Intention and Effect in The Hairy Ape

Intention and Effect in The Hairy Ape ANN MASSA American plays do not always travel well. A recent performance in London of George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum was misunderstood by an audience which did not possess the kind ofknowledge of black American life and culture to allow it to recognise caricature and parody. In the hands of the Schaubiihne Company from West Berlin, O'Neill's The Hairy Ape - shown at the National Theatre in May 1987 - was a production in which the play became the victim of distortions imposed by the actors, the director, and the designer. Convinced of the clarity of his art and the irresistible impact of his themes, O'Neill was not interested in making concessions to his audience. He had done his very considerable part as playwright; now it was up to the audience to make its contribution by concentrating for as much as four hours or by retaining the nuances of his text over an interval dinner. The length of his plays challenged the audience to meet him; such techniques as masks and riskily monotonous repetitions challenged the actors to use body, voice, and presence in order to make text and spectacle work. As for the director - detailed stage directions sought to make inevitable the perception and the production of what O'Neill intended. At the same time, paradoxically, given his low opinion of audiences, actors, and directors, O'Neill's expectations for the successful staging of his plays was not high. What, then, would he have made of Peter Stein's recent production of The Hairy Ape at Britain's National Theatre? In German. Without simultaneous translation. In the context of the unremarkable British command of German. Stein's translation was not available, and The Hairy Ape was out of print in English, though a few copies from the last printing were available at the bookstall. Visually the production was so arresting and its stagecraft so impressive that the audience enjoyed itself immensely. But was it O'Neill's play that they enjoyed, and which Stein had so strongly directed and Lucio Fanti so memorably designed? Were O'Neill's intentions carried out? What are 42 ANN MASSA the discernible intentions and the appropriate effects of The Hairy Ape? O'Neill doubted that any audience other than an American one was capable of understanding the play, for the idiom and the pace ofthe speech was the very stuff of the piece. He wrote to George Jean Nathan of his opposition to its translation. For then it would lose: ... just the quality of it that is most worthwhile - its rhythms of colorful dialogue, its dynamic drive of language. And its emotional significance and meaning is nothing the French mind could get in amillion years. The French theatre is dead from the neck down - and that means all dead where a theatre is concerned, no?1 The German theatre represented by Peter Stein is indisputably pbysical, cerebral, and emotional. Even so, is it possible for another language to mirror the punctuating sounds and rhythms of The Hairy Ape? What is required is an equivalent of the short sharp sentences which for the most part end in a question mark or an exclamation point. Yank's speech is largely monosyllabic, and very few words have more than two syllables. Is the German language sufficiently economical to achieve this accentuated brevity, this grunting non-verbosity? The barking, metallic sounds (men are dogs, men are machines) that O'Neill emphasises could probably be managed in German; but what about the sounds that O'Neill employs because they constitute the crude, powerful, soulful, aggressive substance of his play and because at the same time they wrench conventional Janguage into anon-human medium? The "a" sound becomes "i" (can becomes kin); the "ir", "or". "ur" sounds are transfonned to the ugly. wailing "oi" of hoid, goil, woild, moider. "Th" becomes "d" - another hardening of sound - and O'Neill follows these harsh consonants with the keening "e" sound (de, dey, steel). Is it possible to make German barder than it already sounds? If not, at least the impossibility of fully effective translation makes us look again at the uniqueness...