Tag Archives: Eugene O’Neill

Long night’s journey into day

Robyn Nevin, Luke Mullins, Todd Van Voris and William Hurt in "Long Day's Journey Into Night." Photo: Brett Boardman

By Bob Hicks

It was a long, long night, and by daylight its shadows were still playing tricks.

Saturday night’s opening of the eagerly anticipated Long Day’s Journey Into Night was more than a social event, although it was that. The Newmark Theatre was packed to its two-balcony gills. A post-show spread of food and drink sprawled out over two levels of lobby. The chatter was more clamorous than at a free-for-brawl with Alvin and the Chipmunks, and first-nighters arrived resplendent in a liberal smattering of dress-up Hawaiian shirts (Mr. Scatter’s attire), leopard-skin party dresses, silk jackets and loose-neck ties, even though the temperature was in the high 90s — or, by Puddletown standards, dangerously close to the hubs of Hell.

It was also one of those moments of coalescence when a particular piece of art mattered, whether individual people happened to “like” it or not. One way or another, people were thinking, and arguing, about it — some of them, I imagine, into the wee hours of the morning, when they may or may not have been wearing off a Tyrone-size hangover.

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You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll darn near die

What's holding things up? Jamey Hampton in "BloodyVox." Photo: Michael Shay, Polara Studios

By Bob Hicks

Actors have a parlor trick they like to pull out to amaze and amuse their non-thespian friends. I’m not sure if it has an accepted given name, but I sometimes call it the “laugh-cry game.” It’s simple, really: They cover their faces, start making an odd guttural sound, and challenge you to tell whether they’re laughing or crying. In terms of technique, both actions come out of the same place.

It’s fitting that the art of acting is so often depicted with drawings of the tragic and comic masks, because the comic and tragic are so often barely a whisker’s width separated from each other. Tragedy gets the respect. Comedy gets the love, if often reluctantly. But really, the balance is a lot closer. Remember, Chekhov insisted his mournful plays were comedies.

Robyn Nevin and William Hurt in "Long Day's Journey Into Night." Photo: Brett BoardmanI think of this because the big deal in Puddletown this weekend is Saturday night’s opening of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Eugene O’Neill‘s imperial American classic, at Artists Repertory Theatre. This production has Serious written all over it. A co-production with Australia’s Sydney Theatre Company, it stars occasional Oregonian William Hurt as the destructive Tyrone family patriarch, and it drew sparkling reviews in its recently closed Sydney run. I look forward to it not just because it arrives with stellar recommendations but also because O’Neill was in a very real sense the father of American theater, our first true genius. That he was such a morose son of a bitch was the luck of the draw. France got Moliere, the satiric comedian. England got Shakespeare, the astonishing Everyman. We got Old Bleak House, and few writers have ever done bleak better: O’Neill paints loss in despairingly seductive strokes of love.

Good laughs are nothing to sniff at.

Continue reading You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll darn near die

Long Day’s Journey: It’s boffo in Sydney

The coolest thing about the boffo reviews for the new Australian production of Long Day’s Journey into Night is that it gives Mr. Scatter the chance to type the word “boffo.”

Photo Credit: Jez Smith  The cast of Long Day's Journey Into Night pictured from left: William Hurt, Todd Van Voris, Robyn Nevin, Luke Mullins. Boffo. There it is. He loves that word. It makes him feel so, so … Variety-ish. As in, “Sticks Nix Hick Pix” (improved to the more rat-a-tat “Stix Nix Hix Pix” in the 1942 movie musical Yankee Doodle Dandy.) Please hand Mr. Scatter his wide-brimmed hat with the “Press” card sticking out from the band. He’ll spring for drinks, giggles and gossip at the Cocoanut Grove if you’ll bring him the lowdown for his next juicy Hollywoodland scoop. Wait: Is that Gloria Swanson in the next booth?

In brief: Sydney Theatre Company‘s production of Eugene O’Neill’s harrowing masterpiece has been knocking ’em dead Down Under, as critic John McCallum writes in The Australian. Starring William Hurt, Robyn Nevin, Luke Mullins and Portlander Todd Van Voris, it’s a co-production with Portland’s Artists Repertory Theatre. It continues in Sydney through Aug. 1, then comes stateside for its run at Artists Rep Aug. 13-29.

Praising the cast across the board, McCallum calls it “a stunning, absorbing production, full of emotional complexity.” Here’s what he has to say about Van Voris, who plays the sozzled son Jamie:

“Van Voris’s Jamie, rotund and strutting self-confidently at first, has degenerated into an alcoholic wreck by the time he returns at the end from the bars and whorehouses to which he has tried to escape. In a powerful long scene he drunkenly reveals something of his scary true nature. But here too, as well as the hate and selfishness, we can see the love underneath, a love that he has been so assiduously trying to drown in whisky for so long.”

Of more than passing interest: Artists Rep will follow up on Long Day’s Journey with a new production of the rarely revived Ah, Wilderness!, a warmly nostalgic play that’s the closest O’Neill ever came to writing a flat-out comedy. It’ll run Sept. 7-Oct. 10.

Boffo. Boffo. Boffo.

Mr. Scatter just can’t help himself.

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PICTURED: The cast of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” from left: William Hurt, Todd Van Voris, Robyn Nevin, Luke Mullins. Photo: Jez Smith

Ashland 1: tilting at windmills with Clifford Odets

Armando Duran as Don Quixote, with his steed Rocinante. Photo: David Cooper/Oregon Shakespeare Festival/2009

Armando Duran as Don Quixote with his noble steed Rocinante. Photo: David Cooper/Oregon Shakespeare Festival/2009

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There aren’t many towns in America where you can spend the afternoon with Paradise Lost and then watch Don Quixote braying at the moon come night.

But this week I’m in Ashland, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and that was Tuesday’s bill of fare. No, it’s not just Shakespeare, or DeVere, or whoever wrote that great body of plays we call Shakespearean, on the festival stages.

In the case of Paradise Lost it isn’t John Milton, either. This is a latter-day variation on the theme of the Fall of Humankind — a 1935 play by the Golden Boy himself, Clifford Odets, who around this time was perhaps the most lionized young playwright in the United States, with almost concurrent productions of Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing! at The Group Theatre in New York. If it’s tough now to figure out exactly why Odets was such a god, well, the world and its styles have changed.

Sarah Rutan and Mark Bedard in "Paradise Lost." Photo: Jenny Graham/Oregon Shakespeare Festival/2009The festival’s Don Quixote is a world-premiere adaptation by the playwright Octavio Solis, whose plays Gibraltar and El Paso Blue the company has produced in the past, and you could hardly come up with a pair of shows more different in texture: Outwardly, their personalities seem as different as the old knight-errant’s and his squire Sancho Panza’s. Paradise Lost is mostly sober-sided declamation and the anguished shredding of hair shirts. Don Quixote is mostly whimsy, pratfalls, stage tricks and elaborate horseplay (in the case of Quixote’s steed Rocinante, literally).

But the two plays also have a curious connection, and it’s one of the things that makes a trip to Ashland so stimulating, even if you don’t much like a particular play or production. The two heroes — Don Quixote in Cervantes‘ tale, the inattentive businessman Leo Gordon in Paradise Lost — are dreamers and innocents, civilized men in uncivilized ages. And both, at least in their critics’ eyes, have been lured into foolishness by their odd attachment to reading and knowledge.

In a rude world the idealist is a failure and a fool — often a holy fool, as in the case of Dostoevsky’s Idiot and these two men. In both Don Quixote and Paradise Lost the central characters seem ineffectual at best and catastrophically detached at worst, but one suspects in both cases an even deeper authorial frustration with the modern cultures that have made these dreamers so out of touch with reality. How can Cervantes not regret a 17th century Spain in which the ideals of chivalry are nothing but a joke, or Odets the 20th century America of the Great Depression in which the cheaters and brutes prosper while the honest and earnest land on the streets? For Cervantes and Odets, humankind’s fall from grace is as much a corruption of a once nobler civilization as it is a stumbling of individual sinners on their spiritual paths. How can it be anything else when these two most graceful of men are outcasts and fools?

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