Begotten: O’Neill and the Harbor of Masks by Derek Goldman (review)

Nestled within Washington, DC’s informal O’Neill festival, comprised mainly of major productions at the Shakespeare Theatre Company and Arena Stage, was Begotten: O’Neill and the Harbor of Masks. A semi-professional, four-day workshopped production presented at Arena, Begotten was written and directed by Georgetown University professor Derek Goldman, and performed by five Georgetown students and acclaimed local actor Rick Foucheux (who only weeks earlier at Arena had anchored director Kyle Donnelly’s rewardingly warm Ah, Wilderness! as the dry-witted father). The seventy-five-minute piece was a formally stylized exploration of matters familial and theatrical, perhaps best followed by audiences already conversant with the O’Neill clan’s calamities and the pioneering dramatist’s creative philosophies. The argument of Begotten has to do with artistic birthrights and masks donned onstage and off, keyed by O’Neill’s fascination with the power of Greek tragedy and his mission to transcend the hokum practiced by his commercially successful actor father.

The actors in Goldman’s piece formed a narrative chorus, often in masks and directly addressing the audience, delivering biographical data practically in bullet-points: the death of baby Edmund, the guilt of brother Jamie, the hollow Monte Cristo triumphs of James, the creative pushback of the adult son Eugene. This history took on a ceremonial air with the donning and doffing of masks and the live musical accompaniment of Roc Lee, playing percussion and wind instruments to further invoke the ancient Greek style. Goldman’s ideas about the interpenetration of theater and life became clear when a crescendo from Monte Cristo was bellowed by Foucheux—“The world is mine!”—in a way that counterpointed the actual grieving of the father for the dead Edmund.

Fig. 1.

(From left to right) Addison Williams, Clark Young, Vivian Cook, Alexandra Waldon, and Rick Foucheux in Georgetown University’s April 2012 production of Begotten: O’Neill and the Harbor of Masks. Photo by Margot I. Schulman.

Eugene O’Neill’s artistic breakaway was introduced with snippets from Bound East for Cardiff, providing a taste of his colloquial stage dialogue and frank gaze at death. Then Goldman came to the centerpiece of his exercise, a full version of O’Neill’s short, intensely moralistic drama Fog. The atmospherics of Goldman’s staging—ideally fitted in the Arena’s newest space, the Kogod Cradle, an oval-shaped, state of the art 200-seat theater—were simple yet powerful: stage fog shrouded the life-sized wooden lifeboat that was the chief element on scenic designer Jamie Gahlon’s otherwise bare stage. A few lanterns and the sound effect of lapping waves completed the picture. Foucheux and Clark Young played two men adrift in the North Atlantic with an apparently sleeping woman and her dead baby also on board. Young effectively rendered the gloomy high dudgeon of his idealistic poet character. Foucheux was expertly smug as the older businessman, pragmatic and then cowardly, finding the depths of despair as the pair, adrift amid icebergs, faced the possibility of a frigid demise. Contextualizing Fog within the O’Neill biography prompted a view of the short drama, with its tension between philosophical choices and egotistical poses, as a mask for the O’Neill men. The masking theme even came through in Clark’s considered delivery of the poet’s line to his panicked companion: “Act . . . like a man.”

Fig. 2.

Addison Williams (left) and Rick Foucheux in Georgetown University’s production of Begotten: O’Neill and the Harbor of Masks. Photo by Margot I. Schulman.

Once through Fog, Goldman returned to a formal style of masks, direct address, and choral exchanges; following the heightened naturalism of the O’Neill work, this passage felt like an essay fitted to a template of Greek drama. The theme remained O’Neill’s fascination with masks, this...