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STRANGE INTERLUDE by Eugene O’Neill; National Theatre/Lyttelton[i];
Southbank, London; July 2013, closed September 1, 2013; directed by Simon
Godwin.
Strange Interlude is an implausible play that
somehow manages to reach believability by its final tableau. The convoluted
story of a mother-in-law haranguing her pregnant daughter-in-law (protagonist,
Nina Leeds) to abort her baby in order to impede the hereditary madness in her
family ascendency, and, following that abortion, be impregnated by a
clandestine surrogate—with the upshot of weaving a new life with her unwitting
puerile husband and their out-of-marriage baby, seems so far beyond any
believable consideration as “story” that for the first hour or so the event at the National Theater (NT) has no real basis in reality. Then
the controlled, heavy-handed dramaturgical engineering of Eugene O’Neill starts
to disengage and the play—the Pulitzer prize-winning play—alights. Across this
redacted production on the Lyttelton
Theater’s neo-Greek-proscenium stage, the play finds a creaking momentum
that teases out the particularly craven aspects of the drama including
promiscuity and nymphomania, celibacy, paternity, illegitimacy, and congenital
family insanity, among a few other O’Neill standards. Eventually the Interlude “plot” delivers steady,
unremitting levels of shock and awe, genuinely lyrical romance, and cleverness
and jocularity; there’s even uproarious hilarity in this forbiddingly gothic
drama. Beyond the slightly clumsy effects of quotidian dramatic exposition at
the onset of the play, the story ultimately reveals itself as a “noir”
tragicomedy of power if somewhat unwieldy proportion. Strange Interlude is a mammoth 5 hour, 9-act play, boxed and
compressed by director Simon Godwin to 3 hours and 20 minutes at the Lyttelton; but regardless of the show’s
abridged length, the information load is onerous.
As we learn of the tragic death
of Nina’s heartthrob, Gordon, a “doughboy”[ii]
in the trenches of World War I (Anne-Marie Duff as Nina) and her ensuing sexual
proclivities with a slew of wounded-warrior lovers, the coil around this
confused Yankee girl’s heart begins to tighten. In her enduring grieving for
her dead, but eternally lingering fiancé (a spiritual doppelganger of sorts)
Nina’s emotional state deteriorates to what is amateurishly diagnosed by her
father as clinically-defined anti-social levels. Nina, fundamentally, has the
debilitating symptoms of classic, heart-broken, disconsolate youth: she’s
neighbor hostile, belligerent, loud, weepy, and on certain occasions at her
infirmary work-site, sexually explicit and even predatory; and sadly, her
well-meaning, but somewhat conniving bookish father (Patrick Drury as Prof. Henry
Leeds) plans for her rehabilitation with the honest, but equally unfulfilled
and sexually inhibited suitor, Charles Marsden (Charles Edwards). Slowly,
weirdly, the nexus of pious academic father, the dutiful suitor, Marsden, and
(eventually) a slightly sinister, but incongruously funny family physician, Dr.
Edmund “Ned” Darrell (Darren Pettie) bring meaning and reparation to the wobbly
and spiritually mangled Nina. And collaterally, with the successful execution
of Nina’s fetal-switching ruse, her doltish, toe-headed, piddling future husband
“Sam (Jason Watkins) is snared from crippling insanity and spiritual calamity
as well. As always, O’Neill’s persistent leitmotifs of awesome but verboten
sex, underground abortion, medical ethics, and psychologically violent parental
bullying vanish and resurface throughout the play until the exhaustive drama is
spun-out over the three decade period between, and immediately after, the World
Wars. Now, ironically, the euphonious title, Strange Interlude, has two connotations: the tumultuous years
between the Armistice and Pearl Harbor; and the inner-voices that conjoin
characters and audience in O’Neill’s sluggish, but eventually transcendent
play.
Strange Interlude, as revived at The NT, and cautiously, painstakingly
directed by Simon Godwin, is a fulsome event that takes us from a leathery
office-study in the Leeds family’s upscale college-town home to a depressing
New England summer house (with a deranged, Jane Eyre-type relative squirreled
away in the attic) and, eventually, to an elegant pre-war Park Avenue apartment
replete with nouveau fixtures, pristine accoutrements, a fascinating, if
scene-stealing translucent tubular staircase, and Nina and Ned’s toy-smashing,
pre-pubescent, biologically engineered
child.
Fortuitously, the emotionally healthy “kid” is named after Nina’s
deceased boyfriend and preternatural countenance—“Gordon.” The symbolism of a
new and resurrected Gordon is a tad obvious, but O’Neill, an inelegant poet at
times, would have it no other way—Gordon is now amongst the living. The
intermittent scenes of Strange Interlude are
set on the aft’ deck of a sea-worthy cruiser where family and friends drink,
fight, shriek and rally at the finish line of the now grown-up Gordon’s
prep-school regatta, and (lastly) Sam’s post-funeral gathering at a harbor
terrace that calls to mind the final wrenching tableau of Bogart and Bergman in
Casablanca. I was mystified by the
ethereal mood and location of this final scene so I returned to the Interlude text for clarification. In his
Act 9 stage notes O’Neill identifies the location of this scene as “a terrace
on the Evans’ estate on Long Island,” and further: “In the rear the terrace
overlooks a small harbor with the ocean beyond”.[iii]
This design choice probably had tremendous significance for O’Neill in his
inception of the final tableau, but I can only respond to what I see on the
stage, not (necessarily) what the author directs me to see. For me, the locus—the
“feeling”—of this quixotic long-goodbye scene is a small, private airfield or
dockland—a hidden highway, so to speak, for the mobile rich. I had no sense
that the “terrace” was proprietary and felt that it was much too airy and
commodious for what O’Neill defines as a “pretentious villa”. Ultimately, the
final frenetic scene involving Nina, Ned, Charlie, Gordon and Madeline
(Gordon’s girlfriend) is quite rousing, but with an aftershock: Gordon (now a “sun
bronzed” and “extremely handsome ‘collegian’,”
“with the figure of a trained athlete”) bitch-slaps the cuckolding Ned for
his lifetime of boorish behavior and exits from his life—forever. Effectively,
with the dissolution of Gordon and Ned’s detestable and suspicious bastard/father
relationship, Nina’s gnawing paternal secret is buried forever. Now, with her husband
committed to the grave, her cloying boyfriend beyond Gordon’s reach, and her sexless
life with Charlie imminent, Nina is free to kick back and enjoy the empty
moment. Ms. Duff’s rendering of this pitiably restored Nina is credible and quite
compelling. And design quandary aside, Eugene O’Neill was (and remains) the
seminal modern-American set designer.
Strange Interlude is somewhat of a Jungian
theatrical experiment. Embedded in the action are innumerable
stream-of-conscious asides that comment-on, paraphrase or interrogate the
motives, needs and passions of the relevant characters. These “inner-moments”
are the context of the play’s mellifluous title and are proffered as secretive
interpersonal consultations that allow the characters to continually second
guess one-another as well as update the audience. Occasionally they’re
delivered in various circumstances as afterthoughts, epiphanies and mini-soliloquies.
At the time of the original 1928 production these “asides” probably seemed au currant or even daring, but now, in
an electronic storytelling era, are graceless narrative devices. As a separate dramatic
formula the asides are funny, dream-like, informative and even gossipy; and in
certain places they offer the performers a ballsy panache—a kind of impulsive
directorial authority that allows them to step out of the O’Neill box and
pontificate on a given or developing situation. And weirdly, with certain
asides, it seems as if a given performer just decided on impulse to stop the
play and recite O’Neill’s stage directions or rehash the play’s subtext. Sporadically,
the Strange Interlude performers seem
secure and self-possessed with O’Neill’s method of paraphrasing and commenting
on-the-fly, but overall, they’re never completely relaxed or in charge of the
moments; and the audience isn’t always sure if the asides are intrapersonal or
reciprocal. The plays “asides,” as textual commentary, are showstoppers—curious
persisting showstoppers, but not enormously vital to the moment or the event;
and as an adjunct to an already hulking stage play, O’Neill’s “interludes”
become formulaic and redundant.
The sets by Soutra Gilmore are
spot-on to the time and circumstance of each new scene and decade, and the
costumes are impeccably chosen right down to the laughable argyle socks of the
cuckolded husband, Sam, and the nifty leather grenadier jacket of the
duplicitous, but again, eminently funny Dr. Edmund Darrell. Every care has been
taken by The NT design team to find historical authenticity in the production
values and the effort has paid-off in visually coherent ideas. Even the arching
stern of the cruiser in the very shrill regatta scene is credible in both
design and purpose; as such, we believe that the characters at some point
actually inhabit the boat rather than just “act” on it; and with the exception
of an over-orchestrated transition scene near the end of the production, the
mood, atmosphere and setting of Strange
Interlude is enhanced by drifting melodies, odd sonic effects, gothic
lighting and a turn-table installation for quantum scene changes. And as
striking and choreographed as the awesome set changes are, it’s never a
high-tech show. As a matter of fact, considering the reach of the play’s
geography (New England library, New England cottage, a Jersey shore summer
home, Park Avenue apartment, cruise deck, and ocean harbor terrace) it’s
somewhat of a measured and deliberate, low tech show. In all aspects, the
production values of Strange Interlude never
exceed the dramatic values.
The National’s Nina Leeds is carefully rendered by Ms. Duff;
she suffers and almost cracks early on, then lapses into a ghostly despondency
as her genderless, erotically- dispossessed marriage, creeps by; in her
eye-popping, abortion-plotting scene with her mother-in-law, Ms. Duff is
appropriately dumbfounded as she learns of the terrifying congenital psychosis
in the Leeds family tree, then near comatose as she accepts and acquiesces in
her mother-in-law’s very bizarre fetal-engineering strategy. O’Neill demands a
gamut of bewilderment and hysteria in the “Nina” role and Ms. Duff unpacks and
interrogates every nuance in her character’s border-line lunacy. Paradoxically,
as things get worse for Nina, things also start to get better, and we see this
struggle in Ms. Duff’s watery eyes, her sorrowful mask, and her nervous,
reed-thin hands and arms. Gradually Nina’s mood swings are less fraught and the
arc of her “craziness” is (seemingly) less hysterical. Here’s how O’Neill
describes her unsettling serenity in his Act
5 preamble: “one gets no impression of neurotic strain from her now, she
seems nerveless and calm”). Ms. Duff
not only inhabits and anchors O’Neill’s “nerveless and calm” Nina, but nails
the instable role to the floor.
Beyond the deep denial of her
bogus housewife role, the prognosis for a reasonably sensible home life seems
to be “improving” for Nina. Now, with her Faustian fetal-bargain fulfilled,
Nina can rest easy and move on with her restructured and secretly extended family.
Equilibrium settles in until Ned, recovering from a serious bout of
Euro-wanderlust, resurfaces, and a whole new set of erogenous circumstances
kick in. When Ned morphs on the doorstep of Nina’s suburban summer home, she
hears his mating call and responds with vigor. Unabashedly, Ms. Duff, in her
indelicate, Shameless[iv]
television-acting mode, quickly and laughably flips Nina’s disposition from
smiley-face and wispy-“Mom” to hot flashes and then sexual beggary; she baldly
dishes-up Nina’s erotic impulses through horny billing and cooing, panting,
whimpering, and then weepy-hysteria. (This ecstasy-dance all happens with
Nina’s cipher-husband, Sam—under direct orders from Nina—shaving upstairs.) As
Ms. Duff construes the sexually thirsty Nina, any assignation with Ned, be it a wistful night at home with Sam
and Charlie, or a birthday party for their son, Gordon, can trip her insatiable
appetite for the leering, philandering, part-time micro-biologist who “scientifically” fucked her as a favor—a
moral imperative—to her unknowing husband and mother-in-law.
Unraveling and rewinding “Nina”
is a roller-coaster ride for Miss Duff; and how she sustains her quirky
emotional beats for three hours-plus is mind-numbing. O’Neill demands an
unmanageable expedition for his volatile character, but Ms. Duff, a luminary
and workhorse at The National Theater is
a faultless choice for this unremitting and draining role. Equally, Ms. Duff
has a risk-taking supporting cast that provides a few deft, howling turns by
Darren Pettie (particularly in his interludes with the audience); a repressed and
slyly fay performance by Charles Edwards, and a blubbering, baby-Huey
performance by Jason Watkins as the witless husband, “Sam.” (As a
measuring-stick of Sam’s early arrested development, in his first entrance in
the play his trousers are hiked up under his arm pits and he wears a nappy
varsity sweater tucked into his waistband.) This is the man that wants to
remake the world with the melancholic, passively suicidal Nina? Again, as is
his proclivity, O’Neill demands an inhuman performance from his performer and
he gets it.
“Sam Evans,” as interpreted by
director and performer, is not an easy character for actor or audience to get a
handle on, but Godin and Watkins put their imprimatur on the bumbling role and
the audience responds to his goofiness and his hidden frustration with measured
sympathy. And thanks to Mr. Watkins’ unswerving focus in this unattractive and
debilitated role, he is not a weak link in the cast when he undoubtedly could
have been. The artistic choice to interpose Sam as a juvenile bumpkin was a
sticking point for a few critics of this NT
production, but, to their credit, director and actor made a deep-rooted,
uncompromising decision with this complicated (but hardly complex) character
and saw it through. With Watkins’ and Duff’s impressive character-work the
performances could have shouted “tour-de-force,” but fortunately they never
rise above the ensemble. The jittery, skittish performance of Miss Duff, the
fresh-faced character of Watkins’, the urbane snootiness of Edwards (an Oscar
Wilde prototype), and the very funny blustering and waffling of the blow-hard
Pettie are honest, consistent and thoroughly in synch with director Godwin’s
melancholic, but humoring vision.
As the surreptitious scheme of Strange Interlude coils and uncoils, the
needy “claim” that Nina and Ned have on each other becomes obsessive and then
overt. The sexually thirsty Nina and the ne’er do well Ned begin to “act-out”
their proclivities in plain sight until the intellectually curious (and
suspicious) Gordon makes a shocking discovery: “Sam,” his ham-fisted and
hopelessly gullible “Dad” might not be his biological father; and Ned, the
cloying, overstepping, so-called family friend is every bit the cuckolding
prick Gordon thought him to be. When this discovery happens (he catches Nina
and Ned purring and kissing at the warm-up to his birthday party) the old
Gordon, the spectral Gordon that we only knew as Nina’s spiritual countenance,
is vanquished, and the new Gordon, the covertly conceived, in-your-face Gordon,
is activated. And like his namesake, the
new and wily Gordon has liminal power over the indivisible troika of Sam, Nina,
and greasy lover “Ned.” Uncannily, the consummate dramatist and story-weaver,
Eugene O’Neill, by way of this abbreviated, precautious and clearly delineated NT production, has flipped the primeval
tale of paternal discovery on its head. That is, instead of the cuckolding
mother concealing the devastating secret of false paternity from her cherished
son—the son (Gordon) will forever conceal from his naïve, bungling father, the
devastating secret that he might be his best-friend’s bastard kid. Slowly,
miraculously, this elephantine production of Strange Interlude, under the watchful, controlled stewardship of
director, Simon Godwin, is lifting its large, ungainly splayed feet and
lumbering forward. And the flabbergasted, almost disbelieving National Theatre audience, are too
wide-eyed and incredulous to look away.
Strange Interlude, like many erstwhile O’Neill
prize-winning “blockbuster” plays, has a vainglorious production history on the
New York stage and in Hollywood. The central role of Nina was made famous by
none other than Lynne Fontaine on Broadway[v],
and the roles of the Nina and Ned were recreated by Norma Shearer and Clark
Gable in an incredibly redacted Hollywood scrunching of the play[vi].
Hollywood marquee names and adulterated script aside, O’Neill couldn’t have
cared less. He just wasn’t terribly impressed with movie stars or the movie
industry in general. Considering the illustrious if troubled O’Neill family
history on the American stage it’s not totally surprising that a future Nobel
Laureate[vii]
would be indifferent to truncated rehabilitations of his plays for the still
emerging tinsel-town. Essentially, the screen adaptation of Strange Interlude, as O’Neill rehabs go,
is interesting but not provocative or impassioned. And with the exception of
John Ford and Dudley Nichols’ wraithlike screen adaptation of O’Neill’s short
sea plays, The Long Voyage Home
(which O’Neill consulted on) the O’Neill oeuvre in Hollywood is underwhelming.
Yes, in a few places, the O’Neill film archive offers hauntingly beautiful and indomitable
performances: Sophia Loren in Desire
Under the Elms; Rosalind Russell in Mourning
Becomes Electra; and a dapper, suspendered, silver-haired,
Shakespeare-quoting, card-playing, heavy-drinking Laurence Olivier as James
Tyrone in a small-screen, production of Long
Day’s Journey Into Night[viii].
Inarguably, O’Neill is in the pantheon of Hollywood film lore, but compared
to his artistry on the stage, the O’Neill film oeuvre is canned mediocrity.
My only struggle with the
gargantuan Strange Interlude is the
idea (or gist) of the play itself, namely, the fetal-engineering trickery that
sets the stealth events in motion. This “text” bashing is, perhaps, an unfair
and unsurprising assessment considering that O’Neill’s work is forever judged
against his seminal masterpiece Long
Day’s Journey Into Night. His earlier, less mature writing suffers under
the strain of comparison and, essentially, is read and discussed by O’Neill
doyens, but rarely produced by O’Neill “doers.”
As a result of that comparison Long Day’s Journey has become an
extraordinary one-play canon much like Streetcar
Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, and Our
Town, are one-play archives for Williams, Miller, and Thornton Wilder (in
my careful opinion). But regardless of its girth, its insensible premise, its
dormant production status, its rickety critical reception, and its middling
place in the O’Neill compendium, the largesse of this NT production of Strange
Interlude—by sheer fuerza bruta— will augment the O’Neill canon in the
lending library, countless acting classes and auditions rooms, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon.com.
The National Theater’s production of Strange Interlude is approximately 3 hours and 20 minutes long; at the final curtain
there is heavy applause, a partial-standing ovation and two curtain calls. The
ovation of the elderly, theater savvy, matinee audience is generous and
heartfelt, and the actors reciprocate with subtle, un-rehearsed, bowing and
glad-handing. Obviously there is a formidably high benchmark for standing
ovations at The NT considering that
founding member and artistic director Laurence Olivier has a resume that is
titled and matchless. As Steven Berkhoff[ix]
(a Shakespearean director and actor, a great admirer of Olivier, but a
bellicose critic of the Olivier-as-Hamlet
statue at Theatre Square[x])
so aptly and unwittingly understates him: “He [Olivier] is the greatest
messenger of Shakespeare of his generation.” “Generation”?—how about his
millennium? With the august theater lore of Eugene O’Neill and Laurence Olivier
weighed equally, by the final bell of Strange
Interlude—by the final lap through the NT
lobby, café, wine bar, archive and website—it almost feels as if we’ve
survived Olivier/O’Neill boot camp. Lastly, the decision by the artistic elders
at The National Theatre to produce
this inimitable, but leaden American classic was a plucky, but manageable
project, and exactly what an austere, royally endowed theater is built for.
Following their production of Strange Interlude, The National Theater of England produced a
quasi-musical production of the early and obscure Pirandello play, Liolà. The NT house literature boasted
of a native-Irish cast, tinker music (Irish gypsies) and an olive-grove
folktale setting. For me, a Pirandello devotee, the musicalized tale of a
wandering Latin lothario who sells his numberless children as if they were
exchangeable car parts sounds like a very brassy venture, perhaps an Oliver! or Annie waiting to happen. Arguably, you won’t find this level of theatrical
provocation in contemporary American repertoire because contemporary American
playwrights are immersed in “character revealing” plays which address incessant
family “issues” and intramural squabbling; hence, over the last half of the 20th
century, American repertory has been stocked with plays about “relationships”
and “conflict.” Antithetic to this prevailing logic are iconic artists such as
Eugene O’Neill and Luigi Pirandello (and de facto, the National Theatre of England) who are driven by cultural memory and
reparation. Accordingly, as an instructor in a Communication Arts department in
a Brooklyn/Franciscan setting that offers all aspect of performance, it’s my
right and responsibility to witness this monolithic, prize-winning, three or
four hour O’Neill production (or alternatively) musicalized tales of rustic Italian olive
farmers, and bring their prevailing logic back to my students.
[i] The Lyttelton Theater
is the second largest of three theaters at the NT and has a capacity of 890 seats which qualifies it as a
legitimate, but smaller, “Broadway” sized venue. The other venues at the NT are the Olivier and The Shed. The
Olivier, named after the NT’s founding
member and artistic director Laurence Olivier, is, essentially, the main stage
at the NT with a capacity of 1125
seats. The Olivier is comparable in
size to large capacity theaters in New York such as The Majestic Theater or The
Winter Garden Theater on Broadway. The
Shed, the smallest and most intimate of the three venues is an experimental
theater that can be defined in theater vernacular as a “black box” theater or
simply an “empty space.” The NT web
site defines and explains The Shed as
a “temporary” space that produces projects that are “original, ambitious and
unexpected.” Lastly, as a performing complex The NT can be compared in size and artistic temperament to Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in
New York City which houses numerous venues such as The Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater; Avery Fisher Hall; the Vivian Beaumont Theater, and their
flagship venue, The Metropolitan Opera
House. For more on the NT facility
and artistic mission go to nationaltheatre.org.
[ii] “Doughboy” is the moniker for the hoard of boyish American
soldiers that fought in France in World War I. O’Neill’s youthful character, “Gordon,”
is a classic doughboy. I think the idiom is clarifying and appropriate in this
context because it very accurately defines Gordon’s status in the America military.
[iii] Strange Interlude, Second
Part, Act V. For all stage notes and line quotations from Strange Interlude I consulted the Boni and Liveright Trade Edition as posted on Project Gutenberg Australia.
[iv] Shameless is an
explicit, vulgar British television production that follows a dysfunctional and
decrepit borderline lower-working class family day to day, moment to moment. Ms.
Duff plays a brash, sexually casual “sister” who is a central character on the
show. Shameless has been reinvented for
an American cable audience with a grimy Chicago-Irish family that is equally
“shameless” in their slovenliness.
[v] Strange Interlude opened
on Broadway on January 30, 1928, at the John
Golden Theater with Lynn Fontaine in the role of “Nina.” O’Neill was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize (one of four) for this play.
[vi] Strange Interlude, MGM,
1932: directed by Robert Z. Leonard, with Norma Shearer and Clark Cable.
O’Neill and Bess Meredyth are credited on the International Movie Database (IMDb) as “Writers.” Meredyth is
credited as “dialogue continuity”. O’Neill is credited as: “from the play by.”
[vii] The 1930’s was an august decade for dramatists. The Italian
novelist, playwright and scholar, Luigi Pirandello was awarded the Nobel Prize
in 1934. On November 13, 1936, The New
York Times reported that there was no prize awarded in 1935; accordingly,
when O’Neill won the prize in 1936, he received financial remuneration for both
the 1935 and 1936 awards. The Times noted
that the sum total of both prizes was a windfall “$45 000 dollars.” For more on
this see the official website of the Nobel Prize: Nobelprize.org.
[viii] For a cursory look at the O’Neill filmography see the International Movie Data Base/IMDb. For
a thorough discussion of the entire O’Neill canon see the Gelb or Sheaffer biographies.
[ix] Berkhoff was a very vocal and acerbic critic of the
recently erected memorial statue of Olivier in an area adjacent to the National Theater known as Theater Square. The London Telegraph reported that Berkhoff ranted that the statue
was a “… load of crap.” Olivier’s son, Tarquin Olivier, an advocate and fundraiser
for the statue, led a counter-attack against Berkhoff’s pedestrian criticism.
[x] Olivier-as-Hamlet: bronze
statue, Southbank, London, by Angela Conner. Unveiled September, 2007.
Timothy Dugan, D.Litt.
Associate Professor
Department of
Communication Arts
St. Francis College
