O’Neill’s Class Menagerie in S.F.

By Bernard Weiner

The Berkeley Repertory Theater, which already is running two distinct facets of Eugene O’Neill’s illustrious career on its main stage (“Ah, Wilderness!” and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”), now shows us the early O’Neill when the playwright was working in an expressionist mode.

The Hairy Ape” 11921) opened over the weekend at Theater Artaud as the first offering of the Berkeley Rep’s Parallel Season. It marks the first time this exciting company has crossed the bridge to stage a show in San Francisco.

The move is a felicitous one for all concerned, The Rep can’t help but draw San Francisco’ audiences for this sterling production, as well as getting its large Berkeley subscription base to make the trek over to the city, The geographic and artistic~ cross-fertilization most likely will-yield a rich harvest down the line

The choice of “The Hairy Ape” by artistic director Sharon Ott, to complete the Rep’s celebration of O’Neill’s 100th birthday year, is a daring one.  It is not one of O’Neill’s great plays – though certainly it is a fascinating one, by a young writer with incandescent talent – and could have come off as little more than a museum piece.

Director George Ferencz makes sure that doesn’t happen, by virtue of exceptional, highly creative staging, and with the addition of Max Roach’s throbbing percussive score.  And actor Sam Tsoutsouvas, who plays the title role, is such a charismatic performer that there’s no taking your eyes off him.

Tsoutsouvas plays Yank, the lowly coal-stoker on a luxury cruise ship who awakens to the world above him by meeting the beautiful daughter of the steel magnate who owns the vessel by contact with the Wobblies and the police, by walking down Fifth Avenue – only to find out the awful truth: he doesn’t “belong” (his favorite word).  In the end, turned into little more than a beast by an unfeeling and brutal society, which respects him only for his animalistic power, he enters the zoo cage of a soulmate, a true hairy ape, there to commit a kind of suicide.

It’s a depressing tale of thorough and uncompromising alienation with all sorts of political overtones as proletarian brawn is kept in check by an exploitative educational, political and economic system.  But Ferencz enlarges the metaphor: he’s turned every character into a caged animal.

It’s not just the Yanks of the world who are emotionally hog-tied by the prevailing social system, ship’s officers, policemen, the upper crust, the daughter of the steel magnate and her aunt – ail preen, make animal cries and gestures, The world is a menagerie, and ironically, only inarticulate, brutalized, half-mad Yank manages to come to some sort of self-analysis, however pathetic and paranoid, before he dies.

With the audience seated on both sides of the action, Ferencz keeps the cage metaphor constantly before us, by the simple and highly theatrical use, on a bare stage, of two movable scaffolds. With their iron bars and rods, these scaffolds ensure that we see the characters, rich and poor, in various states of social, economic and psychic immobility.

At one point, the scaffolds are the furnaces of the stokehold, at another the skyscrapers of Fifth Avenue, at another the jail where Yank is incarcerated, at another the cages at the zoo,

Ferencz, who came up with this ingenious set design, moves the action smoothly and seamlessly, although the initial scenes, below decks with the stokers, make for a bit of heavy sledding. The shouting and accents come off acoustically rocky,

This quick change aspect of the staging, with the scaffolds being moved this way and that, is utterly dependent on the timing of the lighting design, and Peter Maradudin does not disappoint, He’s always right on the button, with lighting that perfectly captures the mood and feel of a locale, and of an emotion – the shocking, sudden glare as Yank and the young woman first see each other, for example, or the way the bars of Yank’s jail cell gleam in the moonlight as he bends them apart.

Likewise, Sally Lesser’s costuming which, without rubbing our noses in the class nature of the proceedings, indicates what’s really going on, Since this is not a realistic play, Lesser also gets the opportunity to play around with her costuming, and the after-church duds she’s invented for the social elite are outrageous and clever – such as a woman’s dress covered in scores of hands with large rings on the In or a man’s peacock tail, stuffed with $20 bills,

Roach has composed a compelling, subtle score – a kind of expectant, tense hum, usually played by guitarist Dimitri Vandellos – and the music really takes off during the many fight scenes (expertly choreographed by Michael Cawelti), when percussionist Michael Bruno punctuates the battles with everything from drums to noise-making toys.

But, as good as the staging and design elements are, the show rises or falls on the actor playing Yank.  Tsoutsouvas his arms and shoulders bulging, makes us understand not only the enormous physical strength of this representative of the lumpen proletariat, but also the pathetic confusion and pain, Yank wants so desperately to “belong” he never will and he knows it.

Tsoutsouvas, with more than a passing resemblance to the young John Garfield and James Cagney, makes us care about Yank, not an easy task when O’Neill, anxious to shed the structure of the well-made realistic play, invented a cast of stereotypes, But Tsoutsouvas moves with physical grace and speaks commandingly in Yank’s gutter English, forcing us to pay attention.

He is supported by a strong ensemble, with especially noteworthy performances by Stacey Jack as the magnate’s daughter, Barbara Oliver as her stiff, “cold pudding” aunt and Jim Abele as the ship’s officer and later as the real hairy ape at the zoo,

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