Carla Gugino and Brian Dennehy in Desire Under the Elms / Photo by Liz Lauren
The Tony Award nominations have been announced, and Desire Under the Elms was found wanting, with nary a nod. And yes, there are some glaring flaws in this Goodman Theatre transfer of Eugene O’Neill’s 1924 American tragedy, which now seems more like a precursor to hardboiled noir literature than any Greek playwrights. But the cast certainly don’t deserve to be punished for the tree rot with which director Robert Fall has infected his production, which ranges from allowing set designer Walt Spangler to eschew the titular trees in his boulder-strewn set to including a lengthy montage set to a Bob Dylan track. As a director, Falls has done no one any favors, including O’Neill.
That any of it is watchable, and even occasionally engrossing, is solely thanks to Carla Gugino and Pablo Schreiber as Abbie and Eben, stepmother and stepson, lovers and plotters. The play—streamlined to a lean 100 minutes—may take its over-heated melodramatics very seriously, but Falls counteracts that by staging plenty of scenes as if he were directing a campy stage version of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. Somehow, through sheer charisma and fearlessness, Gugino emerges unscathed, while Schreiber overwhelms his own solid performance by repeatedly flashing an even more solid body.
Like the classic Cain novel, Desire Under the Elms finds a man and woman plotting the death of the woman’s older husband. But O’Neill’s version, written deep in his Freudian period, makes the new arrival Eben’s new stepmother. When they finally look past their hate for one another to see each other’s movie star good looks, they’re in the parlor where Eben’s mother was laid out after her death. In no time at all, they’re indulging in some brief role-playing before, judging from the steamy glances Gugino and Shcreiber share, devouring one another.
Somewhere in the mix is Brian Dennehy as Eben’s pa Ephraim (everyone has a bizarre backwoods accent to accompany their oddball names), but he fades from memory every time he leaves the stage. He can’t physically compare with Schreiber, nor does he match the fireworks that Gugino lavishes on Abbie. Dennehy just ambles in and out of scenes, sometimes yelling, sometimes snarling, but always an unwelcome distraction from the sizzling connection between Eben and Abbie.
Mostly it’s Gugino that one desires. In an outlandish final scene, Abbie suffers a complete breakdown, and Gugino doesn’t shy away from embracing O’Neill’s purple dialogue or dated emotionality. Laughing hysterically, she falls to the stage and keens wildly over the massive mistake she’s just made for Eben’s love. Appropriately enough for their characters and performances, Schreiber and Dennehy fade into the background as Abbie falls apart. In another year, Gugino would have been a shoe-in for a best actress nomination, but she’s undone by Falls’ undercooked production. Like Abbie, a woman who hungers for a home of her own with a terrifying intensity, Gugino has been let down by the men around her, wasting a memorable performance in an unmemorable production.
> Desire Under the Elms
Through July 5. The St. James Theatre, 246 W. 44th St. (at 8th Ave.), 212-239-6200. $32–$117.
