If there is one Chicago theater company that I think would be a no-brainer fit with the kind of adventurous, text-transcending theatrical visions that the Goodman Theater has programmed in the terrific Eugene O’Neill Festival that I’ve been salivating about since the beginning of January, it would be the Hypocrites. I am an unabashed fan of this theater company and of it’s idiosyncratic Artistic Director, Sean Graney, who has gifted this city with many, many nights of one-of-a-kind theater over the past several years. So on paper, the Hypocrites taking on Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, a classic of 1920’s American Expressionism about the dehumanizing effects of an industrial, materialistic society on the individual worker is like an e-Harmony match made in artistic heaven. So, although I really, really admired Graney’s production, currently at the O’Neill Festival till this Saturday, February 21, I felt ultimately, though, that my high expectations of this group, doing this text, was somewhat missed.
Or maybe the expectations that I had, as a regular audience member of its productions, were just too high. Maybe I just expected the Hypocrites to go all-out balls-out with a play that was almost begging them to do so, and it seemed like they mystifyingly held back. Graney does a lot of things in this production that are frankly awe-inspiring. He reconfigured the Goodman’s Owen Theater so that the audience is sitting where the stage usually is, and the actors are performing in three levels of performance space, using the theater’s balcony sections for some of the scenes. It’s spot-on staging which not only creatively illustrates the play’s initial ocean liner setting, but also effectively conveys some of its themes around social stratification and class conflict. But after the first fifteen to twenty minutes of this seventy minute play, all the scenes are performed at ground level and the other higher-level performance spaces go unused. Why? Using those spaces throughout the rest of the play would have been more intriguing and innovative. Halfway through the play there is a totally unexpected, and to be honest about it, quite cheesy, foray into a 1960s Mod Squad-type setting when Yank, the angry laborer-hero, meets the self-absorbed denizens of New York City. It’s jarring, not because it’s an unprepared-for shift to a different time period (the shipboard scenes are set in the 1920s) but it feels so out of place, tone-wise and visuals-wise. I would have preferred a more expressionistic, more dream-like take, similar to the brilliant jailhouse scene which follows the Manhattan sequence, where the massively physical Yank is enclosed in a tiny jail cell with three inmates who pop up and down the cell like Jacks-in-the-Box. The ending, which is a radical re-write of O’Neill’s original ending (in the Hypocrites version, Yank kills himself at the zoo, versus the play where he is crushed to death by the ape he lets out of its cage), is powerfully performed, scored, and lighted. But it is a scene ripe for memorably outre, unconventional touches too, in my humble opinion, definitely more than just having a pole with a monkey head on it standing at stage right.
Yank is a crushing role, with both a physicality and an emotional state that is pretty much kept at an intensely high level from the beginning of the play until it’s climax. Chris Sullivan, whom I really liked in Graney’s more riveting production of Edward II at Chicago Shakespeare last year, is mesmerizing. It is an exhaustive and exhausting performance, and I cannot imagine him playing this role night in night out. It really takes a lot out of someone, and I respect and admire him for it. However, the intensity level of his performance is so unrestrained at times, lots of yelling, shoving, banging on the stage floor, and other kinds of business, that I felt like I was in an endless, brain-whacking loop of Christian Bale’s Terminator set meltdown audio on TMZ.com! It was a little too overwrought for me (and caused quite the headache after the performance I attended). Of the ensemble, I really like Rob MacLean who portrays Paddy, Yank’s more introspective co-laborer, a lot, since he tempers the vital but high-decibel emotionality of the play with more subtle acting. And Najwa Brown, the little girl who stole most of Red Orchid’s A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant last December, is again pulling off a welcome heist here, playing a role that O’Neill wrote as an adult police officer. It’s a brilliant touch! Despite some of my misgivings, I still think this Hypocrites version of The Hairy Ape is a noteworthy night at the theater, and demonstrates that our best companies can go toe-to-toe with the previous presenters in the Festival, the Wooster Group and Companhia Triptal, and still come out swinging.
The Hairy Ape is at the Goodman Theater, 170 N. Dearborn St., until this Saturday.
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