The “Lost Plays”: The Web, Recklessness, and Abortion
2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/eugeoneirevi.42.1.0106
ISSN2161-4318
Autores ResumoTao House is the serene Northern California retreat where O'Neill wrote his final and most memorable plays, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten. But in October 2020 it was the site of videotaped script-in-hand performances of three of his earliest works, from the so-called lost plays.O'Neill wrote these three plays—The Web, Recklessness, and Abortion—just after his redemptive bout in the sanitarium with tuberculosis, when he found his true vocation as a playwright, but before he formally studied playwriting at Harvard with George Pierce Baker. They are miniatures, exercises to work out particular knots of conflict, almost like sculptors' maquettes. Together these taut, heavily wrought little melodramas give a fascinating glimpse into the preoccupations that fueled O'Neill's artistic trajectory.Decades before he would turn to his richest material, his own family, the young O'Neill seems here to be drawing on the lives he encountered as a reporter for the New London Telegraph. He shows us a terrible prism of humanity in the seedy underworld of the crime beat. His sympathies are with the working class or underclass white women he finds smothered in the lower depths of a stratified society, lacking agency in their own lives. Their fates rest with callous men who use them. They are all trapped. They all struggle and try to seize a remote chance at happiness. But O'Neill seems to give human happiness very long odds, at least for the women of his time whose hopes for love and freedom contort into desperate, impossible longings before being violently stomped out.Director Eric Fraisher Hayes eliminated all “fighting, kissing, and sitting” in the scripts to make some kind of shared stage experience safe for the actors. Most have roles in more than one of the plays, limiting the population of the bubble. All three plays are performed in front of a generalized textured set, a bit like a Home Depot display: a shingled-looking area stage right with a chandelier hanging imprecisely over it, a wide wooden lath section stage left, up a couple of steps with an exit, and a period staircase turning and exiting out the middle. There's just enough there to let your imagination fill in the blanks.In The Web, we meet Rose, a woman trapped in the life of prostitution, played just this side of the border of tender and tough by Emily Keyishian. She's not at all sexualized: she's a tired working-class young woman with a hacking tubercular cough who finds purpose in caring for her baby. But to her monstrously self-centered pimp, Steve, played by Charles Woodson Parker as a kind of Bluto wannabe in a t-shirt and vest with flat cap, the baby is just an impediment. A narrow path to Rose's salvation appears in the form of a sympathetic antihero next-door neighbor, Tim Moran, played by Ryan Hayes. Moran is a wily and notorious escaped con, the man who looks the most like virtue in this rogue's gallery that also includes a band of rotten flat-footed cops. In the end, the lousy system triumphs, and hope dies.We sense O'Neill trying out his Shavian chops, as Rose and Tim each in turn, standing by their script stands, deliver a little essay on how the system made them into criminals (a “yegg”—professional robber—in Tim's case) and keeps them from becoming anything better. The actors all inhabit O'Neill's street patter convincingly, without veering into Guys and Dolls cartoonish-ness. It's a challenge that runs throughout the productions: making the characters real and relatable humans with beating hearts, transcending both O'Neill's period dialect as well as the two-dimensionality one might expect in what are to some extent compressed object lessons. Director Hayes has assembled a crafty bunch of stage practitioners who are equal to the task. John Hale has a nice moment at the end of The Web as the momentarily softened copper who takes responsibility for Rose's baby, leaving us to wonder what possible future that child could have, the next hopeless entrant into the inescapable web of the underclass.In Recklessness, Mildred, again played by Keyishian, is young woman from a modest family trapped in a loveless marriage with a much older man of means, the bluff, calculating Arthur Baldwin. Here the stolid Hale brings the role of Baldwin a bit of wry charm, deftly handling another dialect of O'Neill's, the pompous patter of the educated and entitled. Mildred's salvation appears in the form of the dashing, temporarily down-on-his-luck chauffeur with a future, Fred, played by Kyle Goldman. Goldman is a standout in this series, especially supple here as a jaunty sport we can relate to across the dusty decades.O'Neill executes a bit of misdirection, where Baldwin offers Mildred a plausibly happy ending while he's actually working out his revenge. Spoiler alert: it goes very, very badly for the lovers. But the director gives us a final image that suggests there may at least be a grim release available to them, and to all of us, in the end.Abortion revolves around an impregnated working-class girl, Nellie, whom we never meet. Her privileged college-boy lover, football hero Jack Townsend (Ryan Hayes, thirtyish and somewhat miscast here), could never accept her as a possible mother of his child. He wants to brush it all under the rug, marry his fiancé, Evelyn, and continue on his respectable course as the beloved scion of a happy, well-off family. Due to production difficulties, Evelyn ended up being another offstage character. This left the focus on the relationships between Jack and the other men: his stodgy father, played stodgily by John Tessmer, who wants to help make the problem all go away, and the menacing Joe Murray (Will Long), Nellie's aggrieved brother. They form a contrast of classes, one turning to money and the other to a gun as the preferred instrument of power to resolve an outrage.Keyishian appears again but you wouldn't know it, so fully does she embody the zippy nineteen-year-old sprite, Jack's sister Lucy.Dramatic justice is delivered on Jack. In fact, the director changed O'Neill's ending to visit what he saw as greater punishment on Jack for his pusillanimous selfishness. But our pity for poor Nellie is not extinguished.These are not readings. There's solid period costuming and a bit of gestural blocking within the limits of COVID safety. There's even sound design—rain, a crying baby, a motorcar roaring past. One feels grateful for the immersion afforded by this bit of committed, artistic theatre provided by the Eugene O'Neill Foundation in these strange times. Of course, videotaped script-in-hand Zoomed performances cannot replicate the magical spell that's cast when an audience shares space with live performers. In person, one's attention focuses and zooms in where it's needed and makes unconscious cuts from one view to another. Here you mostly have the still frame and the static set. There is very little use of the compensating tricks of close-ups and cutaways one gets with film. Director Hayes's admirable respect for social distancing comes at a cost.But there are still entrances and exits, combinations of characters, and action. And there's the power of O'Neill's battered, belligerent young soul, and some very intelligent, sensitive performances, maybe even better than the somewhat heavy-handed material deserves.For those who don't like watching things on a computer, these pieces are mercifully short, about a half-hour each. For those who want a fuller picture of O'Neill's original impulses as an artist, this is time well spent.
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