"It sounds almost Russian," my companion remarked of the mournful melody crooned by a trio of ragged buskers in the narrow corridor, lined with dockside down-and-outs, through which audience members were escorted into the Goodman's Owen Theater. The language was, in fact, Portuguese, but no country can claim a monopoly on the Blues -- a possible reason for the Brazilian Companhia Triptal's attraction to Eugene O'Neill's gloomy picture of the New England seafaring life. When performed by the visiting artists (whose arrival in Chicago from São Paulo was greeted by record-breaking snow and frigid temperatures) for the Goodman Theater's "global exploration" of the American playwright, The Long Voyage Home emerges less as dramatic interaction between fully-realized characters than as a fragment of a larger portrait conveying the quiet despair of the sailor's lives, where any plan reflecting hope for a better future is met with failure at the hands of likewise-doomed predators.
Like the shiny liquor bottles that suggest a church window in the darkness of the meanest waterfront tavern, traces of warmth and camaraderie gleam amid the squalor to comfort men and women with nothing but their memories to accompany them on the road to a lonely death in the arms of strangers.
