O'Neill's searing 'Desire Under the Elms'
builds toward tragic end
By Nina Metz
Special to the Tribune
October 12, 2007
There is something alarmingly familiar in Eugene
O'Neill's "Desire Under the Elms," the story of a love triangle that
begets infanticide. Although the play, from 1924, echoes the ancient Greek
tragedies -- updated and relocated to New England -- it is a mistake to
distance ourselves from the actions that transpire. A person can be driven
to shocking behavior, especially when love is involved. This is hardly an
outdated truth.
It is the mid-1800s, and three grown brothers find themselves alone on the
family farm, abandoned, so they think, by a widower father who gussied
himself up and rode off without a word. The two eldest boys (played in
Tweedledum-and-Tweedledee fashion by Gregory Hardigan and Vince Teninty)
leave to seek their fortunes in California.
The youngest, Eben (Ian Westerfer), eyes the farm as
his inheritance.
The farm is isolated, literally and metaphorically, and Tracy Otwell's
scenic design for the Hypocrites revival (at the Chopin) features a
concrete backdrop, stubbled and weathered, with a horizon line spanning
its width. There is no other house or building in sight.
Eben's plans go awry when his father (J. David Moeller, with large hands
that hang out of his sleeves like weights; these are farming hands)
returns with a young bride (Audrey Francis).
The sexual tension is instant the moment she and Eben lay eyes on each
other.
"I'm Abbie," she says, and Francis gives the line a nice top spin,
coughing back a laugh. "I mean, your ma."
O'Neill wasn't afraid of taboos. Abbie seduces Eben by telling him, "I'll
take your ma's place," and the scene escalates into full-on kissing, which
is enough to fry any man's brain, let alone one as emotionally lost as
Eben's.
The first act, under the direction of Geoff Button, suffers from its
obligatory plot development.
It exists merely to set the table for Act 2, which, to Button's credit,
has unstoppable momentum as Abbie does the unthinkable.
The woman is part schemer, part lover, and Francis keeps you guessing
right up until the very end.
When her character is finally revealed, it is as if she is skinned alive.
Daily Herald
'Desire Under the Elms'
The Hypocrites don't do melodrama as a rule. But in light of director Geoff Button's excellent revival of Eugene O'Neill's "Desire Under the Elms," featuring a terrific ensemble, including the superb Audrey Francis, they might want to reconsider.
Inspired by Greek tragedy (it echoes "Oedipus Rex" and "Medea") and set in mid-19th-century New England, "Desire Under the Elms" is an aching portrait of loneliness and desperation.
The slightly pungent but not unpleasant smell of mulch greets you as you enter Chopin Theatre's basement studio. It covers the floor and most of Tracy Otwell's rough-hewn set, invoking the harshness of the unforgiving land as well as its beauty, which is reflected in the panoramic projections and Jared Moore's lush, "purty" lighting.
In less sensitive hands, "Desire" might be just another potboiler. But Button uncovers its pathos, while still maintaining the sexual tension (eloquently expressed by Francis and Ian Westerfer). This play is about more than the affair between the conflicted Eben (a boyish Westerfer very good as the restless romantic) and the desperate, weary Abby (an honest, passionate performance by Francis, an actress to watch) who has recently married the much-older Ephraim Cabot, Eben's grasping, hard-bitten father (a flinty, menacing J. David Moeller). It's about people searching for peace and sanctuary, a place they can call their own, and someone they can love who will love them back.
Rounding out the cast is Gregory Hardigan and Vince Teninty, who supply the comic relief as Eben's oafish older brothers Simeon and Peter.
The space presents some staging problems which results in some bad sightlines (snagging a seat in the first couple of rows should help). Also, some awkward stage business involving Eben and Abby during Cabot's musings at the end of Act One don't make a lot of sense. But that's an anomaly in this highly charged, thoughtfully rendered revival.
Cast matches O'Neill's 'Desire'
Hypocrites dig deep to find intensity needed for challenging work
Eugene O'Neill's "Desire Under the Elms" is a tight, primal blood knot of a play -- a work that is full of biblical overtones while as rife with incestuous possibilities as any Greek drama. With language at once lean and lush, O'Neill gets to the heart and soul of the matter on every count, wasting no time as his characters seal their fates with such seething resentments, lustful natures, intense greed, doubt and opportunism that they seem to ignite like so many uncontrollable brush fires.
"Desire" is definitely not an easy work to carry off, but with the Hypocrites' production at the Chopin Theatre studio space, director Geoff Button and his cast have created a lip-smackingly good production.
And set designer Tracy Otwell deserves special applause for devising a fabulous environment -- with moist soil covering every inch of the performance space, and conjuring a sense of the hardscrabble existence and rock-strewn soil of a New England farm.
The farm has been worked for decades by the patriarch, Cabot (J. David Moeller, whose Old Testament looks and scratchy presence are a big plus here), and he has buried two wives in the process. His sons by his first wife -- the rather dim-witted Peter (Vince Teninty), and the not so much shrewder Simeon (Gregory Hardigan), whose interplay is expertly captured by the actors here -- are tired of the hard labor and their father's abuse. And they agree to a deal with their angry young step-brother Eben (Ian Westerfer, a most sensitive, alert and intelligent actor) to sell their shares in the farm in exchange for enough money to get them to the gold mines out West. Eben, meanwhile, is hellbent on inheriting the farm that belonged to HIS mother.
But Cabot has different plans. In a surprise move, he marries a young and very attractive widow, Abbie (Audrey Francis, a fearless, attention-grabbing actress who seizes hold of her blazing motivation, runs with it and achieves sensational results). Now SHE stands to inherit the farm, and will stop at nothing to do so.
The bitter enmity -- as well as the intense lust -- that flares between new wife and innocent stepson is instantaneous. And it leads to a series of monumental catastrophes that along the way pose many questions about love, betrayal, hunger and madness -- questions that hang in the air even at the play's end.
With O'Neill it is clear from the start that a master is at work -- a writer who can set a story on fire. The actors follow through, so that the scenes between Abbie, and the father and stepson whose lives she enters, are truly incendiary.
Just another radically dysfunctional American family? Perhaps. But this one is the genesis of it all --the real thing.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
TimeOut Chicago:
To create a “poetical vision illuminating even the most sordid and mean blind alleys of life”—that’s how Eugene O’Neill described his concern and task as a dramatist. In Desire Under the Elms, which examines the tragic results of flinty patriarch Ephraim Cabot’s return, with his young third wife, to the even flintier New England farm he built on the backs of his three sons, those alleys are lined with varying degrees of desire—for people, for place. The Hypocrites’ production, so well-nestled in the basement of the Chopin Theatre that you are startled by the low rumble of the Blue Line beneath the building, illuminates O’Neill’s poetical vision most definitely through the visual.
The hardscrabble place desired by the
troubled Cabots is subtly conjured by designers Tracy Otwell (set) and Jared
Moore (lights), almost stealing the show in what’s very much an actors’ play
(here sensitively and meticulously rendered by the ensemble) and giving
director Button an ideal canvas on which to create some arrestingly
deliberative moments. The Cabot farm is so palpable that the theater smells
like earth, since the floors are covered inches deep with mulch, and the
home reflects the increasing destruction of the family, with disjointed
rooms and a parlor lit in red, illuminating the inflamed nexus of the play.
Under Button’s direction, the oafish antics of the older Cabot sons, the
tortured tension and explosions between youngest son Eben and his young
stepmother, and the fruitless scripture-declaiming of their father unfold in
a union just as seamless and as searing as O’Neill’s vision of life and the
poetic.
(4 out of 6 stars)—Megan Powell