"Long Day's Journey' and "Caucasian Chalk Circle'

In a season stuffed with new play events— 87 world or Philadelphia premieres— I was gratified to see two revivals of modern classics: Simpatico's brilliant staging of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, and Temple University's excellently staged yet overwrought production of Bertolt Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle. Between them, the pair painted thoroughly distinct (and for Brecht, thoroughly surprising) views of the family.

In O'Neill's largely biographical drama, James Tyrone (Steve Gleich) replies to the complaints of his wife Mary (Peggy Smith) by saying, "This isn't a prison, I'm not your jailer," and she counters, "No, to you, this is a home." She's recently re-succumbed to her morphine addiction—a problem caused, like many others, by James's stinginess in providing adequately for his family. The two sons fare no better; Jamie (Allen Radway) has wasted his father's lofty ambitions by drinking and whoring while filling his younger brother Edmund (Kevin Meehan) with false ideas that glamorize depravity and mock honest living.

The entire history of their family conflict unravels on a single long summer day of suspicions and accusations in 1912. Dad berates Jamie for his alcoholism and lack of ambition while overlooking similar faults in the younger favorite, Edmund. Mom counters that Dad never provided a proper home (financial or emotional), and Jamie's jealousy spites any affection he feels for a brother now dying of consumption. Tempers erupt and quickly vanish, recriminations counter accusations and, as Mary rightly observes, "The past is the present, and the future too"— one that still paralyzes this family.

Faster pace, greater intensity

Carol Laratonda's superb direction of O'Neill's lengthy drama skillfully trims the play to a lean and fast moving two-and-a-half-hour whirlwind of emotion. But rather than sacrifice the impact of the tragedy of familial missteps, the quickened pace and overlapping conversations intensify it. As the evening progresses, each rehashed accusation from the past hits with blunt force: Mary didn't want another child after an earlier baby died in infancy (perhaps through Jamie's treachery); she only acquired her taste for morphine during Edmund's birth; and both tragic situations stemmed from James's miserliness.

While Gleich as James finds only one moment of believable emotion (in a discussion of Edwin Booth), the intense performances of the other three actors propel the evening forward. Smith's slowly degenerating junkie mannerisms (quickly shifting glances, countering suspicion with accusations) transmit her anguish, and Radway and Meehan's fiery performances demonstrate that in every family, the other hand of friendship rests on a readily drawn sword.

Brecht's abandoned baby

Brecht's play focuses on two families in the Caucasus, told by a narrator in two stories. In the first, a civil war upends the rule of Governor Abashvili, forcing him and his family to flee. Abashvili's wife Natella, more concerned for her dresses than her newborn son, rides off in her coach and leaves her child behind. The poor peasant Grusha— recently betrothed to the young army officer Simon— takes the infant with her, knowing the new regime will certainly kill the baby.

The SS-like Ironshirts pursue her vigorously, and in her quest to protect and raise the young son (and heir) Grusha narrowly avoids rape, traverses a mountain chasm on a crumbling rope-bridge and (to avoid ostracization) agrees to marry a sickly farmer. Brecht's point here was expressed very clearly earlier in The Good Woman of Szechuan: "Fearful is the seductive power of goodness" in a world where no good deed goes unpunished.

But The Caucasian Chalk Circle's second story offers a chance to rectify the injustices of the former governor's despotic rule, when the Ironshirts appoint the drunken populist judge Azdak (Robert Smythe) to settle legal disputes. He rants about the fattening of the governor's underlings who lost a war while enriching themselves (sound familiar?). And like many modern activist jurists, he tries to redress social inequities with the power of his court. When the former governor returns to power, he keeps Azdak in place to oversee the trial of Grusha, who is ordered to give back the young boy she has raised for three years.

Tired theatrical devices

In contrast to Simpatico's thorough success, in Chalk Circle director Armina LaManna's brilliant stagecraft is offset by cartoonish direction of her actors and the employment of tired theatrical devices. Her flamboyant (in the best sense of the word) use of flowing drapes, the moments of frozen action, and her bridge scene— Grusha descends from scaffolding to walk precariously across the interlocked arms of the ensemble— punctuate Brecht's play with moments of brilliant spectacle.

Unfortunately, she negates these effects by inviting the audience to walk in on the overused technique of a rehearsal, where magicians and musicians, singers and performers quickly take the stage when a PA announcement calls their cue. The cast's intentionally haphazard accents overshadow Marian Cooper's gorgeous costumes, and the caricatured performances include one rabbit-hunting soldier marching off in imitation of Elmer Fudd. Will someone please tell Temple's graduate students that sometimes you can just take even Brecht's script at (dramatic) face value?

Differing views of the family

The most striking difference between these two productions emerged from the playwrights' differing views of the family. O'Neill sees the family as an imprisoning wellspring of neuroses, indictable for every failure of an individual's life. You'd think that Brecht— the committed Marxist socialist— would have readily agreed (Marx himself viewed family as an impediment to the loyalty more properly accorded to the state).

But in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Brecht adopts a surprisingly modern bourgeois view of the institution. In the penultimate scene, Azdak uses the chalk circle to decide which of the two women— Grusha or Natella— truly deserves to keep the once-abandoned child. And though Grusha fails the test twice, Azdak still rewards her devotion with the continued care of the boy, arguing that the bonds of love and generosity supersede those of blood. If Brecht has an ulterior motive, I couldn't find one in Temple's production (though after grad school at Temple, I could easily post-hoc a few for him). Fellow travelers, anyone?



To read another review of Long Day's Journey by Steve Cohen, click here.