Directing O'Neill: Mourning Becomes Electra, Long Day's Journey Into Night, Desire Under the Elms, Days Without End

Mourning Becomes Electra: Staying the Course

Eugene O'Neill International Festival of Theatre, St. Michael's Theatre, New Ross, County Wexford, Ireland, October 13, 2018

Ben Barnes

As distinct from the academic, the theatre director approaches a dramatic work with a very particular set of criteria. What does the dramatist want to say, how does he or she say it, and how can I translate this from the page to the stage? Can I refract this play through the prism of my own time so as to make it feel new minted and as enlightening, moving, and entertaining as it must have been to audiences who first saw it? I believe it is axiomatic that, unless as a director you are interested only in an act of homage to the stagecraft and delivery popular in the time when the play was first produced, then you must find a framing device and a production style that scans and makes sense for the audience of the time in which you live.

I was invited by the first Eugene O'Neill International Festival of Theatre to direct a staged reading of O'Neill's great trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra, which is based on the Oresteia of Aeschylus. My brief was to present all three plays in one day with afternoon and evening sessions punctuated by a dinner break.

When coming to O'Neill, the first thing that strikes you is that there are a lot of words. You might put this down to a contemporary theatrical sensibility and point out that the entire word count of Pinter's Betrayal would fit snugly into the pocket of an extended scene from A Moon for the Misbegotten (try it), but even in his own day O'Neill had the reputation for using many words where few might have sufficed. When he sailed back to New York from Europe in May 1931, the American newspapers reported his arrival with "six of his trunks filled with the manuscript of one play."

So when you shape up to these plays and their great length you have four options—you cut them, you speak them well, you speak them quickly, or some combination of all three. The third of these options is not as facile as it sounds. I was directing at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 1992 (a revival of my Irish premiere production of Christopher Hampton's Les Liaisons Dangereuses), and Jonathan Miller was there in technical rehearsals for his production of The Double Dealer by William Congreve. We got talking about O'Neill and he regaled me with the story that he had knocked about an hour off the running time of Long Day's Journey Into Night by having the actors in the argument scenes—which, of course, is most of the play—speak over each other as one would do in a "real-life" argument. Such a technique is now standard in the theatre to the point where authors—Caryl Churchill is a case in point—indicate the caesura where they imagine the overlap to begin.

This was not an approach available to me in Mourning Becomes Electra, which has the stately formality of a Greek drama and not the excoriating family feuding of the Tyrones that came to define American drama and seems almost modern by comparison. However, the blue pencil was available to me and I chose, in all three plays, to eliminate what I regard as O'Neill's self-conscious attempt to replicate the scene-setting of a Greek chorus with his gnarled country folk speaking a peculiar vernacular. Eliminating these "choruses" allowed us to get straight into the meat of the story while still retaining a choral character in the farmhand and general factotum, Seth. It also reduced the actor wage bill! That done, I resisted, for good reasons, making further substantial cuts in the story itself.

From watching O'Neill's work in various productions down through the...