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O’Neill’s Ghosts
Reviewed by Paul Birchall
John Stark Productions at the Odyssey Theatre
Through Sept 28
Plays about geniuses are often very difficult to do successfully because, while it is a comparatively simple task to convey the quirks, personality flaws, and traumas that go into someone’s psychology, it takes something else to communicate the spark of, well, genius. That’s a glaring problem – amongst many – in playwright Jovanka Bach’s opus on the demons and furies gnawing on the psyche of the great playwright Eugene O’Neill.
Bach was a beloved Southern California playwright, with several Off-Broadway productions to her credit, who died in 2006. Yet, this drama, about the personal life of Eugene O’Neill, doesn’t represent her best work. The dialogue attempts to imitate the heightened reality of O’Neill’s writing style, but simply comes across as hammy and posturing, while the plot itself confusingly melds real time with dream sequences in a way that’s challenging to follow.
The play takes place in 1950, in the Northern California writing “office” of O’Neill (John DiFusco), who is busily thrashing out his first draft of Long Day’s Journey into Night, despite continually being interrupted by the needs of his aging, trophy wife Carlotta (Lisa Thayer), who is tending to their ailing pet dog. There are phone calls, which O’Neill assiduously ignores (but which Carlotta answers) that deal with dire news concerning the suicide attempt of O’Neill’s long neglected son Bud (Michael Vaccaro).
As O’Neill pens his perhaps greatest opus, he is haunted by the ghosts of the relatives who are inspiring Long Day’s characters. He’s visited by his undependable, drunkard brother Jamie (Tom Groenwald), who has always resented O’Neill’s comparative stability and talent; and he also confronts his long dead father (Dana Kelly), a hard working professional actor who withheld his love and affection from Eugene for his whole life. His morphine-addicted Mama (Penny Orloff) whisks in and out like a ghost. The O’Neill tendency to withhold affection is clearly a trait that has passed down the family line, as (in dreamy flashback) O’Neill routinely snubs and bickers with his son Bud, who tries to please his papa by becoming a tenured Yale Professor, but is still dismissed as an inconsequential failure.
Textually speaking, Bach’s play is faintly unpleasant, anchored by the message that somehow O’Neill managed to transform all this familial sickness and rage into gorgeous theater, like a lobster transforms silt from the ocean bottom into the delicate white meat of its innards. The question Bach often appears to be asking here is whether art is worth all the suffering of those around the artist – the answer, for Long Day’s Journey is possibly yes, maybe less so for The Emperor Jones.
Director John Stark presents a straightforward staging that offers the text as written, with little interpretation of characterization or subtext. Blocking consists of “old school” arm waving, with many of the line-readings being dismayingly stilted and overwrought, without attention to pace and precision. It’s certainly an issue that there are no attempts to capture humor or lightness – even O’Neill’s play Mourning Becomes Electra has a joke or two – and the production’s heavy mood gradually become burdensome. It’s also really difficult to tell the difference between scenes taking place in the real world and those taking place in ghost land.
Yes, if O’Neill’s dead mom and dad show up, it’s a good bet that it’s a fantasy sequence – but Bud often appears in both the real world and in the fantasy one, making it hard to follow the time- line.
Performances are strangely uneven, particularly for a cast of this caliber. Thayer’s Carlotta offers some of the show’s few ironically amusing moments, as she vamps around the stage like Joan Collins on a bender, inadvertently preferring her dying dog to her unhappy stepson.
As O’Neill, DiFusco is surprisingly stiff – he doesn’t seem to be entirely comfortable with his lines, and the confusion extends to the character’s psychological underpinnings, which feel unformed. The play’s central cathartic moment, revealing O’Neill’s profound emotional coldness, is stunning for its callousness. This powerful moment makes us realize that sometimes folks are just not kind, not pleasant, and not easy to pigeonhole.
John Stark Productions at the Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd, WLA; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; through Sept. 28. (310) 477-2055, johnstarkproductions.com
