The Return of O'Neill

We sometimes forget that Eugene O'Neill is the only American playwright to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Not that that is always the greatest distinction one may be awarded. After all, neither Sinclair Lewis nor Pearl Buck today receives the respect they may have garnered many years ago. And there are all sorts of miscellaneous writers worldwide who have been feted by the Swedish Academy despite what could fairly be described as lackluster credentials.

But O'Neill has taken his knocks, just as many of his greatest characters did. We have learned that not all of his work is great, but whose is? In New York, some of his earliest plays are being revived, with mixed reactions. Now, however, in Washington, we are having an O'Neill festival, centered at the Arena Stage, the city's pre-eminent regional theater company. Last weekend, I saw O'Neill's only comedy, the not-very-comic play of either nostalgia or recollection, Ah,Wilderness. It is a pleasant play--to employ Bernard Shaw's terminology--and it was well played at Arena.

O'Neill was recalling what he had wished was his adolescence in New England. Next month, we get to see what in many ways is the flip side of that play, and to many, his greatest work, Long Day's Journey Into Night.  Instead of the all-American Millers of Ah,Wilderness, which sometimes emits the scent of a Father Knows Best type of in the person of small-town editor Nat Miller, and his delightfully awkward but already inspired son Richard, we get the Tyrones.  The father has wrecked his acting career by taking the easy path (taken by O'Neill's father) of playing The Count of Monte Cristo 6,000 times and thus never hired to portray anyone else.  Elder son Jamie already shows sign of the alcoholism that will consume him. Mother Mary is fighting a relentless morphine habit. And son Edmund, possibly the part most reflecting O'Neill himself, finds out that he has contracted tuberculosis. So much fun for everyone!

Yet as the characters assail themselves and each other, this emerges as O'Neill's most wrenching and most marvelous play.  He must have felt so close to it that although he wrote it in the 1930s, it did not get produced until twenty years later, after his death, when his widow finally released it. Jason Robards came of age playing in it and two other great O'Neill works: A Moon for the Misbegotten and The Iceman Cometh. First, he was Jamie in the original production and then James Tyrone the father some decades later. 

Yes, sometimes O'Neill can feel repetitive. Sometimes you feel you can't listen to Larry Slade kvetch any more in The Iceman, but then Jason Robards (or in the movie, Lee Marvin, who was also excellent) appears as Hickey, the salesman whose entrance receives as long a build-up as does Tartuffe in Moliere's eponymous play. And then we all face dealing with our pipe dreams, whether or not we find Hickey convincing in his sales pitch to the gathered drunks to deal with theirs.

Seeing one of these three great plays is a wonderful experience. So was seeing Ah, Wilderness.  It's amazing to recall that when it debuted in the 1930s, the father's role was played by none other than the then-aged George M. Cohan. Shakespeare Theatre Company here has also been active-doing Mourning Becomes Electra previously and soon Strange Interlude. These I haven't seen, but I will not write off any O'Neill. He always manages to make you feel some new thoughts even when seeing one of his great plays a second or third time.

The Play's the Thing

Finally saw the play Red the other night; 'twas my first trip to the newly-rebuilt Arena Stage in Southwest DC. For those of you who have already seen this drama on Broadway or London, where it originated at DonmarWarehouse, or Chicago, where this production was launched at the Goodman Theater, this may be old news, but this is one fantastic evening in the theater.  This saga of the midlife crisis of painter Mark Rothko raises many perplexing conundrums and conflicts.

For us, the impact was magnified because we had just returned from seeing the Van Gogh show, focusing on his nature pictures--the plants, flowers, wheatfields, and trees--at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  That wonderful museum does have a Rothko or two, even if its modern strength lies in its Monets, Cezannes, some other Impressionists, and some Picasso and Braque but mostly from Picasso's earliest stages, ending with cubism.

I've always found Rothko's color blocks compelling although now I feel more supplied with what he was trying to accomplish. It also seem amazing that one major theme of the play was whether he would go back on his commission to provide murals for the then-avant-garde Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York. The great conflicts of art brought down to one decision. I also found his fretting about the generation coming up on him--the Pop art, op art, Warhol and Stella--pushing at his group--DeKooning, Jackson Pollock, and the other abstract expressionists.

Both Van Gogh and the Philadelphia art museum remain remarkably overwhelming.  The museum has a superb collection that demands more than a  single visit; Philadelphia itself, where I once spent a summer working and many childhood visits, has many other wonderful museums, and restaurants in great profusion.  The Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Penn remains a treasure, too, and last time I was there, I enjoyed the new National Constitution Center.

The weekend before I managed to catch the Met's broadcast in theaters of Verdi's Ernani, probably the one major work of his that had eluded me until now. It was his first big success (after Nabucco, I suppose) but it's a bit like Sicilian Vespers--wonderful exciting music, good arias, but you don't leave the theater remembering any melodies. The new soprano Angela Meade was fine and did show some evidences of Sutherland's ability to make hard singing look easy; Marcel Giordani, who has been doing major tenor roles all over Europe, was more than adequate but not fine enough to make anyone forget Pavarotti, who enjoyed singing the title role. Dmitri Hvorostovsky was excellent as always in both his singing and acting of the role of Charles V, and Ferrucio Furlanetto, veteran bass-baritone, deserved the plaudits he received (especially from Charles Rosen in the New York Review of Books) for his masterful rendition of the villain's role. Rosen mentioned that after hearing the legendary Rosa Ponselle's recording of a famous soprano aria from this opera, Maria Callas ordered it never to played in her presence again!