Brian Dennehy

Now, if you were to say to O’Neill, if you could figure out a way to say to O’Neill, “Look at this body of work that you did. Doesn’t that have any value, doesn’t that have any significance?” Well, it has an enormous significance to us. Did it have a significance to him? Well, he had pride, he had pride in what he had done. I mean, there was a tiny percentage of some kind of satisfaction, but not much. Beckett—Beckett probably had the more mature attitude, which is, the only response that can be called for by success or failure, or “great” success, the Nobel Prize, or this or that, is to laugh. It’s all funny. Really, that’s what it is. It deserves to be laughed at. The greatest tragedies, the human…I mean it would be hard, for example, to find a way to laugh at the Holocaust, or whatever…I mean, it’s interesting, when you hear people talk about Progressivism and the 20th century—when the 20th century was probably the period of greatest butchery in the history of man. We just got better at it. The development and growth of Progressivism. It was the most progressive century of all. Really? Take a look at it, count the numbers. Beckett would say, “That’s funny.” He’s right! It’s a bitter, nasty, ironic vision of comedy, but it is—banana peel. Man invents electricity, he invents the motor car, he invents the plane, he invents television, he invents all kinds of communications, he invents ways of feeding the world, and he falls on his ass. So, necessarily are these great playwrights all pessimists? I don’t know if Shakespeare was a pessimist. Shakespeare was just trying to stay alive. He was worried about what had happened to Kit Marlowe, and he didn’t want it to happen to him. But he wanted to write, he wanted to make money, he wanted to buy real estate. That was Shakespeare’s real objective: he wanted to buy real estate in Stratford, and he did. That’s funny.

Audience: Yes, I have a question. Every bad production of O’Neill that I’ve seen—I’m asking for your opinion now [Dennehy: No problem finding those!]—every bad production I’ve seen is, I’m wondering about, because I’m wonder if it’s in the acting. So many of the actors stand outside of the role, and so many actors won’t commit to the role, and Jason Robards…

Dennehy: It’s not easy, it’s not easy to get inside. There’s another part about O’Neill, which a lot of people ignore, exactly what I’ve been talking about—he’s funny. You know, when Mary Tyrone talks about her relationship with her Mother Superior at school… yes, it’s tragic and moving and powerful, but it’s also very funny. Now, it ain’t the kind of funny you’re going to laugh out loud, but you’re going to recognize if you hear it right, if it’s acted well…I saw Vanessa Redgrave do it a couple hundred times, and it’s pretty damn impressive…but the fact is, it is at the same time, comic. Ok? It’s tragic and comic simultaneously, and that’s the challenge of O’Neill. When O’Neill has this guy [James Tyrone of Long Day’s Journey] talking about the extended slip on the banana peel that was his life, reaching for this thing—what was the thing he was reaching for? A bunch of real estate. That’s what he wanted, he wanted money. He wanted to own something. I mean, the fact is—there are some people here who know this about this town [New London, Connecticut, where O’Neill grew up]: this town had in it one of the great artists of the 20th century. Treated him like crap. All these little butchers and grocers and lawyers, and even the big businessman, that’s supposed to be Harkness—they treated the O’Neill’s like a joke. Gene and Jamie were a bunch of drunken bums. Even after the Nobel Prize. They didn’t care about that. They were vaudeville performers, losers, with this little shack of a house down on Pequot Avenue. And that opinion still exists in this town. They weren’t substantial people like somebody running a stationary store or hardware store.