Yank (Jon Beavers, left) gets his first taste of midtown New York in the company of the class-conscious Long (Ariyan Kassam) in the Irish Repertory Theatre revival of The Hairy Ape.
The word belong becomes an obsession for stoker Yank (Jon Beavers) in Eugene O’Neill’s 1922 play The Hairy Ape. Yank has spent his life shoveling coal on a transatlantic liner, and he is the tallest and seemingly strongest of the men doing that work in Ciarán O’Reilly’s engrossing production at the Irish Rep. Yank sees himself as the solid foundation of the entire society, but when a socialite visits the stokehold, it launches him on a downward spiral. He becomes obsessed with the idea that she could look at him only as a “hairy ape.”
O’Reilly has embraced naturalism for much of the production, with flashes of expressionism, and the thick accents that O’Neill gave his characters on the page—Yank’s Brooklynese, along with Swedish, German, cockney, and Italian—are, thankfully, made comprehensible by a sterling cast. As critic Edmund Wilson noted in 1922, the play has “a mouth-filling rhythmical eloquence.”
The first of eight scenes finds the stokers roistering below decks, and Yank’s self-confidence is unbounded:
Mildred (Elizabeth Teeter, right) spars with her aunt (Joanna Glushak) on deck.
Everyting else dat makes de woild move, somep’n makes it move. It can’t move witout somep’n else, see? Den yuh get down to me. I’m at de bottom, get me? Dere ain’t nothin’ foither. I’m de end! I’m de start! I start somep’n and de woild moves!
That scene gives way to one of astringent comedy: on deck, an heiress, Mildred Douglas (Elizabeth Teeter), sits with her aristocratic aunt (Joanna Glushak). Neither woman likes the other, and Dan Bass’s makeup for them provides a skillful contrast: Mildred is pale, and her lipstick is blue; she’s cold and bloodless. Glushak’s aunt is well-rouged, and her facial expressions might illustrate the word sourpuss. She scorns Mildred’s efforts in social work:
After exhausting the morbid thrills of social service work on New York’s East Side—how they must have hated you, by the way, the poor that you made so much poorer in their own eyes!—you are now bent on making your slumming international.
The talkative, philosophical Paddy (John Keating) holds forth as another stoker (Hassiem Muhammad) listens in. Photographs by Carol Rosegg.
The headstrong Mildred—giving her aunt a slow-motion slap, one of the non-naturalistic touches in the production—has arranged to visit the ship’s depths, where the stokers move back and forth shoveling coal from a pile on one side of the stage and dumping it into the glowing red furnaces on the other side. (Charlie Corcoran’s scenic design is simple but outstanding; Michael Gottlieb’s lighting, superb; and Brian McNabb’s movement work is impressive.)
When Mildred enters, Yank is the last to see her, and when he turns, she faints—which unsettles Yank completely. He is awakened to his class inferiority—that Mildred regarded him as a “hairy ape,” although she didn’t use the term. In his view, “she was like some dead ting de cat brung in. Sure, dat’s what. She didn’t belong.”
To find Mildred and exact revenge, Yank goes ashore with his shipmate Long (Ariyan Kassam, wearing an improbably barbered beard for the period), who wants to enlist him in a class struggle. But Yank finds himself more alienated than ever. Their first visit is to Saks Fifth Avenue on a Sunday morning, where Yank talks about his alcoholic parents and the violence of his upbringing. There Long harangues him: “Yer been lookin’ at this ’ere ’ole affair wrong. … I wants to convince yer she was on’y a representative of ’er clarss. I wants to awaken yer bloody clarss consciousness.”
In the depths of a ship, Beavers’s Yank is top dog, as another stoker (Adam Petherbridge, left) looks on.
Then church lets out, and toffs in top hats and women in furs swarm them—their heads swathed in glittering silver masks from the crown to the neck. Costumer Orla Long’s stunning expressionist sequence marks the beginning of Yank’s realization that he is the one who doesn’t “belong.” Getting into a scrape with one toff, he ends up in jail, where prisoners read from a paper about class strife. After his release, Yank joins the International Workers of the World (“Wobblies”). But his behavior is a bit too earnest; suspected of being a traitor, he’s thrown out. Ultimately, he heads for the Bronx Zoo to see an original hairy ape.
O’Reilly’s visuals include a nod to Rudolph Zallinger’s 1965 March of Progress illustration of evolution. One quibble, though: O’Neill’s stage directions specify that the stokers are “hairy-chested,” yet apart from veteran John Keating’s loquacious Paddy, the only actor among the others to match the description is Jonathan Crimeni. Rather, they all sport toned bodies more appropriate to a Magic Mike movie. Beavers seems to be the most hairless one of all, but fortunately his performance seethes with vitality and rising scorn: he’s riveting. All in all, O’Neill has been treated admirably.
Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape runs through Nov. 15 at the Irish Repertory Theatre (132 W. 22nd St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday and at 3 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit irishrep.org.
Playwright: Eugene O’Neill
Director: Ciarán O’Reilly
Scenic Design: Charlie Corcoran
Costume Design: Orla Long
Lighting Design: Michael Gottlieb
Sound Design: Ryan Rumery & Florian Staab
Original Music: Ryan Rumery
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