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Desire Under the Elms
When Desire Under the Elms moved to Broadway in 1924, out of a modest fringe production at the playwright’s home company, the Provincetown Players, it had the good fortune to be targeted by an uptight district attorney’s public campaign to clean up the Rialto. Deemed by D.A. Joab Banton to be “too thoroughly bad to be purified by a blue pencil,” the struggling little 19th-century farm melodrama saw an immediate box-office jolt. Never the optimist, author Eugene O’Neill greeted the success skeptically; he didn’t want his play attracting the wrong crowds for the wrong reasons.
It’s hard to imagine, then, that O’Neill would be amused by the lengths to which director Robert Falls goes to draw them in with his pleadingly racy revival of Desire, a tough little Oedipal tale blasted out here in wild, baroque proportions madly out of synch with the small-scale theatrical producing model for which it was written. Stoves that lift from below ground, titanic hanging boulders and a fully functioning cabin suspended above the stage are among the questionable visuals, while the musical rhythms of O’Neill’s salted folk dialogue are replaced by an outsourced Oscar-bait-sounding film score. Stretching the three-character drama over a mural-size canvas, Falls again deploys the nouveau riche style he foisted on Dollhouse and King Lear. But unlike those plays about the gentry, Desire is still, however important, a rugged workman’s tragedy, and Falls’s rococo staging is like an ill-fitting tuxedo to O’Neill’s white-socks story.
Still to be marveled at in this new revival is its trio of central performances. The thrilling Gugino, playing a trophy wife sold to one man but drawn to his son, gives an aching and erotic performance. Glamourlessly haggard Dennehy and feral Schreiber, as the Greek figures vying to fertilize her, are not wasted either, but Gugino’s performance will be the talk.
Falls, it must be noted, has done Chicago legitimate public service this winter with the dynamic global work he has imported and the crop of local fringe troupes he has harvested for his otherwise marvelous O’Neill Festival. But these smaller companies all demonstrate a facility to produce less with more, examples the indulgent Falls doesn’t seem to heed here. Desire’s biggest extravagance is a musical montage in which a meal is served, laundry is hung, and a bathing Schreiber flashes us his heinie, all to Bob Dylan’s 1997 “Not Dark Yet,” revealing this director’s worst current habit: not a boomer’s cultural self-regard, but a reliance on the recognizability of celebrity. Funny that this dramatic metaphor for the perils of America’s manifest destiny should be produced with such endless resources and ill-advised certainty.
