And Give us the Shadows by Lars Norén (review)

During a career that, to date, has yielded over seventy plays, Lars Norén, Sweden’s preeminent contemporary playwright, has embraced his country’s legacy of appreciation for Eugene O’Neill. And Give Us the Shadows, first staged in 1991, five years after Norén had completed his autobiographical trilogy, which, he has said, was influenced by Long Day’s Journey Into Night, had its belated American premiere in 2013 at The Schoolhouse Theater, north of New York City in Westchester County.

O’Neill’s motives for attaching prohibitive conditions to Long Day’s Journeyand the crusade against them waged by his third wife, Carlotta Monterey O’Neill, provide occasion for imaginative speculation in the play, which emulates O’Neill’s synthesis of naturalism and the classical unities in Long Day’s Journey. Set in the parlor of O’Neill’s last home, in Marblehead, Massachusetts, on the dramatist’s sixty-first birthday, October 16, 1949, And Give Us the Shadowscomprises a fictitious account of what might have happened if Carlotta had hosted Eugene Jr. and Shane, both sons from Gene’s previous marriages, to commemorate the day with their father. Unlike, for example, A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck(2011), the innovative one-act opera by Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori, which shares characters and a common setting with And Give Us the Shadows, Norén, whose plays, as well as his accomplishments as poet, novelist, and director, exemplify a range of styles and experiments in form, has strictly adhered to O’Neill’s conventions in Long Day’s Journey. Unfortunately, The Schoolhouse production often reduces Norén’s psychological complexity to a straightforward performance style that seemed like a throwback to a bygone era.

Marita Lindholm Gochman’s translation offers ample opportunity for the attractive Hollis McCarthy to capture Carlotta’s quirkiness and humor, as when she declares that with a little scotch “the world takes on a rosy hue,” for instance, or pointlessly suggests her husband “go upstairs and write some goddamn masterpieces, so that we can get some money!” Although McCarthy avoids the sort of caricature of Carlotta as a campy viper that Zoe Caldwell created in 1986 for PBS in Eugene O’Neill: A Glory of Ghosts, her exchanges with Saki, the household’s Asian servant, given deadpan delivery by Ray Sheen, are played for laughs often generated by racial and sexist stereotypes. McCarthy also showcases Broadway chops that Carlotta likely never possessed, singing and dancing to “The Sunny Side of the Street” with such joyful aplomb that the audience responded with the most enthusiastic applause of the evening.

Director Moni Yakim and his cast refrain from deifying O’Neill, thus giving Gene and Carlotta equal footing as they square off against one another. Although Norén’s conception of the O’Neills relies upon similar surface contrasts between the couple that marked Jo Morello’s E.G.O.: The Passions of Eugene Gladstone O’Neill(2013) and My Gene, Barbara Gelb’s one-hander starring Colleen Dewhurst (1987), And Give Us the Shadowsbestows ambiguity on Gene and Carlotta that frees both characters from the hackneyed portraits history has painted of them. Partly as a result, the production’s finest achievement is its compelling study of the aging O’Neill. Acted with convincing bitterness and rueful smiles of regret by Len Gochman, script in hand, who took over the role when Broadway veteran Jerry Lanning left the production after collapsing onstage early in the run, this O’Neill is a portrait of the frustrated artist as a forgotten old man, his eyes still flickering with inspiration and his shaking body still harboring some deep place of creation known to him alone. As Eugene Jr., Paul Michael Valley creates a pompous professorial windbag who still craves his father’s approval. Gochman’s O’Neill turns a deaf ear to the confidences his namesake shares, such as...