Festival considers O'Neill in the 21st century

CHICAGO — For someone who was written off as passe long before he died in 1953, Eugene O'Neill still has an uncanny ability to grab headlines and spark debate among theater critics.

Robert Falls — artistic director of Chicago's Goodman Theatre, and known as an O'Neill specialist — has an appreciation for that ability and used it to assemble a two-month festival aimed at bringing America's only Nobel Prize-winning dramatist back to center stage.

"O'Neill is frankly my favorite writer," Falls said in a recent interview. "Here's an author who was very much formed in the 19th century and defined American drama in the 20th century. I wanted to see if these plays are still relevant in the 21st century.

"His work is hard, and his work is tough, and it tends to be pessimistic, but I look at O'Neill as an artist for all time," he said.

Falls, who has previously mounted festivals celebrating the work of Edward Albee, David Mamet, August Wilson and Horton Foote, said it took only 18 months to assemble the offerings, "which is surprisingly short for the way festivals are put together. But it indicates how much interest in O'Neill there still is worldwide."

In choosing the productions, Falls said he deliberately avoided the later naturalistic plays such as "The Iceman Cometh" and "Long Days Journey into Night" that did so much to restore O'Neill's reputation posthumously. Instead, he concentrated on earlier — and more experimental — works written while O'Neill was still in thrall to European expressionism and Greek tragedy.

Here are some of the things he chose (and how they were retooled): a production of 1920's "The Emperor Jones" with the black male protagonist played by a white woman in blackface and drag; a sequence of early plays, done in Portuguese; the 1865-set "Mourning Becomes Electra" done in Dutch and minus all references to the Civil War; "The Hairy Ape" done with the audience on the stage and the actors in the seating tiers; and the nine-act, 7<0x00BD>-hour "Strange Interlude" performed by a troupe most famous for doing 30 plays in 60 minutes.

The menu sounds provocative — and it is.

Most of the works have engendered a certain amount of controversy; none more than Falls' own production of "Desire Under The Elms." That production, which moves to New York in April, has what seem to be tons of stage boulders, plenty of scratching, spitting and drooling — but no elms.

Several critics complained about the lack of trees, and noted that O'Neill's stage direction describing the trees is famous in its own right as an example of dramatic Freudianism.