be placed on O’Neill, and not Horath, for making the play so impossible to navigate. As Mary McCarthy, the legendary theater critic for the Partisan Review, said in 1946, O’Neill “did not possess the slightest ear for spoken word.” While it is clear that O’Neill developed his complex and conflict-laden characters brilliantly, he seemed to possess no intuition for how to convey such complex characters without having his characters discuss their own psychology outright.

From the first five minutes of the play, O’Neill shoves this down our throats, as the characters discuss the drug addiction, alcoholism, sickliness, miserliness, and depression without any nuance or banter. While that kind of talk is great on paper, it doesn’t reflect how people actually speak. The fact that McCarthy pointed this out is a sign of the fact that O’Neill’s appeal was not theatrical. While more literary-minded critics heralded Long Day’s Journey as perhaps the most realistic portrayal of a crumbling American family in terms of characterization, it’s a painfully unrealistic play to watch for anyone with sensitivity to dialogue.

It’s this type of approach that makes Collage Productions’s rendition so bad. Jeff Helgeson recites the lines of father James Tyrone like John Wayne in his worst movies. As the vagabond older brother Jamie, Jeff McVann seems more focused on remembering his lines—and indeed, he struggles with his lines throughout the production—than understanding his character’s contradictions. As the mentally unstable, morphine-addicted mother, Barbara Button is so unconfident about her lines that she seems afraid to say them. As a result, her voice is so quiet that it’s impossible to hear her.

Long Day’s Journey doesn’t require the actors to think about their characters—every detail of their psychology is in the dialogue. The play requires something much more complex from the directors and actors: They must not only maximize the impact of the dialogue, but also make the dialogue believable. By employing actors who are not only detached from the dialogue but who also don’t seem to care, the worst parts of the play are brought to the forefront, thus making the production impossible to sit through. In fact, the indifference of the actors is absurdly self-referential: Like the characters they depict, the actors are stuck in a position they hate with no concern for how they treat their circumstances or the people they affect (in this case, the audience).

There are other serious problems with the production as well. The set-up of the play’s set, despite being dramaturgically fascinating, is an acoustical nightmare. Lines that are spoken from five feet away seem 50 feet away, so that much of what little power the delivery has is lost. The other main problem is the score, written by Horath himself. In fact, from both the program and his own introduction, Horath seems to consider himself more of a composer than a director. This hurts the credibility of the play, especially when the music—played mostly in major keys—contrasts sharply with the tense arguments that are taking place on stage.

While Horath and his cast certainly took on a difficult job in choosing to produce Long Day’s Journey, they fell flat due to poor decision making and sloppy production. While it may be acceptable for the Tyrones to put on a play at this level, it is certainly not acceptable for a professional theater company in Chicago.

Labels: , , , ,

posted by Ethan Stanislawski @ 1/02/2008 06:25:00 PM   0 Comments

My review of ATC's production of Orpheus Descending

"Orpheus Descending scours depths of human misery"
Published October 18, 2005 in The Chicago Maroon

From the very beginning of the American Theater Company (ATC)’s production of Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending, you get the sense that nothing but despair will cross this stage. There is desperation in the body of Lady Torrence, the aging shopkeeper whose curmudgeonly husband is on his deathbed. The title of the play comes from the Greek myth about the musician Orpheus’s descent into the underworld and it is not the only supernatural theme Williams calls upon in this play. Orpheus Descending is full of black magic at its blackest, with voodoo curses, witchcraft, and the darkest of Christian themes. Yet out of the haze comes one of Williams’s most rewarding theatrical experiences, and the American Theater Company has shown remarkable courage in putting on an exceptionally despairing view of the worst the world has to offer.

Not surprisingly, this messy, confounding view of the universe rubbed many critics the wrong way in 1957, causing the play to more or less fall off the public’s radar. This is a world where no one has any sense of hope unless it’s at the most useless time possible, where past demons continue to torture and drag down a person years after they first rear their ugly heads. It’s a world of gossip, violence and vice, perhaps the darkest one Tennessee Williams—a playwright known for shocking themes—ever created. Set in the Mississippi outskirts of New Orleans in 1948, Orpheus begins with the gruesome death of Lady Torrence’s father and details its devastating effects on her life and marriage. When Val, a young, handsome former blues musician enters the scene and looks for a job, she views him as her savior and secretly clamors for him to be “store clerk by day, stud at night.” As this fantasy comes to fruition, we see both Val and Lady Torrence stumble into a world beyond redemption, where fragile lives become even more fragile, until the ending, when the characters shatter. While Williams was never one for happy endings, in no other play does the tragedy run this deep, leaving the audience aghast.

It takes an exceptional production—and an especially exceptional cast—to fully impart the play’s despondency and fractured, jarred emotions. Damon Kiely’s production does just that. He’s helped by an absolutely spellbinding display of acting intuition by his two leads. As Lady Torrence, ATC veteran Carmen Roman seems to grasp just how desperately her character is clinging to a hope of finding a way out of the bottomless pit she’s fallen into. Her seduction of Val is at once pathetic and sympathetic. Val, portrayed with remarkable realism by Steve Key, has a surprisingly earnest nature, considering what can be intuited about his past, and we get the sense that the boyish adventurousness in his speech and actions gets him into more trouble than he deserves. Yet, there’s also a dark element to Val’s character that’s barely visible but impossible to ignore. You can tell that the director and actors worked hard on the movements onstage, because while they are entirely natural, they also lend a disorderly, grating feel to the events in the play. The production staff also did its part: Keith Pitts’s set gives an excellent view of a store long overdue for massive reorganization, which is simultaneously a source of comfort and claustrophobia for the characters onstage. Furthermore, Charlie Cooper offers one of the best examples of how lighting can make a play, as his work paints the set with a faint red-orange tint, giving off a sense that while we may be on earth, we are also in the land of the damned.

Tennessee Williams worked on Orpheus Descending for nearly 20 years, so it’s no surprise that it has been called the most “Williams” of his plays. While Lady Torrance does have elements of Blanche DuBois, and Val certainly has the earnest but uncertain nature of Tom Wingfield, these are characters stripped down to their bare nature, victims of no injustice except their own existence. Val says it best: “There are two kinds of people in this world, those that are bought and the buyers.” In their world, no one exists without a price on his body and his soul, and the interactions that occur from people trying to exist on their own create a prevalent sense of disillusionment. But this is not your typical existentialist distress; this is disillusionment in the Macbethian sense, one where from dust we rise, and to dust we shall return. It’s this take on the bare nature of existence that makes ATC’s production of Orpheus Descending one of the darkest nights in theater, and also one of the most rewarding.

Labels: , , , ,

posted by Ethan Stanislawski @ 1/02/2008 06:23:00 PM   0 Comments