Hughie
2019; Penn State University Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/eugeoneirevi.40.1.2019.0110
ISSN2161-4318
Autores ResumoThe one-act Hughie, written in three weeks, premiered in Stockholm (1958) and became part of O'Neill's contribution to the modernist and existentialist European canon of the first half of the twentieth century, joining the works of Beckett, Brecht, Camus, Sartre, Ionesco, and others. O'Neill intended Hughie to be part of a series entitled By Way of Obit, in which, as O'Neill wrote to George Jean Nathan, “the main character talks about a person who has died to a person who does little but listen” (Selected Letters, ed. Bogard and Bryer [1988], 531).A recent O'Neill Foundation production, part of the nineteenth annual Eugene O'Neill Festival and the first international version of same, was staged in the barn next to Tao House, O'Neill's former residence. Director Eric Fraisher Hayes took Hughie in an experimental direction, enlarging the cast from two to three in order to dramatize, as he framed the point in his notes, the “incredibly rich, magical world of the notes that O'Neill wrote between the dialogue”; and, as he said in an e-mail to me, to “give the third character a journey and … discoveries as well.” In order to keep the action moving, Hayes edited out a number of the stage directions, retaining the more colorful ones. Late in the play, many of the directions were omitted.As a short story, Hughie partially works, since so many of Hughes's thoughts are lodged in the unvoiced stage directions. O'Neill knew the play read better than it played. According to Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O'Neill did not intend Hughie “to be given conventional stage productions” (O'Neill [1962], 844). This telegraphs the playwright's challenge to directors, specifically his recognition that the play would benefit from the application of new techniques. Today's directors may well wonder what to do with the stage directions. Without them, can they capture the fullness of the play's modernist isolation, its moodiness, sadness, and loss—the feeling that these people and this New York hotel engender, reminiscent of Edward Hopper's midnight graveyard diner in “Nighthawks” and recalling to everyone the isolating moments in life?By inserting a third character voicing the stage directions, Hayes frontally addressed the play's conundrum. Choosing to capture more of O'Neill's language lost to playgoers without a copy of the entire play at hand (e.g., Charlie responds to Smith “in the vague tone of a corpse which admits it once overheard a favorable rumor about life”), he took the spotlight off Erie Smith and so changed the dramatic experience. The third character in this Hughie becomes as important as the other two—at times inserting himself between the two characters, sometimes standing behind Charles Hughes, and, occasionally, standing on the sidelines—his presence always felt.The director's move from a focus on Erie to an ensemble piece suggested that these characters are interchangeable, serving as a reminder that we all, at times, occupy the roles of Erie, the silent Charles Hughes (the face we present to the public), and/or the Charles Hughes of our thoughts. Aaron Murphy, Dorian Lockett, and Clive Worsley, who changed roles for different performances, sometimes adopted a humorous tone—something I had not witnessed in other productions of Hughie. The play included a solid cacophony of night sounds: elevated trains, streetcars, taxi honks, dog barks, garbage men banging metal garbage cans, policemen's footsteps; the sounds became fewer and fewer as the play progressed to emphasize Erie's descent.The strength of Hayes's interpretation is that playgoers were privy to a fuller understanding of Charles Hughes, hearing more of O'Neill's voice—often hilarious and sarcastic, rebellious even, in response to the often tiresome and needy Erie. Also, by inserting a third character, this Hughie provided more of a dramatic dynamic on stage, largely absent in a two-hander in which one character talks while the other “does little but listen.” Hayes's version thus makes of Hughie less a short story, or a dramatic poem, and more a theatrical piece, filling in the play's gaps.But a salient argument can be made for restricting Hughie to just two cast members since the play is really about silence, and that to capture the heart of the play, the focus should remain on the silence that is essentially the relationship we have with ourselves and on the threatening silence we meet in others—a silence underscored in O'Neill's entire output. From early works like The Moon of the Caribbees and Before Breakfast through late masterpieces like The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night, O'Neill portrayed what was ineffable—that force, the mystical silence that cannot be explicitly communicated in words. And while confronting a silence that can be threatening—even irritating—to an audience, that silence is essentially what O'Neill promulgates in Hughie. Erie Smith should continue to be “eerie.”I believe the play was well received generally. For me, the third voice seemed a superfluous and unnecessary reminder that the play's force lies in the misery of man's isolation. At times, I confess I found the third voice more of a distraction than an aid in understanding O'Neill's modernist message. I wished for another kind of enhancement: perhaps an occasional voice-over to capture the stage directions. I remain more enamored of a Hughie that focuses on Erie Smith, an obsessed teller of tales á la Melville, or on the pitiful, tortured ghostly figure of an Erie Smith waiting and hoping, only to be met with the deafening silence that meets Beckett's Didi and Gogo. I remain greatly appreciative of the storied interpreters of Erie Smith—for example, Jason Robards Jr. (1964), Al Pacino (1996), and Brian Dennehy (2008)—who placed the spotlight squarely on Erie Smith's desire for and relationship with the absent Hughie and not on his replacement: the silent Hughes. I do not want to turn away from the graveyard figures in that Hopper painting or to deny St. John of the Cross's “dark night of the soul.”O'Neill issued an enigmatic challenge regarding his Hughie: “Let whoever does it figure it out” (qtd. in Gelb and Gelb, 844). Directors should freely ask themselves what is gained or lost if they ignore Hughes's unspoken thoughts. Although the play does invite enhancement, it does not demand it. Hughie remains one of the finest American one-act plays largely due to the play's rendering of the tormented, solipsistic inner lives of America's misbegotten with compassion.
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