( Surprised )
2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/eugeoneirevi.34.1.0065
ISSN2161-4318
Autores Tópico(s)Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research
ResumoThe story of a theatrical production goes something like this: The artistic director picks a piece. He's excited about it. It speaks to him, and he thinks it will speak to his audience, too, in some way. Then—and this is key—hijinks ensue. We think we understand at first reading what a text is or can be. We learn much more in our process.I found Exorcism in a Tucson bookstore. I hadn't heard of its rediscovery or that it was being published by Yale University Press. O'Neill had been a favorite of mine since a youthful performance as Rougon in The Sniper (1915), and now, in a strange hardback volume with some oddly inappropriate Christmas artwork on the endpapers, I had discovered this lost play. I read it standing in the aisle and bought it twenty minutes later. I did not read the self-possessed caveats of Edward Albee. But I had my own. It was a “new” O'Neill play, and it had echoes of The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night. As artistic director of Beowulf Alley Theatre, I wanted to do it at once. I liked O'Neill's language—I always had—and this would be a premiere of sorts. However, I thought it would be almost impossible to stage in a meaningful way for a modern audience. The second scene seemed chaotic and unearned.I was surprised as anyone could be that O'Neill and Jay Leno have the same agent. Through a labyrinthine series of phone calls, messages, and emails to Yale University Press, I finally managed to get contact information for International Creative Management, a worldwide power agency, which had control of the play's performance rights. Again, after a plunge into the labyrinth, the drama division of ICM gave us license to produce the play as long as we did not publicize it as anything but a workshop production on our website, in the program, media, and so on. We were not to call it a premiere of any sort or a full production. ICM lived in hope that a professional, preferably New York–based company would pay to produce a twenty-five-minute play and pay handsomely for the opportunity. (Good luck!) We were grateful all the same.I asked Nicole Scott to direct the play. The summer before she had directed for us a scaled-down (read: workshop) production of Hamlet and understood the parameters. She was excited about being involved in a lost play of O'Neill's. Then she read it. I had asked a few actors to be involved. I really wanted the best cast possible. They showed a lot of interest. Until they read it.Albee had laid it out in the book. This was a slight piece. The second scene had an odd dénouement without dramatic sense. Ned's turn, leaving him happily bound toward “some rest cure institution,” seemed improbable. The actors, at the first read-through, concluded their reading with looks of confusion. Ned and Jimmy were decent parts. Malloy and the Major a little less so. It was going to be impossible to cast Nordstrum. There were only five lines, and one of them was “Sure, I like like haal for gat you along, Ned” (54). We engaged a great Chicago-based actor named Ken Beider to take on Jimmy and one of the best young actors of our city, Evan Engle, for Ned. David Swisher, a former artistic director in his own right, from the Bay Area, took on the Major, and Mark Klugheit, a retired actor from the Philadelphia area, took on Malloy. I would take Nordstrum myself, py jimminy.At Beowulf Alley Theatre, which was founded in 2001 as a nonprofit company with a commitment to nurturing Tucson theater artists, we had created some years ago a little research and development division we called The Next Theatre. Under this aegis, we were able to produce the play in July 2012, with the idea that we could offer our audiences a look into the mind of one of our greatest writers. It would be a short five-performance run in our ninety-five-seat theater. We were suspicious of the play's appeal.The focus of our earliest conversations and table work centered on whether, despite the stage directions to the contrary, there was anything sinister in Ned's sudden exorcism. He wakes from his suicide attempt in an irritable mood. The line parentheticals include: “with a savage gesture,” “restraining his anger,” “disgustedly,” and “furiously.” Within a few minutes, however, we are to see “his eyes now twinkling with a tickled humor.” Ned's abrupt about-face from a morbid view of the world to a hopeful exuberance was a great challenge for our actors. Nicole Scott suggested early on that she didn't believe Ned. She had the feeling that he would try suicide again the minute Jimmy and the Major left. Others felt that he was classically manic-depressive. Trying to understand Ned through the prism of O'Neill's life seemed a fool's game. Yes, O'Neill attempted suicide and yes, he went on to become a towering genius of theater. But he certainly didn't seem like a towering genius with this ending. Was O'Neill faking it? Faking the happy ending? We found ourselves concluding that Ned probably was, whether or not the playwright knew about it. His optimism would be as short-lived as his pessimism. After all, O'Neill didn't wind up his career writing light comedies with Moss Hart. We wanted Ned to have the twinkle in his eyes but a sort of pall, a hint of the darkness around him as well.I spoke about the play with Dr. William Epstein, professor of English at the University of Arizona, after a hearty attempt to find criticism and scholarship about it. His view was similar to mine, in that he believed the play was slight and not a milestone of early O'Neill. He also added some excellent advice: “You can't play scholarship. You can't act criticism.”The characters of the Major and Jimmy were a sort of walking story. The Major would indeed tell the tale of his daughter and show his scar as promised by Ned in scene 1 in the second half of the play. Jimmy never actually does tell his story completely or explain his melancholy fondness for springtime, but he repeats the attempt often enough. Malloy's moments are strange. There is nothing entirely unreasonable in his dialogue with his son. Even his early chastisement of Ned for attempting suicide, considering how it might affect his family, seems reasonable enough and, in the period, unavoidable. Malloy is not a monster, at least in the text.The challenge for the actors was to create from a fairly thin text whole characters. One of the actors reread The Iceman Cometh, assuming that Jimmy may have been a prototype for Jimmy Tomorrow. Ken Beider, who played Jimmy, was particularly fond of the positivity of the character, polar opposite of Ned. His quirky optimism, Ken believed, came from a comfortable habitual life, the opposite of Ned's transience. Jimmy tells the same story, has a decent rate on the flat, feels compassion for others, and saves Ned's life. Ken believed he isn't a pathetic character but a noble one, not a blind optimist but a decent man. Evan Engle, who played Ned, found the transition difficult even with our modern sensibility, which seems to demand some irony to a happy ending. What he discovered was that Ned's turnaround seems to come in obedience to his father, Malloy. He is defiantly angry even after his rescue, but stops abruptly when his father arrives. He ceases to be cynical about his wife. He embraces the idea of a sanatorium. The only frown comes when his father mentions returning to his office. This autobiographical O'Neill is not that close to Edmund from Long Day's Journey Into Night.One night, at a bar on Congress Street down from our theater, we decided to gin-soak a line-through and discuss the play. Nicole had mentioned that O'Neill was somewhat notorious for his dislike of actors, how in his later years he refused to watch his own productions. O'Neill's stage directions and line-reading parentheticals are notorious for trying to do the actors' work. Initially, we had hoped to pair the play with The Complete and Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O'Neill, developed by the Neo-Futurists in New York, but were unable to acquire the rights. All of us who had read or performed O'Neill were aware of his predilection. Evan noted that this obsessive quality was common to American playwrights of note, including Albee and David Mamet. The obsession with an exact view of how the performance must go became a turning point in our production. We made the decision to attempt to realize the exactitude of O'Neill's directions. We would attempt to play them as written. If a line was to be delivered heartily, we would deliver it heartily.From then on, we attempted to disabuse ourselves of our postmodern sensibilities and approach this show as a re-creation. We decided to hold “talk backs” after the performances to make our experiment clear. In her director's notes, Nicole Scott asked the audience: “Is this a play that should have stayed lost or is their value to it?”My original impulse to produce the play had been about the language. I was particularly fond of Ned's description of his night and morning with the prostitute at the brothel: “She was pretty, but she looked—there were all the weak sins of the world on her face” (31). I liked Jimmy's generous display of inarticulateness. I liked the wit: JIMMY (In a hurt tone):Oh, I don't know. People aren't all as bad as you'd like to make out.NED (Caustically):Aren't they? Well, I haven't seen them all. (7–8) Our attempt was to embrace these line readings intensely. This required a textual analysis that was not about the dialogue but the parenthetical descriptions, the active context. Nicole had recalled an interview with Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalfe about acting O'Neill in the New York Times (June 14, 2012). Lane explains the trouble he was having in rehearsal playing Hickey's first entrance in Iceman Cometh, “[the entrance] didn't feel right, until I finally went back to O'Neill's description, and just walked in beaming at them all.”This is how Exorcism begins: JIMMY (Suddenly brightening up and beaming with friendliness as he see his roommate.):Hello, Ned.NED (Putting his black slouch hat on the washstand and throwing his raincoat in a heap on the floor—shortly.):Hello, Jimmy. (5–6) It is a relatively elegant bit of exposition of two simple greetings, worth dwelling on. The most complex and problematic turns come from Ned, of course, as his emotions, tumultuous and just under the skin, are mapped out clearly by O'Neill throughout the scene. Jimmy tells a brief story about how he plans to ask an old friend for money. Ned responds with sudden savagery. Jimmy is taken aback and speaks in a hurt tone. Ned continues caustically. The juxtaposition of their qualities comes in a brief exchange of dialogue: JIMMY (With a grin.):You must be feeling queer. Later, then?NED (With a grim smile.):Later? Supposing there wasn't any—As mentioned above, the suspicion with which we greet O'Neill's line readings and stage directions has even led to comic mashups about them, like the Neo-Futurists' work. Evan found, however, that these moments were instructive. In the following speech, Evan acted the directions, the feelings given, more than the verbal matter of the line: NED:If I knew that— (He pauses—then adds quietly.) I'd be a wise guy, indeed. (Then excitedly.) But I'm talking rot. What was it you were holding forth about? (Sardonically.) Oh, yes—the beautiful spring! (13) O'Neill's directions are a second text. In Ned's long speech about his adultery with a prostitute, O'Neill is spare with the directions because, I assume, he realizes the power of the language. It begins with “Getting up and pacing back and forth—with growing intensity” (30). There is no further direction until after he wakes in the morning and turns to see the sleeping prostitute. With a shudder, he says, she was pretty. As the speech ends, literally transitioning back to a dialogue, the directions increase: “He swallows convulsively,” and “He sinks on the cot limply, his head in his hands” (32).O'Neill manages the tone between characters with parenthetical line readings. In a monologue, he seems less inclined to do so. The troubling part comes in the second scene. Ned is saved by Jimmy. His father comes and offers him a stay at a “rest care institution.” We move swiftly toward the end of the play and the problematic reversal of Ned's worldview most clearly delivered in his toast, “Stop! New leaf be damned. It's a new book without a leaf of the old left in it” (35). The speech is exalted, a bit hortatory, and echoes Jimmy's attachment to renewal and spring. It is not, however, described or punctuated by directions. O'Neill has left us alone to figure it out.To the extent that spoken dialogue creates character for O'Neill, there are as many character revelations in his descriptions. When we looked solely at the dialogue and passingly at the parentheticals, we built characters that through the spoken words had a gathering force. O'Neill's second text, the descriptions, gathers as well and offers actors clues around the passages he does not clarify. The intense descriptions of mood swings in the first scene, where Ned is excited, sardonic, exasperated, and kindly illustrate the character far more acutely then the spoken dialogue. Ned's text in the first scene is more or less a clever concealment of his forthcoming suicide attempt. The second text gave us important clues to understand how he gets beyond that. In the first scene, Ned is manic, changeable, and mercurial, even in his resolution to take his own life. He acts both excitedly and solemnly. This exorcism was physically punishing. His changes of mood would slow. His response to the real affection his friends have for him and even his father's would accumulate and finally turn his worldview. He would have the exaltation of the hangover, the moment of false clarity. All the directions in the two scenes lead to this if the dialogue does not. That was the lesson for us: the passionate turns of the character, its figurative life, are in the directions.We created, as per our contract, a modest set with passing nods to early twentieth-century New York flophouses. We had all the drinks and songs. In the end, we wanted the audience to see what O'Neill had intended to the best of our ability. We were sure, of course, O'Neill himself would hate it.Our critics believed that Evan's performance was too light of step. The problems we saw in the play showed themselves in reviews. “Engle has a bounce in his step and a smug smile that do not necessarily point towards suicide,” wrote Dave Irwin from the Tucson Sentinel. He continued, “Evan Engle, as Ned, gives an idealized performance as O'Neill would probably like to have seen himself.” If Evan followed these instructions, this codebook of second text, we presumed that would be the result. As expected both the critics and the audiences were very fond of Ken Beider's Jimmy (“a heart-wrenching performance”).In discussions with our audiences, we found their responses echoed the sentiments and concerns of our cast and most other critics of the play. It seemed too abrupt that Ned would forswear suicide. What proved to be interesting in our discussions is that the audience felt the characters were vital and real. The shifts in tone did not bother them at all. The sudden mood swings of Ned seemed appropriate. They found Malloy cold and oppressive. They adored Jimmy. In the end, the play had a power over the audience we didn't expect. Attempting to play O'Neill by his rules, following his guidelines, his directions, his readings, proved to be the surest way to succeed.While we remained confident that maintaining the hint of a cynical tone in scene 2 would have given the audience a more satisfying conclusion, we were heartened that O'Neill's character studies, however slight, still have a hold on modern audiences.Sitting in that same bar on Congress after the opening night, we looked at one another bleary-eyed and strangely exhausted after a thirty-minute play. Many of us wanted to start reading other O'Neill plays with the idea of producing him again next season. A Touch of the Poet was mentioned. Iceman was discussed. And because of the uncomfortable job of playing the happy Swede, Nordie, I thought of Anna Christie, who was pretty with all the weak sins of the world on her face.There is always a strange rush of happy exhaustion after a drama. A kind of delirium comes upon actors after a performance of emotional intensity. It's a giddy feeling, and you're inclined toward a cast party, maybe a drink and some singing. Then, of course, it hit us. That's what Ned was feeling: the giddy hysteria of surviving a drama. “Damn,” I said (caustically), “O'Neill may have been right again.”
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