In The Long Voyage Home, one of Eugene O’Neill’s early sea plays, a hard-luck Swedish sailor named Olson tells a prostitute, in broken English, “I want to go home this time. I feel homesick for farm and to see my people again. Just like little boy, I feel homesick.”
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O’Neill’s first major tragedy, Desire Under the Elms usually attracts comparisons to Euripides’s Hippolytus because of the premise (a young wife’s passion for her much older husband’s son). But Sisyphus seems the more apt classical allusion here. O’Neill’s original stage directions call for “two enormous elms” on each side of the Cabot family’s mid-19th-century New England home, with “a sinister maternity in their aspect, a crushing, jealous absorption.” Instead, Walt Spangler’s set features rocks—lots and lots of rocks. They surround the periphery of the stage, forming their own amorphous and threatening presence. They hang from thick ropes overhead, as does the farmhouse itself. Michael Philippi’s sickly green lighting design filters through a scrim at the rear of the stage, behind which are yet more rocks, hanging in watery shadows. It feels very much like being stuck at the bottom of the sea.
Though the love triangle between Eben, Ephraim, and Ephraim’s beautiful but scheming third wife, Abbie, forms the basis of the play’s conflict, the real battle is between hard and soft—the same essential American opposition Tennessee Williams would embody decades later in Stanley Kowalski and Blanche DuBois of A Streetcar Named Desire. Ephraim believes that Eben, the product of his second marriage, takes after his late mother, a woman he scorns for her softness (and whom he worked to death after stealing the farm from her, according to Eben). But Eben’s half brothers believe he’s the “spittin’ image” of his father—”hard and bitter as a hickory tree”—and, as they head out for California, they predict that “dog’ll eat dog” in the primal contest between Ephraim and Eben.
This Desire Under the Elms is explicitly modeled for a 21st-century audience, desensitized by Nancy Grace-style sensationalism and therefore unlikely to be fazed by the atrocity Abbie commits to maintain her position. So perhaps it makes sense for Falls to focus on overarching metaphors rather than human frailties. Like Olson, we all want the security of home, but reality can crush our domestic illusions like grain between grindstones. The play leaves us to ponder just where we fall on the spectrum between stony self-preservation and the dangers of unbridled emotional vulnerability.v
Through 3/1: Wed-Sun and Tue 2/10 and 2/17, Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312-443-3800, goodmantheatre.org, $25-$82.
