“The Hairy Ape” at Irish Repertory Theatre (Photo: Carol Rosegg)
The Hairy Ape at Irish Repertory Theatre is a wonderful production of a challenging play. Director Ciarán O’Reilly has located the heart of Eugene O’Neill’s early classic and staged it with a haunting humanity that makes the play’s expressionism feel quite immediate.
First staged in 1922, The Hairy Ape precedes O’Neill’s late masterpieces like The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night, and in many ways it pales in comparison to those better known and frequently produced works. Opening in the stokehole of a steamer ship, the play introduces us to Yank (Jon Beavers), the biggest and the baddest of the coal-shovelers who keep the ship moving and the wealthy passengers happy. When Mildred Douglas (Elizabeth Teeter), a steel tycoon’s wealthy daughter with a desire to see and empathize with the plight of the working class, makes her way below deck and reacts in fear and disgust to Yank’s appearance and coarse language, Yank plunges immediately into an existential doom spiral. The 90-minute play follows his concerted, but ultimately fledgling, efforts to establish his belonging and dignity in various corners of human society before he grows more desperate and seeks out other company.
On the page, the play’s language can be stilted and stodgy: O’Neill writes Yank as a gruff New Yorker and his stokehole companions fit into various other recognizable types. The play also uses a heavy hand to examine ideas like class and identity. It is, without question, a crucial play in the early development of a serious dramatic tradition in America, but its value on the contemporary stage beyond a historical artifact remains an open question.
O’Reilly’s production answers that question with considerable force. The production is visceral and vibrant. Beavers shows us a Yank that is far more complex and pitiable than a brainless lug from the stokehole. His performance is consistently moving as he captures the tension between the round, developing identity inside Yank and the outward person who struggles to understand himself and the world around him. Beavers’s Yank never feels like the flat caricature that O’Neill’s script could produce if done poorly. This Yank is, instead, nuanced and recognizably human.
O’Reilly emphasizes Yank’s plight with a lively, engrossing staging. Scenes that are ritualistic or expressionistic punctuate and cut through the play’s wordiness. Charlie Corcoran’s two-level set is beautiful in its industrial warmth and certainly among Irish Rep’s more ambitious set designs. Michael Gottlieb’s lighting design bathes the entire affair in a foreboding mood that is in constant dialogue with Yank’s psychological struggles.
Irish Rep and O’Reilly have consistently shown themselves to be deeply in tune with O’Neill’s work, particularly the early, lesser-produced plays like Beyond the Horizon and The Emperor Jones. This production of The Hairy Ape is yet another example of O’Reilly’s deft ability to probe into O’Neill’s early work and find an excellence that excites and moves.