Still Stoking the Class Struggle: O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape

Nine years ago, the British director Richard Jones brought a production of Eugene O’Neill’s lurid, wild 1922 play The Hairy Ape to the Park Avenue Armory. There, inside a massive neon-yellow shipping container, the story’s begrimed, chest-thumping seamen swung from bars and threw their weight against each other and the too-bright walls. It was fierce and exhilarating, a vivid argument for the lasting greatness of a strange, tough play. What it wasn’t necessarily — and through a combination of aesthetic and context it had a diminished chance to be — was a thematic kick in the chest. The doomed existential awakening of the play’s protagonist, a hulking ship’s stoker called Yank, then felt powerful if not prophetic.

Oh, the difference an almost-decade makes. At the Irish Rep, director Ciarán O’Reilly has brought O’Neill’s expressionist howl back for a swift, sturdy, smaller-scale revival that now feels unnervingly on-the-pulse. The cultural demons a 34-year-old playwright was conjuring a century ago rise up as dark reflections for our own. It’s not just the play’s central exploration of an American masculinity that is at once violently insular and terribly vulnerable; it’s O’Neill’s satire of the sociopolitical cesspool that breeds these men as if they’re Uruk-hai spawning in Isengard’s mud pits. Lest we get to thinking that we’ve only recently realized that it’s the system, man, here comes Long (Ariyan Kassam), Yank’s fellow stoker, a dedicated Cockney socialist, to grab his shipmate by the metaphorical collar and shout, “I wants to awaken yer bloody clarss consciousness.”

Long’s textbook Marxism is just one of the tools O’Reilly uses to underline O’Neill’s description of The Hairy Ape as a comedy. It’s a spiky, ugly one, and it can come to no good end, but the fact that this production allows us to laugh is both a blessing and a mark of dramaturgical perceptiveness. The play turns a distorting lens on its characters: Everyone is stretched, blurred, heightened, their outlines grotesque and bestial. Dialects are as thick as old paint; symbols go up like flares. Approach all this raw meat timidly or with too much self-seriousness and it will start to stink. But O’Reilly and his company dig in: Inside the none-too-big Irish Rep, his actors get gnarly and sweaty, and his designers pull off a series of ingenious maneuvers, maximizing the space’s potential while also playing up its claustrophobia.

Here, despite the character’s repeated insistence that he “belongs,” Jon Beavers’s strapping, ferociously complacent Yank feels too big for his enclosure almost as soon as he stands up. Charlie Corcoran’s set makes inspired use of a second level that can be raised and lowered on cables — a floor for those on top of it and a ceiling for those below, one that forces Yank to hunch and duck as it bears down on him. But before his world starts to shrink, we see him seated, soot-smeared brow furrowed, gaze abstracted. While his fellow ship’s stokers hoot and holler and knock back booze in their bunks between shifts, their alpha comes across as a parody of Rodin’s sculpture: “Give us a rest. Nix on de loud noise,” he eventually growls in heavy Brooklynese. “Can’t youse see I’m tryin’ to t’ink?” It’s both an earnest moment and a sad recurring joke. For this mountain of a man — this man who crows, “I’m steel, steel, steel! I’m de muscles in steel, de punch behind it!” — thinking is an exhausting physical effort, more Sisyphean than Herculean. Yank’s sliver of identity is so precarious, so shallow and yet so aggressively formulated and tightly grasped, that any time his brain pushes toward something that might challenge it, he quickly backslides into the mud.

What knocks him for a deadly loop is a powdered, pampered piece of work called Mildred (Elizabeth Teeter). She’s the daughter of the steel millionaire who owns, among other things, the ship where Yank slings coal for a living, and where she’s currently traveling first class with her aunt (Johanna Glushak, who turns the decrepit chaperone into a death mask with an acid tongue). Mildred is as self-satisfied in her own sphere as Yank is in his. Casually dabbling in the same class-consciousness that Long preaches, she insists on taking a trip below decks “to discover how the other half lives.” When she — with the white dress and dark-smudged eyes of a silent-film ingénue — encounters Yank bellowing curses in the glare of the furnaces, all her cynicism and sophistication abandon her. She faints, but not before shrieking the words that will wind up breaking his brain: “Oh, the filthy beast!”

It’s the play’s pivotal moment, though not one of the strongest in O’Reilly’s production. Here, the meeting of Yank and Mildred — so stupid and fleeting and yet so cataclysmic — is a gorgeously wound up punch that makes contact but doesn’t quite knock us out. In general, O’Reilly and his designers thrive in the play’s darker, dirtier, more literally cagelike scenes and settings — where they falter is in seeking out an equally effective theatrical vocabulary for the play’s opposite extremity: the monied, glitteringly hypocritical world of Mildred and her ilk that intrudes on Yank’s reality and destroys his sense of self. “Is dat what she called me — a hairy ape?” the big man stammers below decks, the remainder of his sorry life about to turn not only on a vapid insult but on a mishearing. “Hairy ape, huh? … Yuh skinny tart! Yuh white-faced bum, yuh! I’ll show yuh who’s a ape!” 

When Beavers is surrounded by his fellow stokers (Hassiem Muhammad and Adam Petherbridge are particular standouts in the ensemble, whom O’Reilly and movement director Barry McNabb choreograph with wonderfully simian energy), the production’s power is at its fullest. Though it ebbs occasionally as Yank — in pursuit of his lost certainty and of a revenge that he can’t articulate — takes a shoreside tour through various circles of hell, the actors don’t let up on the gas. They’re the guts of the thing, and they keep us hooked even when the container wobbles. O’Reilly’s evocation of the swank of Fifth Avenue is more chintzy than chilling, and there’s a moment with a firehose that’s simultaneously too literal and too lackluster to come off as anything but an anticlimax. Still The Hairy Ape is, in one sense, a long, furious solo — a man pounding his head against a piano while accompanied by the orchestra — and Beavers ably carries its weight through to the finale.

Of all Yank’s misadventures after he leaves the benighted safety of his stokehole, the most striking here is his visit with some wary union men at the IWW. As their secretary, Petherbridge sharply sketches the kind of condescending liberal who will always see a Yank and think of him not as a comrade or even as one of the people but as one of “you people.” Hoping to find a decisive means of sticking it to the man, Yank guilelessly mentions the IWW’s reputation for blowing things up, to which Petherbridge glibly responds: “You mean change the unequal conditions of society by legitimate direct action — or with dynamite?” It’s a great laugh line, and it’s more, too. Of course Yank means dynamite, and these days it’s hard not to think that he may, in this at least, be right. What an appalling timeline we inhabit, when this brawny, suffering man-child of 100 years ago seems so familiarly broken, while the machine that broke him roars onward, shinier than ever.

The Hairy Ape is at the Irish Repertory Theatre through November 15.