Review: Desire Under the Elms

Despair has always been a currency with which the world of letters trades. This simply is. Despair is amorphous and timeless. Its depth is unmeasurable and its manifestations endless.

As a new revival of Eugene O'Neill's "Desire Under the Elms" at the St. James Theatre attempts to reveal, despair is as relevant in New England, 1850 (when all the way in Californ-ay-aye gold rushers were striking rich) as it was in New York, 1997 (when Bob Dylan was recording his 30th studio album).

It goes without saying in 2009: despair is the old black, one that never changed.

Eben (Pablo Schreiber), Ephraim (Brian Dennehy), and Abbie (Carla Gugino) make an uneasy trio of son, father, and stepmother, a trio ultimately overmatched by their crepuscular hopes for some kind of quiet of which there appears to be a'plenty in their New England bucolic purgatory. The actors are frequently just as overmatched with the material and (somewhat ironically) are at their strongest and safest on their own, without the help of the others.

Pablo Schreiber as Eben (born [as begrudgingly as men are in Greek tragedies] to Ephraim) bestows the audience a tepid mix of winsome vulnerability and sinewy physical presence. Eben has designs on his daddy's farm as penance for the death of his mother, but storms around the stage in a manner too dainty to resemble a hardscrabble New English farmer, his voice reminiscent more of John Kerry than John Adams. This quality of looking exposed works, but worked much better in his debut performance in Clifford Odets' "Awake and Sing!" Brian Dennehy gives a blunting performance as Ephraim, old and still quite menacing, whose "hardness" only shows signs of a third dimension during a few windy renderings of O'Neill's pastoral poetry. Carla Gugino (Abbie) yields the strongest hand in her delicate and effusive portrayal of a woman serving quadruple duty as a mother, stepmother, housewife, and unrelenting lover. Her cagey complexity and throttling sexuality are the only things truly in full bloom on the farm.

Beyond Ms. Gugino, there are other unequivocal triumphs. Set designer Walt Spangler shows us despair by stripping a farm scene bare of its barns and vegetation and replacing them with a monolithic stone wall. Festooned about are large rocks suspended by rope, a giant house that drops in for scenes but never lifts completely out of sight. Director Robert Falls, in a brazen and inspired move, pipes in Bob Dylan, whose "Not Dark Yet" scores a six-minute montage of the mundane labor and elemental piety exemplifying the daily lives of sorrow's triumvirate. His direction peaks in its attention to giving his actors plenty of tasks to accomplish when they are on stage but not in a scene; this is not a small feat, this is something that drives a flawed narrative and gives weight to the undulations of thematic despondency.

With intensity rarely at a premium (and no intermission to boot), "Desire Under the Elms" does its clumsy work with moments that arouse pausing curiosities. One might walk away wondering if we'll always be at the wrong place at the wrong time; one might also walk away thinking O'Neill loved the sea too much to write well about the farm.