February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Joseph Hurley
O’NEILL, a play by Anne Legault. Directed by Michael Hillyer. At Blue Heron Arts Center, 123 East 24th St. Through Jan. 30.
The daily activities of writers are not the stuff of which strong, original plays are made, since the lives of scribblers, particularly if they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing, namely sitting at a desk and writing, are not strikingly interesting.
Still, playwrights and screenwriters keep trying. The latest to attempt to make a famous writer come alive onstage is the French-Canadian dramatist and novelist Anne Legault, whose "O’Neill" is on view at a valuable new venue, the Blue Heron Arts Center on East 24th Street.
Written and first performed in French at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and then at Montreal’s Theatre du Rideau Vert, "O’Neill" has been translated into flexible English by Daniel Libman, a Calgary-based playwright.
Legault has positioned her play on two time levels, 1940, when the dramatist was working on "Long Day’s Journey Into Night," and 1912, when the Tyrone family, the writer’s surrogates for himself and his tortured and self-torturing relatives, were living out the events of the play, responding to, and sometimes arguing about, what O’Neill, seated at his desk, was committing to paper.
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Director Michael Hillyer restricts the embattled Tyrones to the set’s higher level, representing the O’Neill family’s summer house in Connecticut, complete with seagulls and the sound of the nearby sea. He manages to keep Legault’s curious play moving along at a vigorous clip. With the Tyrones stewing on that upper level, the lower plane is occupied by, in addition to the playwright, his final wife, Carlotta Monterey, who had been Miss California in 1907 and later a Broadway actress whose roles included the ocean-going society girl at the heart of O’Neill’s "The Hairy Ape." Joining the pair, from time to time are the writer’s son and daughter, the doomed, drug-addicted Shane, and Oona, who would eventually marry screen great Charles Chaplin and become the mother of actress Geraldine Chaplin.
The stage genre into which "O’Neill" most comfortably fits generally bogs down as it trots along through the highlights of the individual under scrutiny. Playwright Legault fares somewhat better than most writers who’ve tried this sort of thing, mainly because she’s been sufficiently daring to play fast and loose, to some extent, with the writer and his characters, who sometimes break through the rigors of the work’s stated time conventions, charging into O’Neill’s "space," sometimes challenging him on the manner in which he’s writing their lives, and, at other points, imploring him to alter the facts in the interests of sparing their feelings.
"O’Neill" is, obviously, a Pirandellian exercise as much as it is a rather bizarre literary stunt, and, probably more than playwright Legault had any real reason to hope, it works, or, at least, sustains the fascination the inherent idea suggests.
Among the more delightful aspects of "O’Neill" are the occasional moments when Legault allows "her" characters, exactly half of whom are, of course, the Irish-American literary giant’s own creations, remembered and reshaped from his own personal history, to break the rules she has set for them.
Legault shuffles her cards with surprising dexterity, and, as far as it is possible to tell, translator Libman has served her well. For his part, director Hillyer has made absolutely certain that the pace never really lags, at least not enough to give the audience sufficient time to mull over the basic brittleness of Legault’s conception.
The actors, particularly Jeanne Ruskin as Mary Tyrone, and Wayne Maugans as Jamie Tyrone, are easily excellent enough to grace a real production of "Long Day’s Journey Into Night."
Evan Thompson, as the stage version of O’Neill’s actor father, and Jeff Bond, despite being saddled with the underwritten role of Edmund Tyrone, the authorial self-portrait, are marginally successful in a somewhat difficult situation.
As for the work’s more recent period, Nicholas Stannard and Margaret Reed, as Eugene O’Neill and Carlotta, give solid performances, considering that neither occupies the center of the action.