“I ain’t on earth and I ain’t in heaven…
I’m in de middle trying’ to separate ’em, taking all the worst
punches from bot’ of ’em. Maybe dat’s what dey call hell.”
– Eugene O’Neill, “The Hairy Ape”
In his play “The Hairy Ape,” written and staged in 1922, Eugene O’Neill stunned audiences with his tour-de-force indictment of the class system that dominated the America of his time. A century later, just a mile from where the play premiered, at the Provincetown Playhouse, New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre has breathed new life into O’Neill’s gritty yet moving tale of Yank, the lowly coal stoker employed by a transatlantic ocean liner whose understanding of the world and his place in it is changed, changed utterly, in a single, disastrous moment. In this powerful new production of the play, directed by Ciaran O’Reilly, it becomes painfully evident that the dehumanizing class system O’Neill criticized so long ago still persists in America.
Yank (played by Jon Beavers) is a creature of the rampant industrialism and unchecked capitalism of his era. Laboring in the bowels of the great ships that transport wealthy travelers across the sea, he believes himself to be the raw energy that powers these magnificent vessels at the unheard-of speed of “25 knots an hour,” whereas in reality he is a mere cog in the vast machinery of commerce that he serves. The fact that he labors in the lowest level of the ship and works entirely in the dark is a not-so-subtle metaphor for his true position in society and his deep ignorance of it. Some of his fellow coal stokers try to disabuse him of his illusions, but Yank silences them with his physical power and daunting personality. He is a man very much in need of enlightenment.
That enlightenment arrives painfully, as most conversions do. In the second scene of the play, Mildred Douglas (played by Elizabeth Teeter), a beautiful young upper-class woman, informs her chaperone aunt (played by Joanna Glushak) of her intention to go below decks to visit the stokehole. An heiress to her father’s fortune made in the steel industry, Mildred is curious about the poor and entertains what O’Neill portrays as a naïve and disingenuous desire to understand and help them.
Insisting on observing first-hand “how the other half lives” (the title of Jacob Riis’s 1890 pioneering book of photographs exposing the misery of the desperately poor denizens of New York City), Mildred arrives dressed in radiant white amid what can only be described as an infernal dance, backlit by hellfire, as the half-naked and begrimed laborers rhythmically shovel coal into the furnaces. Horrified by the sheer size, the brute power and the coarse language spoken by Yank, as he harangues the engineers for urging him to work faster and brandishes his shovel like a weapon, Mildred demands to be taken away, far from “the filthy beast,” and promptly faints from fear.
Having never experienced a close encounter with a young woman from the upper class, Yank has a complex response to Mildred. Struck dumb by her beauty and delicacy, he is simultaneously mortified down to his soul by her dehumanization of him. For the remainder of the play, he refers to her as “a ghost,” an apparition coming from the upper regions of existence who has visited the hellish world he inhabits and passed judgment on it and him. She fills him with both desire and loathing—desire for the wealth and beauty that define the conditions of her existence, and loathing for his menial condition and his own poor self.
O’Reilly’s production does a magnificent job of presenting this intractable class divide visually and dramatically. A moveable platform hovers above the stage, dividing the space horizontally into an upper and lower half. The scenes featuring lower-class Yank and his fellow workers play out beneath the platform, while the scene featuring conversation between upper-class Mildred and her aunt on the deck of the ship takes place on the top. In addition, at key moments in the play, the upper platform slowly descends, threatening to crush the laboring men beneath, producing in the audience fear and anxiety for the well-being of the workers (as well as the actors). The platform is present throughout the performance as a vivid representation of the American class structure.
It is common knowledge, in O’Neill’s time as well as our own, that America has been built on the backs of the poor—the workers who built our railroads, paved our streets, dug our subway tunnels, labored in our factories and mined our coal—and O’Reilly’s stagecraft demonstrates that reality in real time. A favorite writer of O’Neill’s who exerted a major influence on his work, Henry David Thoreau, described this unequal relationship more than a half century before O’Neill’s play using a slightly different metaphor, but one that kept occurring to me as I watched the play unfold: “The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another.”
Another key line from Thoreau that resonated with O’Neill might serve as a keynote for the remainder of the play: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” After receiving his wake-up call, courtesy of Mildred, Yank is tormented by the conflicting desires to avenge himself on her and, by extension, the whole class system she represents, and also to find a place where he “belongs”—a word that occurs 47 times in the course of the drama.
Robbed of his complacent, mistaken belief in the important role he plays in the system, Yank goes on a desperate search for his identity and his place in the world. In the course of his quest, he finds himself in many places where he doesn’t belong—on Fifth Avenue in New York City on a Sunday morning as wealthy churchgoers parade past him in their finery without even looking at him; in jail, after being arrested for punching one of those wealthy people, where Yank is subjected to police brutality; at the local office of the Industrial Workers of the World in search of membership in an organization that he (wrongly) believes seeks to dismantle the class system through violence; and, finally, at the monkey house at the zoo, face to face with the figure of a giant gorilla who has haunted his imagination as a version of himself ever since he was declared by his jesting fellow workers, in the wake of his encounter with Mildred, “a hairy ape.”
It will not surprise readers or theatergoers familiar with O’Neill’s work that Yank’s search ends in tragedy. Witnessing the education and, ultimately, the destruction of this beleaguered soul we have come to feel compassion for is, nonetheless, a visceral and shocking experience. Much of the play’s power comes from the extraordinary performance of actor Jon Beavers, who dominates the stage throughout the play, even in the rare moments when he is absent.
Beavers is physically intimidating, like Yank, and speaks in the uneducated dialect that a man of Yank’s class would have spoken in during O’Neill’s time, yet he also conveys Yank’s inherent dignity and our common humanity through the deep emotion that trembles through his many passionate speeches and soliloquies. For all of his brute strength, Yank is a man of words, often sitting in the attitude of Rodin’s “Thinker” (in accordance with O’Neill’s stage directions) and using the limited access to language that he has to try to answer the essential existential questions that haunt us all—Who am I? What am I here for?
As different as we may believe ourselves to be, O’Neill’s Yank is a version of us as 21st-century Americans who are embedded in the same capitalist system he was—limited by it, used by it, deformed by it and powerless to change it. Though conditions have improved in our country in some ways—workers have more rights, thanks to unions and activists who forced changes by the federal government—many people still live difficult, impoverished and financially insecure lives. The lingering, deep-seated dissatisfaction of the working class has helped fuel our politics, particularly in the last decade. Many of those alienated workers have chosen to elect for president a billionaire venture capitalist in the desperate hope that he could—and would—lift them out of poverty. That fond wish, unfortunately, has not come to fruition. Instead, the class divide between the lower and middle classes and the very rich has become a yawning gulf.
The “one percent” has no idea about the lives of people like Yank, and precious few of them ever go below decks to witness what is happening in the stokehole. None of this would, of course, surprise O’Neill. For better and for worse, “The Hairy Ape” is as prescient, relevant and true as it was when he wrote it 100 years ago. The Irish Rep’s production renews O’Neill’s protest against the inhumanity of capitalism and the suffering it visits on the citizens trapped within it. Yank is still in hell, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a chance that he’ll get out.
Politics
Faith
Culture
Vatican
Scripture
Podcasts