'The Hairy Ape' (1st review) and 'Penelope'

Two current productions, The Hairy Ape by Eugene O’Neill at EgoPo and Penelope by Enda Walsh at Inis Nua, ponder this question in very different ways. In both plays, the woman is the catalyst for action, but she is not an actor on the stage for more than a moment. Intead, she is a constant presence, the reason that men seek power, through either her destruction or their own.

O’Neill’s play is also about finding one’s place in the world and our inability to break out of the roles into which society puts us, about “how men and women of all types are caught in cages,” writes Brenna Geffers, the play’s director. Walsh’s play could be seen as a study of men and power, the men caught in another kind of cage, an empty swimming pool, where they act out their desire to win. Each woman is caught in her own cage, just a more attractive, luxurious one. They are identified by their beauty and their attachments — the rich father, the powerful husband. They initiate the action only by their presence.

In each play, we are confronted with a masculine world of brutality — in the belly of the ship, on the rough streets of New York, in a prison, in an empty swimming pool where someone has recently died — and yet the action centers on an unattainable woman. Mildred (Lee Minora) is the daughter of the owner of steel mills and ships in Hairy Ape, and Penelope (Adair Arciero), is Odysseus’s wife, awaiting his return, in Penelope.

Struggling with identity

In The Hairy Ape, Yank (Matteo Scammell), a coal stoker on a luxury ship, is proud of his strength and endurance. Scammell is fierce and intense, his physicality reflecting the brutishness of his character. When Mildred enters his world and looks at him, he is altered. “Is dat what she called me — a hairy ape?” he asks. “She looked it at you, if she didn’t say the word itself,” Paddy (Steve Wright) tells him. Paddy is too tired for outrage; he just wants to rest and drink with the other stokers.

The woman has her own struggle for identity. “I’m a waste product of the Bessemer process,” Mildred says. “I inherit the acquired trait of the by-product, wealth but none of the energy, none of the strength of the steel that made it.” Yank, on the other hand, is nothing but steel and energy until his encounter with Mildred undoes him. “Steel was me, and I owned de woild. Now I ain’t steel, and de woild owns me.”

The others accuse him of falling in love. “I’ve fallen in hate,” he tells them. That’s all he knows, survival and hate. Mildred’s encounter with Yank is the impetus for his downfall, but to her it was just an afternoon’s entertainment. Geffers keeps Mildred upstage for most of the performance. As Yank searches for her, she is always present, just too far above for him to find her.

Geffers plays with gender yet ignores it. Women are stokers in the belly of the ship (most notably Colleen Corcoran as Long, the socialist who tries to radicalize Yank), yet they are the same as the men. Much the way the casting of a woman to play Hamlet in Blanka Zizka’s Hamlet at the Wilma ignores that a woman is playing Hamlet, so Geffers ignores the women as women in The Hairy Ape. Is this a statement of equality or an annihilation of identity?

When Mildred, in her white dress, encounters Yank in the stokehole, she is appalled by his world, and yet she longs for seduction, while he wants to strangle her. “I t'ought she was a ghost, see? She was all in white like dey wrap around stiffs,” he says over and over again. Wanting her to be invisible, transparent — a ghost, not a real person.

Who set the rules?

Penelope is another sort of ghost, remaining silent throughout. The men perform for her when a buzzer goes off, but she encourages or discourages only with a look, a gesture. Has she initiated this competition for her hand, or have the men organized the rules of this game, which can only end in violence and death?

In Penelope, only four suitors remain of the hundred that have been competing for her hand since Odysseus left. They are Fitz (Leanord Haas), an intellectual with a book; Dunne (John Morrison), past his prime but still believing he has a chance; Quinn (Jared Michael Delaney), in an unattractive wig, who wants to control events; and Burns (Griffin Stanton-Ameisen), sunburned in a party hat, the youngest, for whom life is a perpetual party. If these are what are left, one wonders, what were the others like?

On this day, they’ve all had a vision: Odysseus is returning, and this is their last chance. It is then that the honesty and brutality emerge.

The two plays left me with very different feelings. Both are incredibly wordy, spoken in dialects that demand close attention. The Hairy Ape is intense, and the performances powerful. Perching on poles in prison and the zoo, showering under a bucket, the cast keeps you enthralled. The spare set and dark atmosphere bring you into a brutal world. It is a highly charged emotional experience.

Penelope, on the other hand, feels like it's drowning in words. The emotional scenes get lost under verbiage, and sometimes I just wanted a character to stop talking. The set is anachronistic ’50s kitsch, and the characters are like clowns at a barbecue. There’s really no one to root for, except maybe Odysseus, that he would come home quickly.

For Steve Cohen's review of The Hairy Ape, click here.

Above right: Stanton-Ameisen and Morrison in Penelope. (photo by Katie Reing)