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Ghosts of Tao House

2022; Penn State University Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.43.2.0202

2161-4318

Marla Del Collins,

Irish and British Studies

GHOSTS of Tao House? The word “ghosts” nearly floats off the page of its own accord! How am I qualified to talk of ghosts? Then again, I’m Irish, aren’t I? That qualifies me well enough! Haven’t we Irish always been in step with the ephemeral? Not only are we “Walking with Ghosts,” as Gabriel Byrne’s memoir so eloquently suggests, but ghosts are woven into the very fabric of Irish mythology and culture. We talk with ghosts as casually as we might chat with a neighbor on the other side of a balla cloiche (stone wall) that divides one green field from another; and we, being a hospitable people go much further—inviting our stone-dead ancestors to drop down to earth to mingle with us mortals during Samhain, the Celtic new year when the “gate” between the hereafter and the here-and-now opens up a crack to let them in. Don’t we converse with them then? Drink an extra pint on their behalf only to don masks and costumes to frighten them back to their eternal realm should they overstay their welcome?Keep in mind the name “Eugene O’Neill” is often wedded to the word “ghost.” Indeed, the poor fellow has been accused of becoming a ghost himself—haunting, for example, Kilachand Hall, now a Boston University Honors College dorm that was, in his day, a luxury hotel where he spent his remaining years. Moreover, I and fifteen cast and crew members were haunted by the ghost of O’Neill (a true story yet to be told) when we reopened the famous Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal Street years ago. Many Broadway plays had their start at the playhouse, including O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape. We all agreed that meeting up with O’Neill’s ghost in a myriad of ways was more memorable (albeit terrifying—for he would not be trifled with) than the long-forgotten opening night of our less than mediocre play. Therefore, it is only fitting that O’Neill’s characters rise from the dead to be included in this series of short films called Ghosts of Tao House. These ghosts seem right at home—indeed, they are home, residing in and around O’Neill’s last real home, Tao House, nestled in California’s picturesque hills and valleys.In total, the six short films—all accessible from the Eugene O’Neill Foundation’s website (eugeneoneill.org)—are a tribute to all those who have been, as O’Neill wrote in his notebook in 1933, “starved in spirit by their soul-stifling struggles to exist,” a dedication to those growing up in the ominous shadows of misunderstanding, squeezed almost lifeless by harsh Victorian restrictions and patrilinear judgment. The finely tuned energy of the director, camera person, actors, ghosts, vistas, and Tao House itself creates an O’Neillian amalgam of “forces” designed to pull us into the celebration of life!The first “ghost” comprises passages from O’Neill’s Pulitzer-winning Beyond the Horizon, written between 1918 and 1920. Pulitzers are given to artists who swing outside the norm with original ideas that better serve humankind. The play does just that by transcending the dualistic mores of Victorian melodrama and thereby marking the beginning of a multifaceted theatrical style that would reflect human complexity.Beyond the Horizon tracks the fate of two brothers, Robert and Andrew, who are meant to journey through life on separate paths but in trying to do the “right thing” switch paths resulting in both being psychologically undone. Andy Mayo would have been content to stay behind in a traditional rural environment to run the farm, marry, and raise a family while his brother Robert, the poet—passionately played by the gifted actor Willem Long (whose professional camera work is also mighty impressive)—yearns to strike out for the unknown “beyond the horizon” to soak up adventures that will expand his awareness and increase his opportunities. Their desire to take the paths of their dreams is unraveled in short order by the love of a young woman representing domesticity (well, isn’t that typical!). In the end, it’s Robert who stays and Andy who leaves. Neither will know the happiness that comes from following one’s bliss.It’s the power of film that allows Tao House to serve as a stage set by providing what looks to be a small empty pantry or mudroom within the house to symbolize repression. Physically confining Robert to the smallest and most isolated room in the house is the perfect metaphor for his “going nowhere fast.” Robert also represents all disenfranchised young artists who take refuge in their rooms save for escaping through the written word or out an open window! Only through film can the atmosphere switch so dramatically from a vacant room to an expansive vista—the colorful outdoors containing metaphors representing boundless growth, creative energy, beauty, and a multitude of opportunities to grow and thrive. We certainly know which path Robert (aka Eugene O’Neill) would have taken and, happily for us, did take in real time.Beyond the Horizon reveals how social pressure to follow the dictates and domestic norms governing marriage and children can undo self-directed dreams. In the end the dreamer is condemned as “selfish” and “irresponsible” if he takes such a deviant path. Robert’s monologues are elucidated by the breathtaking Las Trampas Regional Wilderness surrounding Tao House. The road that leads anywhere, but especially to the ocean, reflects O’Neill’s abandonment of the ordinary that would have by this time already carried him over the high seas, as rendered in Bound East for Cardiff. Unlike Robert, O’Neill did not do “the right thing,” and for that we are both disturbed and grateful. If nothing else, this short film inspires us to get off our duffs and write the next chapter of our best-selling novel or award-winning play despite the outside din and inner demons mouthing “no way!” So, get going! Eugene O’Neill was anything but idle—cramped fingers notwithstanding.In Desire Under the Elms, the action takes place in and around the Cabot family farmhouse in New England, 1850. The protagonist, Ephraim Cabot, is the almighty patriarch of the Cabot household. In this “ghost,” actor Randy Anger brilliantly captures the highs and lows of a depressed man’s rant. Male depression is, of course, a psychological category unto its own that Eugene O’Neill knew all too well. The play made its debut in 1924 at the Greenwich Village Theatre in New York City. Two months later it would enjoy a short run on Broadway with Walter Huston playing the part of Ephraim. O’Neill had a number of plays actively enjoying notoriety at the time, so when this one was banned both at home and abroad, it made for an instant hit, a game changer for him. O’Neill would make a small fortune during its short run. I suspect he graciously thanked his negative critics by lifting a tankard or two! I had quite a chuckle over the symbolism used to depict the stony rigidity of New England puritanism. By filming the simple act of stones being piled up one atop another, Hayes and company clearly conjure up the image of those same stones being dug out of the ground and stacked so laboriously by nineteenth-century Irish and American farmers—their blistered and bleeding hands marking off boundaries—a metaphor, quite possibly, for the divisiveness among themselves as their own beating hearts slowly turned to stone.Desire Under the Elms presented yet another opportunity to create a formidable male character meant to mock a war-mongering society and the patriarch at home. O’Neill’s father, actor James O’Neill—or “old Gaspard” as Gene and his brother Jamie were wont to call him—may have been in the playwright’s mind when he created Ephraim Cabot. His father was a formalized tragedian who, with dramatic flair—and bolstered by an emptied bottle of gin—would go off on many a similar tirade while the brothers, I can imagine, buried their heads in neatly embroidered pillows to stifle their nervous fits of laughter.Randy Anger portrays a thoroughly convincing humorless, “would-rather-sleep-with-cows” type of guy, but let’s pause here to praise another hoofer playing the part of Ephraim’s third wife, the long-suffering Abbie. In this case, she defiantly chews her cud throughout the standoff. I am inclined to call her “Bessie” (for I know not her stage name). The way Bessie portrays the cow-ering wife holding her ground against her husband’s bluster is nothing short of award-worthy. Bessie’s going places if she can find herself a good agent.Now, as if creating this series of films weren’t enough, director Hayes has amazingly transformed himself into a thoroughly believable Lazarus from O’Neill’s Lazarus Laughed: A Play for an Imaginative Theatre. The play was completed in 1926 and produced in 1928. Who knew the “imaginative theatre” could easily be the rolling hills surrounding Tao House! The original production accommodated a cast of 159 amateur actors along with hundreds of masks, costumes, and scenery, and opened at the Pasadena Community Playhouse. Ah, but wait, we have only one ghostly character to contend with—Lazarus himself—or do we? Filming techniques serve this play well as Caligula, again played by collaborator Long, is controlling what we see through the camera’s lens. Indeed, we are seeing Lazarus through the furtive and fearful eyes of Caligula, that infamous, ancient, psychopathic Roman emperor. The camera lens serves as Caligula’s eyes, darting quickly back and forth from one scene to another, demonstrating his paranoia and his desire to escape the realization that others may see him as insane and emotionally impotent.O’Neill, inspired by Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, hammers home one of his favorite themes when Lazarus rises from the dead proclaiming “death is dead!” And, if death is dead, then we have nothing to fear from the powerful who hold the possibility of death over our heads! Rejoice! This revelation offers us the freedom to be happy no matter what dastardly deeds are being hatched by dastardly people—a visionary’s theme that is so apropos for our own times.The beautiful voice of opera singer Sara Conden adds a haunting atmosphere to this short film. Using her vocal masterpieces throughout would have added extra aesthetic and technical continuity to the series. But even without music, O’Neill’s themes (loneliness, struggle, ghosts, and nature’s multifariousness versus humankind’s binary social order) and his characteristic postmodernist slant of using combined theatrical styles provide ample consistency across all six short films. Long’s Caligula behind the camera and Hayes’s Lazarus demonstrate how two artists psychologically and kinetically complement each other as they dance, or shall I say “laugh,” their way through this romp, ending fittingly at the gravesite of Blemie—Eugene and Carlotta’s beloved Dalmatian—for who knows better that “death is dead” than our wiser four-legged friends who by happily living in the moment have the last laugh!The next ghostly rendering is from “Anna Christie,” completed in 1920 and produced in 1921. It would suffer several rewrites as O’Neill struggled to turn the original protagonist, an ol’ seafarer named Chris Christopherson, into the sailor’s long-lost daughter, Anna Christie. The process of revealing the human complexities of a female heroine once a sex-worker provides a remarkable departure from the stereotypical portrayal of such women in that day and age and would consequently earn O’Neill his second Pulitzer. Could O’Neill’s daily teatime with his close friend Susan Glaspell, also a member of the Provincetown Players, and herself a Pulitzer-winning playwright, have anything to do with his sudden heartfelt empathy for women as a downtrodden underclass?This film opens with the demonstrative sounds of male voices belonging to Chris, Anna’s father, and seafaring bloke Matt, her fiancé. The two men argue about which has “property rights” over Anna, and who will control her future. But she will have none of it! Anna (saint Anna is the mother of the mother of God) makes clear that nobody owns her but herself alone! Her story of how she became a sex-worker is heroically and poignantly told by actor Adrian Deane, but she speaks within a vacuum of silence. In the script, O’Neill includes the angry voices of her father and fiancé interjecting short snippets of barking commentary throughout her monologue. O’Neill knew it would have been unrealistic for a woman not to be interrupted by possessive men while she was telling a sordid tale like this one. Cutting the men’s blustering responses deflates the social importance of the message and weakens the credibility of Anna’s transformation from helpless victim to self-empowered human being. Anna’s heroic monologue, when spurred on by angry male voices, reveals the difficulty of getting a “word in edgewise” when no one wants to listen. The “mansplaining” that counterpoints her monologue not only provides tension, but signifies that the male voices, without warning, could escalate into physical violence against a woman attempting to claim her independence. Despite this lack of verbal barrage, Deane presents a powerfully determined Anna, soldiering on to make the case that both her family and the society at large have failed her and women like her.The blonde wig she pulls from her dark-haired head near the end of her oration may not have been the wisest choice to symbolize the end of her sex-working days. This unnecessary bit of business further weakens the monologue’s message by unintentionally reinforcing the “good girl”/“bad girl” stereotypes that politically and socially read as a woman’s transformation from blonde whore to brunette Madonna. The ill-fated choice harkens back to the days when “blondes” were objectified as “sexy”/dumb/promiscuous, and therefore easier to seduce.Forcing Anna back into the whore/Madonna binary with a wig prop negates the complexity of O’Neill’s intention which is to emphasize her humanness and the futility of her situation. It’s especially important to heed O’Neill’s stage directions. If there’s no mention of a blonde wig, don’t use it. Actually, he describes Anna as “tall, blond, fully-developed girl of twenty, handsome after a large, Viking-daughter fashion. . . .” (Oh, brother, Gene!)In Strange Interlude and in plays to follow, O’Neill repeats the ‘“liberate women” theme. If God were a woman, would we have this much human suffering? What if the second coming of Christ was symbolically the second coming of Christ-ie representing all womankind rising up from degradation and servitude? O’Neill leaves us wondering if Anna Christie, now a quasi-liberated spirit, will attempt to reach her fullest potential and make a go of happiness with or without a man her life. This play states clearly, whether O’Neill was emotionally ready to own it or not, that men and women are equally complicated human beings.This lineup of intriguing apparitions would not be complete without words about “love” from Nora Melody as she toils over a bucket of sloshing dishwater. A whitewashed barn at Tao House serves as the dwelling lit to suggest a turf fire burning in the hearth. Nora cheerfully admits that, unlike her husband Cornelius (Con) Melody, she has no pride outside her marriage bed (well now!). Other than that, we know little about her, save she comes from humble beginnings and was impregnated out of wedlock by her now bitterly resentful husband, who is something of a con-artist to be sure. Con is the despotic man of the house and a depressed man as well. He has succumbed to acts of violence thinking they will protect his core identity—that of the poet. Con is so addicted to violence and the thrill of besting others that it has cost him a formal education at a prominent Dublin college where he killed a fellow student who ridiculed him for his airs and pretenses. His violent tendencies are repeated during his stint in the British army. Nonetheless, Nora serves (lovingly) as the scapegoat for her self-loathing alcoholic husband.Dear, forgiving Nora is eloquently and passionately portrayed by the distinguished actor Bonnie DeChant who can conjure Con to life through her heart-wrenching monologues. Nora loses herself (and her self-worth) in the concept of romantic love and a Tammy Wynette “stand by your man for after all he’s just a man” sense of loyalty. Nora is in love with an illusion—the Irish “king/bard” in a British uniform—and she has unwittingly aided and abetted Con Melody’s ego-driven self-destruction with her unquestioning devotion.O’Neill wrote to Sean O’Casey, “[A Touch of the Poet] is Irish through and through although set in New England.” This was indeed an Irish play, a chapter in Irish history, meant to be part of his historical cycle of eleven plays. It takes place in the early 1800s, a period that marks the first wave of Irish immigrants to escape imposed starvation in their native land. O’Neill lays out what happens to folks who have been deprived of their lands, homes, means, education, religion, music, and history to become, in some cases, indentured servants, slaves—their names, families, and personal identities wiped off the face of the earth. What then might they cling to but their inner rage?More specifically, O’Neill’s themes examine the negative consequences of creating a patrilinear top/bottom class structure—in this case the Anglo-American Yankee’s superiority over the Irish immigrant, the grandiosity produced among those who are mistreated as inferior, the negative impact of alcohol-induced escapism, the need for familial and cultural cohesiveness, and the stark difference in viewpoint from one generation to the next. This last point is illustrated by Nora’s daughter, Sara, who loathes her despotic father as much as Nora loves him. Sara will choose a mate who is nothing like the “bastard.” O’Neill looks to future generations to redeem humankind.The fact that O’Neill subtitled this ghosted play “a comedy of ancient and modern life in eight scenes” hints at the playwright’s thematic intentions (more on that later). The play was produced in March 1922 at the Provincetown Playhouse, Greenwich Village, and from there moved to Broadway. O’Neill’s intermingling of naturalism, expressionism, and realism would come to be known as an “American style” of theater (the origination of postmodernism).Director Hayes has brilliantly created a unique expressionistic backdrop for the protagonist’s monologues. The white basement walls of Tao House offset the ominous shadows projected upon them through the use of simple spots and floodlights. The most menacing of the chiaroscuros is cast by the silhouette of the protagonist himself—the ship’s coal stoker “Yank” Smith, the “hairy ape.” James Hiser, a consummate professional, gives a totally convincing portrayal of Yank, a tough, raging, depressed, and tragically confused figure. Hiser’s visage and body language perfectly reflect Yank’s desire to “pit us against them,” and “me against everyone else.” Yank stokes the fire like a well-oiled machine, and perhaps he, short on social intelligence and emotional empathy, has become a machine himself.The film begins quietly with a distant camera shot of Tao House through the fog. As the camera draws us near, the house seems to morph into a ghostly ship on the open sea. The blue mountain peaks in the distance are the waves. Shipmate Paddy’s soliloquy, tenderly rendered by Hayes, laments the passing of his seafaring days when clipper ships ruled the rolling main. The lament lulls us into a false sense of calm as Tao House, in our mind’s eye, takes on the more detailed shape of an ocean liner—her chimneys dissolve into smoke stacks, the top floor balustrade becomes the upper deck, bay windows designate the captain’s quarters, and, down below near the water’s edge, a basement window serves as a portal into the stoker’s forecastle—a hellish place where strong, weather-beaten men from all nationalities and walks of life converge under the low ceilings of their cramped quarters, swilling and yapping like “caged animals.”In the full play, Yank (serving as a metaphor for the United States as well as the working-class male) is a man only a mother could love. He is the strongest and most apish in appearance among the sailors who “respect his superior strength—the grudging respect of fear.” He is humorless, antisocial, and abusive—a man so welded to the extreme aspects of machismo he’s become its psychological prisoner. He dare not challenge the unspoken gender code of behavior that denies men the full spectrum of human emotions. Yank can only see women as the inferior sex—for him being a man is all about not being a woman. He says of Mildred, the woman he traumatizes in the stokehold, “she don’t belong” (in his world). Yank refers to her as the “skoit,” the “pale-faced tart.” His language is meant to objectify/dehumanize her and in so doing, he dehumanizes himself.O’Neill pokes fun at Auguste Rodin’s sculpture The Thinker—meant to suggest that the male human being is a superior animal because he can think. The director wisely ends the film with Yank’s shadow taking the Thinker pose. Yet, what has this “thinking animal” ultimately given us or our planet? Indeed, “thinking is hard,” says Yank, and despite all his thinking, he still can’t “fit in.” Yank is rejected time and again by people who are terrified of him—why, even the apes in the zoo find him overbearing and dangerous!The Hairy Ape is thematically layered so that the stokers represent not only discrimination against working-class men, but discrimination against their complex humanness. These men, despite representing many nations and cultures, share a flawed (dualistic) way of thinking. O’Neill fleshes out Einstein’s maxim that a “problem can’t be solved with the same thinking that caused it.” How can there be peace on earth if those at the helm share the same “us against them” mentality? In his subtitle O’Neill implies that The Hairy Ape is a “comedy”—a tragic farce that evokes laughter to keep us from crying.What could be more tragically funny than a misfit who continually creates a problem and then has to think about it, only to create the problem over again! Human behavior, O’Neill suggests, is still laced with the apishness of our Neolithic ancestors. And while one mulls this over, Yank’s monologues will keep everyone riveted lest he jump off the screen to give yez’ a wallop! The Ghosts of Tao House beckon—come visit them.