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The Rope

2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.42.1.0095

2161-4318

Cheryl Black,

Theatre and Performance Studies

In early spring 2020, efforts to halt the spread of COVID-19 through social distancing resulted in the suspension or cancellation of live theatrical performances throughout the United States. In a self-proclaimed attempt to “keep the theatre's pilot lit” and more specifically to support theatre artists during this enforced furlough, New York City's Metropolitan Playhouse launched a “Virtual Playhouse” season of free readings, live-streamed on Zoom and YouTube and simultaneously broadcast on New York's Pacifica radio station, WBAI. At the time of this writing in late August 2020, the Virtual Playhouse had provided support for over 150 artists/technicians and reached an audience of over 8,600. The twenty-four plays presented, drawn primarily from early twentieth-century works in public domain, included five by Washington Square playwright Alice Gerstenberg; Suppressed Desires, by Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook; The People, by Glaspell; Constancy, by Provincetown playwright Neith Boyce; Compromise, by Black Renaissance playwright Willis Richardson; and two O'Neill one-acts, The Rope and Where the Cross Is Made. The bounty will continue: near my deadline, the theatre announced a fall season that would include Glaspell's Woman's Honor, Alfred Kreymborg's Vote the New Moon, and Alice Rostetter's The Widow's Veil (all originally produced by the Provincetown Players). Although the entire Virtual Season would be of interest to this journal's readers, this essay focuses primarily on performances of the two works by O'Neill.Nearly a century separates the writing of these plays with their Metropolitan presentations in a manner undreamed of even by the forward-thinking theatrical experimenters at the Provincetown Playhouse. Their re-viewing under these circumstances and in this context sheds new light on their meaning(s) and their enduring significance, as well as occasioning a few thoughts on the possibilities and limitations of virtual theatrical performance. These performances highlight links between our current cultural moment and that of a century ago, beginning with affinities between the Provincetown Players and the Metropolitan Playhouse, its East Village location a ten-minute cab ride from O'Neill's theatrical home at the Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal Street. The stated mission of the Metropolitan Playhouse—to explore “America's theatrical heritage” in order to “illuminate contemporary American culture”—resonates with the Provincetown Players' commitment to developing a home-grown American drama that would effect artistic and social transformation. Recurring reminders to viewers to love and care for their neighbors from Metropolitan's artistic director, Alex Roe, evoke Provincetown spiritus rector Jig Cook's zeal to foster a “beloved community of lifegivers.” (Roe provided information for this review and generously made the Virtual Playhouse archive available to me.)The Virtual Playhouse season and the Provincetown Players' 1918–19 season, when The Rope and Where the Cross Is Made debuted, share the extraordinary social context of pandemic: from 1918–19, the so-called Spanish flu caused over 600,000 deaths in the United States, with an estimated global death toll of 20–50 million. Then, as now, social distancing, mask-wearing, and similar precautions were employed to prevent infection. Although theatres across the United States closed, Broadway carried on with minor adjustments, for example the staggering of curtain times, the elimination of SRO, and the banning of smoking, coughing, and sneezing in auditoriums. The Washington Square Players and the Greenwich Village Theatre closed—presumably due to the pandemic, which peaked in October 1918—but the Provincetown Players performed twenty-five one-acts and one full-length play during the 1918–19 season. The lack of attention granted the 1918 pandemic by theatre historians and playwrights is mystifying, although the Players' first chronicler, Edna Kenton, reported that during rehearsals for O'Neill's Moon of the Caribbees in December 1918, “the postwar influenza epidemic was raging. Player after player succumbed. We recast up to the end, and all the while [actor] Hutchinson Collins lay closer to death at St. Vincent's hospital nearby” (The Provincetown Players and the Playwrights' Theatre, 1915–1922, ed. Bogard and Bryer [2004], 87). Collins died in January 1919. Moon cast-member and Greenwich Village photographer Berenice Abbott reported that the flu “hit the Village especially hard and killed several of her friends”; Abbott's housemate, Provincetown playwright Djuna Barnes, contracted the flu but survived (Philip Herring, Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes [1995], 105). Provincetown playwright Neith Boyce's son, Boyce (Harry), died in the pandemic.That era also shares with our own a widespread awakening to social injustice. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the political activism of disenfranchised women, workers, immigrants, African Americans, and others anticipated that of early twenty-first-century movements like Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Fair Fight, and Occupy Wall Street. Then, as now, activists took to the streets to protest injustice and demand change, and then, as now, the theatre often provided a platform for revolutionary ideas. The Provincetown Players' repertoire regularly included works advancing progressive and egalitarian causes, and the Metropolitan's Virtual Playhouse season and inclusive casting practices, as well as Alex Roe's introductory and closing remarks, have allied the organization with Black Lives Matter and other progressive movements.Written at about the same time, The Rope and Where the Cross Is Made are a well-matched pair: both are “sea plays,” featuring seacoast settings and characters who have lived and worked on ships, and both integrate meticulous realistic detail and expressionist and symbolist elements. Both plays portray deeply wounded human beings and troubled relationships, especially between fathers and sons; both dramatize the folly of human greed. These themes have been generally viewed as autobiographical, reflecting O'Neill's conflicted relationship with his own father, actor James O'Neill, and O'Neill's conflicting drives for material versus artistic success (see, e.g., Brenda Murphy, The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity [2005], 172–77). As in his better-known, later plays, The Rope and Where the Cross Is Made depict characters haunted by the past and unable to learn from it. Common factors that make these works especially conducive to the live-streaming medium include their unified structure (a single line of action unfolding in real time, in a single location) and small cast size (five in The Rope; four in Where the Cross Is Made, excluding the ghosts). Both depend on relaying considerable information to the audience about past events in long expository speeches, for which O'Neill was faulted. This “flaw,” however, lends itself to the Zoom format. Because our attention must zero in on individuals in close-up, the Metropolitan performances focused on psychology and the inner life of the characters, rather than on physical action, which is minimal in both.The Rope is a mordantly ironic revisioning of the tale of the Prodigal Son from Luke 15:11–32, featuring an aging, raging patriarch, Abraham; his careworn daughter, Annie; her hard-drinking husband, Pat; their intellectually disabled daughter, Mary; and Abraham's “prodigal” son, the aptly named Luke, who five years earlier had stolen a hundred dollars from his father and run away to sea. At Luke's desertion, Abraham hung a rope in the barn with the directive that Luke should hang himself should he ever return home. Luke's sudden reappearance brings the hatred and greed festering within the family to a head—the farm and a hidden hoard of fifty twenty-dollar gold pieces are at stake—and brings the action to its ironic conclusion. In Where the Cross Is Made, a cash-strapped, sailor-turned-writer whose sea captain father forced him into the career that cost him his right arm initially resists but finally succumbs to his father's mad obsession with recovering a treasure presumably lost at sea.First performed by the Provincetown Players in spring 1918, The Rope was live-streamed by the Metropolitan Playhouse on April 4, 2020, the second performance of their virtual season. The evening's running time of just under an hour featured a ten-minute preshow virtual tour and an introduction by Roe, which served to create an illusion of space-sharing communality. As the audience virtually “enters,” signs invited them to make themselves comfortable in the homey lobby, and to eat, drink, and “go wild” with cellphone use. A sign bearing the charge “Love One Another” was prominently displayed, and the illusion of an audience's presence is humorously sustained by Roe, who cautioned viewers to “watch their step” on the stairs. Roe, who directed the reading, also served as narrator (sporting a devil's mask), skimming through most of O'Neill's thick descriptions but pointing out important stage directions. A photograph of a weathered barn suggested the setting, and a practical rope with a noose was visible in each actor's home space. As with all Virtual Playhouse readings, actors, in consultation with directors, furnished suggestive apparel and properties. Other practical props included a cane brandished by Abraham; bottles of liquor (this bottle is meant to be shared and should look the same in each space, but the actors did not seem to coordinate on this small detail); a chisel, to be used by Luke and Pat to torture Abraham into revealing the location of his hidden hoard; a silver dollar, which Luke gives to a delighted Mary upon his arrival; and the bag containing the gold coins.In 1918 O'Neill resisted director Nina Moise's advice to cut some of the exposition, insisting that the drama relied on the psychological and emotional truth conveyed by the actors: “Make them act!” (O'Neill to Moise, April 14, 1918, in Selected Letters of Eugene O'Neill, ed. Bogard and Bryer [1988], 82). The deep commitment to O'Neill's text revealed by the Metropolitan cast validated O'Neill's conviction. The several expository scenes were charged with emotion and revelatory of character, relationships, and tormented psyches. As the unhinged Abraham, gaunt, gray-haired, growling Marty McDonough was especially effective during Luke's homecoming scene, when the prodigal misinterprets Abraham's incoherent joy as anger. Noelia Berkus, as Annie, provided a convincing portrait of barely suppressed bitterness, wisely eschewing O'Neill's call for speaking in a “high-pitched, sing-song whine.” To his vibrant rendering of Sweeney, David Logan Rankin brought a piercing gaze, a subtly brogue-inflected speech, and an appropriately underplayed inebriation. There was a lurking sweetness about Jamahl Garrison-Lowe's Luke that made one believe his compassion to the “soft-minded” Mary, an otherwise uncharacteristic generosity necessary to set up the resolution. The gifted young Talia Cuomo shone in the difficult role of Mary. Following the reading, actors disappeared until Roe “re-entered” and invited them back for a virtual curtain call. This early experiment in virtual performance had a few technical glitches: some overlapping sound; a slight delay in Abraham's “entrance”; and, more notably, an inability to activate the chat function, an interactive feature that greatly enhanced the “liveness” of subsequent performances. Before ending the session, however, Roe was able to retrieve and share a few congratulatory comments submitted by YouTube viewers and to deliver a final reminder to all to act with compassion during the current crisis.By the time the Virtual Playhouse live-streamed Where the Cross Is Made on June 20, the theatre had fine-tuned the technology and significantly enhanced the interactive “liveness” of the experience through postshow conversations, frequently facilitated by scholars and artists from across the country. Rashida Z. Shaw McMahon facilitated the discussion for Compromise; Dorothy Chansky for Gerstenberg's Pot Boiler; J. Ellen Gainor for Constancy and Suppressed Desires; actress Louise Heller for Mary E. Freeman's The Apple Tree; Andrew Ball for William Dean Howells's The Smoking Car; and Howells's great-granddaughter Polly Howells for his The Parlour Car. I had the honor for Glaspell's The People, and Alex Pettit handled Where the Cross Is Made.The evening began with slides projecting the exhortation from Lincoln's 1863 Gettysburg Address that those who died fighting for liberty and justice “shall not have died in vain.” This moment linked past and present struggles and connected the evening's performance to the forthcoming Virtual Playhouse reading of Glaspell's The People, in which Glaspell employs this quote for similar purposes. As usual, Roe's welcoming remarks specifically referenced the COVID-19 situation and the Black Lives Matter movement as illustrative of the play's themes of “unfinished business” and the impact of the past on the present. Reminding viewers that the theatre helps us “look at and understand the past to understand the future,” Roe affirmed the Playhouse's unequivocal support of BLM protestors, and postshow facilitator Pettit ironically referenced the evening's Trump rally in Tulsa as a “counterprotest.” Roe wrapped up with a unifying message of “health and safety to folks gathering wherever they are,” and a reiteration of his view of O'Neill's play as a depiction of one man's tragic failure to break with, or learn from, the past.As in The Rope, each actor's screen featured the actor in a head and shoulder shot, simply dressed in subtle colors that suggested an earlier era. An abstract background design of dark blue with heavy black lines, rendered by Danny Licul, was interestingly evocative of the “postimpressionist” backdrops by Provincetown designers William and Marguerite Zorach. Practical properties were limited to a lantern and treasure maps, and stage business to Nat's burning of his father's map in a futile attempt to exorcise the obsession. The sound of the sea, provided by sound and video operator Rachael Langdon, heightened the mood and emotional content of this play about a mad sea captain's obsession with the return of a wrecked ship bearing treasure.With this play, also, the commitment of the performers, under the direction of Frank Kuhn, justified O'Neill's refusal to cut expository dialogue. The burden here rested primarily with Michael Hardart as Nat, the only character aware of the backstory of his father's obsession with recovering long-lost treasure and the family's current financial predicament. Nat's sharing of this information with his sister Sue (sympathetically and sincerely portrayed by Julie Pham) and with the doctor he has summoned to commit his father revealed far more: it revealed a tortured emotional journey that culminates in his own descent into madness. The white-bearded and feverishly energized Joe Candelora was perfectly cast as Captain Bartlett, the “old salt” in the grip of a hopeless dream. As Dr. Higgins, John Ingle was well served by a rangy look, raspy voice, and rather caustic manner that called to mind the late, great O'Neill interpreter Jason Robards.At the time of the play's Provincetown debut in fall 1918, director Ida Rauh and others strongly objected to the entrance of the ghosts of three drowned sailors at the play's climax, fearing that what O'Neill intended to engender terror in the minds of the audience might instead invoke laughter. O'Neill won the argument (as usual), and critic Heywood Broun, at least, found the effect “fearful” (Eugene O'Neill: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Bryer and Dowling [2014], 47). This challenge was magnified for a virtual staged reading. The Metropolitan met it with a somewhat abstract painting of the ghosts, rendered by Pamela Lawton and suggestive of O'Neill's detailed description of decomposing flesh being washed in green light, which was read in full by narrator Dena Miller.The forty-five-minute reading was followed by an invigorating thirty-five-minute conversation, during which the actors “re-entered,” joined by Pettit, Roe, Kuhn, Licul, and Lawton. Following Pettit's engaging and authoritative commentary on the play and performance, a number of viewers submitted questions and comments, some joining the conversation through the magic of Zoom and becoming visibly as well as audibly present. This conversation created a remarkable semblance of theatrical “liveness” and communality, underscoring the fact that the audience was sharing time, if not space. For Pettit, the reading confirmed his opinion that Where the Cross Is Made is better than its later, full-length adaptation, Gold, and that Hardart's performance as well as O'Neill's abundant visual details rendered Nat's long expository monologue the centerpiece of the play. Roe highlighted the play's timely potential to teach us “how we bear the legacy of the past and how to reconcile with it and move on.” Other topics treated during the interactive conversation included possible influences on O'Neill (Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, and Stephen Crane among them); the play's autobiographical aspects; the theme of reality vs. “pipe dreams”; and the character of Sue Bartlett, in relation to O'Neill's reputed inability to create complex or sympathetic female characters, especially early in his career. Pettit declared that Pham's performance had given O'Neill more than he deserved. Director Kuhn and participant Robert Brophy viewed Sue as anticipating the maternal Josie Hogan in A Moon for the Misbegotten. It is worth noting not only that Pham wisely ignored stage directions requiring “hysterical” line deliveries, but also that the character as written seems entirely motivated by love and compassion, attributes that apparently render her immune to the inherited obsession that infects her brother. Particularly within the context of this performance, Sue highlights Roe's consistent pre- and post-show appeals to “the better angels” of our nature. The Eugene O'Neill Foundation's artistic director, Eric Fraisher Hayes, Zoomed in with an interesting question regarding the appearance of the ghosts that are meant to be seen by the audience (presumably from the Captain's and/or Nat's POV). Hayes's observation that in their madness, Bartlett and Nat believe they are seeing living sailors, not decomposing specters, stands to be of considerable interest to future directors and designers of this play.Some plays from the Virtual Playhouse season (Compromise and The People, for example) are overtly political, speaking directly to issues hotly debated then and now: what is the worth of a Black life in a white supremacist society? What is our responsibility as citizens to ensure a “more perfect union”? The two O'Neill plays are not political in this way, yet these readings illuminated their implicit political impact. Both plays strike deep at greed and materialism, values that are arguably at the root of our nation's most grievous errors, and they also strike deep at the failure to confront past and present realities. The Virtual Playhouse performances of these plays, significantly augmented by interactive engagements with audiences, underscore their resonance for our time and highlight O'Neill's recurring theme of the past's impact on the present and his recurring use of the dysfunctional family as a metaphor for a nation suffering the sins of the (founding) fathers.One of the obvious advantages to virtual theatrical events is their ability to facilitate real-time interactive exchanges among geographically distant audiences—for the Metropolitan, much larger audiences than their intimate East Village space could accommodate. A consideration of this season contributes to our understanding of the shifting concept of “liveness” in relation to performance in the twenty-first century. The Playhouse's interaction with its virtual audience managed to create the illusion of shared space; to underscore the actuality of shared time; and, in my perspective as an audience member and occasional participant, to foster a crucial sense of connection and community during a time of social isolation, thereby reaffirming the power of theatre to remind us of our common humanity.