A Touch Of The Poet
2018; Penn State University Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/eugeoneirevi.39.1.0190
ISSN2161-4318
Autores ResumoThe Eugene O'Neill Foundation brought A Touch of the Poet home to its birthplace as part of its annual O'Neill Festival, pairing it with a Role Player Ensemble production of J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, which was performed in nearby Danville, California. The old barn on the property of Tao House was the venue for Poet, and so the story of the Melody family unfolded just 500 feet or so from the desk where O'Neill wrote it initially in 1939. After he faced the fact that he would never finish the “Cycle,” a sequence of eleven plays tracing two families from the time of the American Revolution to the present, in which Poet was to have been the third, O'Neill returned to this segment in 1943 and put the final touches on it as a stand-alone play. He thought about venturing a production in the late 1940s, but the mixed success of The Iceman Cometh and the stress of moving across country to New York sorely taxed his fragile health. Then, the apparent failure of A Moon for the Misbegotten in its preview performances convinced him that the effort would be futile. And so it was not until 1958 that the play received its New York premiere in a botched production (see Laura Shea's account of the play's Broadway history in the Eugene O'Neill Review 37, no. 1 [2016]: 89–107), and it took major revivals with Jason Robards, Gabriel Byrne, and others to show that the play's subtle effects are well worth pursuing.In the choice to present these two plays, Eric Fraisher Hayes, artistic director of Role Players as well as the Foundation, took the cue from the Galway O'Neill conference to explore the imprint of Ireland on O'Neill's writing, which is nowhere clearer than in Poet. In this play, as in the other late plays, he returns to a time of origin, specifically the 1911 and 1913 New York tours of the Abbey Theatre's Irish Players, which included performances of Synge's Playboy. That play was also included in three American tours of the Abbey in the years preceding O'Neill's writing of Poet—1930, 1934, and 1937. He could not have seen any of these revivals, but he might have read reviews and other coverage. There can be no doubt that Synge's portrayal of a father- and daughter-defined family in a County Mayo shebeen in years before Irish independence was influential on O'Neill's depiction of a similarly configured—and conflicted—family in a New England inn on the eve of Andrew Jackson's rise to the presidency. These two historical events are hardly identical, but as expressions of the rise of populism in the name of democracy, they bear comparison, especially when considered in conjunction with similar political uprisings during the Great Depression, as O'Neill would have seen.The Role Players' production of Playboy, directed by Edward Nattenberg, served as a reminder of those terms of similarity, though the production largely missed the peculiar humor of a clever patricide who gains and loses the admiration of a community at odds with the laws of an imperialist state. The dead father turns up alive and well, as thick-headed as ever. (They don't make loys like they used to.) Keith Jefferds created such a powerful image of that father's brute existence that it made some of the other performers seem like cartoon figures. An exception was Bri Costello in the crucial role of Pegeen Mike, the daughter of the shebeen's owner in whose heart the whole play takes place. The stubborn reality of her environment will not permit much freedom for her imagination and affections, and the sudden appearance of the young outlaw Christy Mahon seems like salvation. The alternative is a gutless Shawn Keogh. It is hard for me to see the appeal of either of her suitors in this production, but Costello brings verve to her feisty character and at least a trace of the lyricism that suffuses Synge's script.O'Neill's counterpart to Pegeen Mike in Poet is Sara Melody, and Lindsay Marie Schmeltzer gives her such strength of self-possession as to suggest Sara in 1828 had a prevision of Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own (1845). She has had to cope with a father who, as Major Cornelius Melody, is mostly a product of his own imagination. In reality he is closer to what his nickname declares, a Con. He is technically the innkeeper, but he leaves the work to Sara and her mother, Nora, and reserves his energy for carousing with his friends and reminiscing about his glorious days of fighting Napoleon in the Peninsular Wars. Carlos Aceves' neatly realized set captures the period well, while the rough-hewn barn in which the show takes place is a reminder of the rustic world beyond. Sara's mother, played with touching conviction by Bonnie DeChant, seems locked in a state of blind adoration for Con, and she presumes her daughter will eventually accede to the helpless passivity to which she is doomed in this world dominated by masculine values: military honor, horses, and whiskey. But a means of escape for Sara has arrived by chance in the form of Simon Harford, a Yankee gentleman who has given himself the privilege of exploring in Thoreauvian retreat the possibility that nature might offer a more suitable order for understanding human existence than social class. Nature instead dealt him a fever, and he has been recovering at the inn for some weeks when the play begins. Sara's charms have not gone unnoticed as she nurses him to health, and a proposal of marriage seems imminent. The set shows only the first flight of the steps to that upper floor, and yet we understand that in Sara's mind they stand for a symbolic elevation above her origins, the mother and father who will remain on the ground floor. However, Con will insist on a proper marriage settlement with the Harford family, and so the honor of the Irish-born Melody family must be tested against the blue-blood standards of the Yankees.When Simon's mother, Deborah, played here with elegant authority by Melanie DuPuy, comes to fetch her son away from what she views as a wily scheme, Con drunkenly puts the moves on this fine lady, even forces a kiss on her, and so ruins any chance of Deborah approving the marriage. John Hurst as Con allows for no easy judgment of his character as a drunken fool or a weak fraud. Whatever the truth of his character's origin—and it is apparent that his pose about being a war hero is a lie—in Hurst's interpretation he is a man of wit, self-determination, and strong sentiment, in short, a figure of Romantic sensibility. Con likes to stare into the mirror and quote Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (“I have not loved the World, nor the World me,” also one of Simon's favorite verses), but in Hurst's performance this counts as more than a display of vanity. Hurst strips the recital of all its music, its gushing poesy, and instead what we hear is a note of what the humanist philosopher Pico della Mirandola called “the dignity of man,” tempered to the modern world as Irish defiance or even the will to power.Simon oddly never appears in the play, although he did in early drafts, but by the play's end we know that the quality of independence that has drawn Sara's love is not unlike the proud egotism of her father. Both father and daughter suffer abasement in this play. Sara gives up her chastity to secure her hold on the man she loves, and Con falls, literally, from his high horse in an ill-considered effort to restore his honor. It is O'Neill's genius to pitch their downfalls between the tragic and the comic but inclining toward the latter. The performers brought a raucous energy to the final scene, with pathos and belly laugh juxtaposed. That humorous note is less evident in the play's unfinished sequel, More Stately Mansions. Perhaps it took the family forgiveness of Long Day's Journey Into Night for O'Neill to return to this play and finish it in 1942 with a sense of humor. On a chilly evening in September, Eric Hayes and his cast kept his audience warm with good feeling for what is perhaps O'Neill's most congenial play. O'Neill's Playboy came home, a little bruised in the ego but welcome in the Western World of California.
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