Approximately one hundred years ago, a newly formed theater company mounted Eugene O'Neill's first play, Bound East for Cardiff,in a tiny, ramshackle theater in an old fish-house on Lewis' Wharf in Provincetown, Mass. Starring in the play were the founding members of the Provincetown Players, George Cram "Jig" Cook, his poet-wife Susan Glaspell, John Reed and Robert Edmond Jones, among others.
Opening night was July 27, 1916, when the play, a bold, gutsy drama about life, loneliness and death on a cargo ship headed for Wales, was greatly aided by Mother Nature: on an incoming tide, a shroud of mist wrapped itself around the tiny theater, water flapped against the pilings, foghorns sounded regularly and funereally.
Not long after, the play was restaged in a small Greenwich Village theater, along with two other O'Neill sea plays: Moon of the Caribbees and The Long Voyage Home. The impact of these strong, grittily realistic plays on the American theater world was cataclysmic; the stranglehold that the Victorians and Broadway impresarios had on it was broken forever. Playwrights were now free to write about unconventional subjects -- especially the working-class -- for the first time, free to dare, experiment, challenge.
When news came that CalArts was bringing a contemporary New York production of O'Neill's Early Plays to Los Angeles, I was overjoyed; here was a chance to see these important but rarely performed works.
Imagine my disappointment -- my disgust, really -- when I sat and watched the Wooster Group and the New York City Players not only botch but murder these plays. Just about every aspect of the production was criminally wrong: the bare, industrial-like set was devoid of atmosphere; the lighting was cold and thin; the acting was stupefyingly bad. All blame lies with the director, Richard Maxwell, who has been quoted elsewhere as disliking naturalistic acting. That's all well and good, but it has to be replaced with a fresh style, not one in which the actors are commanded to stand stiffly and speak their lines in a flat, uninflected way like so many sci-fi robots. Maxwell also dressed the actors in inappropriate costumes and bad wigs, and he had them sing three meaningless songs of his own composition.
It’s a case of narcissism gone wild, an egotist trying to show the world how much better than the material he is.
