Brian Dennehy

The Swedes and the Japanese and the international…what the hell… academy types notwithstanding. They were local drunks, drug addicts, losers. Today, they think that…So, that’s funny.

Moderator: Another question out there. Yes, Jacob?

Audience: As you move from the first production of O’Neill that you did to this most recent on Broadway, how have things changed in the way that you think about these people as people that you’re about to….

Dennehy: Well, I have to say that the character that I played in Desire Under the Elms [Ephraim Cabot, whom Dennehy had just played in Chicago and on Broadway] was by far the hardest because he’s more symbolic. When O’Neill was doing his really mature work, there were no longer symbols. In fact, he spent a lot of time in the middle part of his career—Emperor Jones, very symbolic play, Hairy Ape, it was 30s…20s, 30s symbolism—it’s hard to play those guys, hard to find that because they’re not meant to be real human beings. And I respect the people who try. Now, somebody like Elizabeth [Audience: “LeCompte”; director of the Wooster Group], brilliant, brilliant woman, absolutely brilliant, realized that. And then she took Emperor Jones—and this is not recently, this is 15 years ago, or longer, whatever it was—and she said, “How can I take this character and turn it completely inside out?” So, first of all, the part was played by, I think, Paul Robeson or Charles Gilpin, one of them [Audience: both of them], black actors, both of them—amazing black actors. And Elizabeth LeCompte said, “First of all it’s going to be a woman who plays the part, and it’s going to be a white woman in black face. And, not only that, we’re going to do the dialect exactly the way O’Neill wrote it. ‘Well, I says to him, ‘haw, haw, haw, haw.’” Well, it’s shocking. But boy does it work—anybody else seen it, in here? Oh, it’s stunning, because it makes the point O’Neill was making about exploitation, about the possibility of exploitation of race, and it makes it right in your face. You can’t possibly avoid it. It’s right there. This is what race is, it’s somebody with stuff on their face. They’re human. The gender’s not the same—so what? The speech is strange and artificial and vaudeville—so what? Here’s this person, and it’s powerful. It has enormous power. Now, O’Neill never intended any of this stuff. But it’s again…and, of course, it is funny. It’s funny. It’s alive, it’s true, it’s tragic, and it’s funny.

Moderator: Thinking about that, O’Neill was reacting in times against vaudeville [Dennehy: Yeah], and the blackface, and he was the first, or one of the first, to have black characters, and have black actors play black characters…

Dennehy: He had an interracial marriage on stage in the 20s [All God’s Chillun Got Wings]. And interracial children. The children could not even be cast as children by law. They had to be adult actors who read the parts for the play to be done. That’s how much O’Neill was throwing rocks at the establishment. They arrested the woman and the man—I can’t remember where, someplace—obviously, there was no sexual relationship. But she kissed his hand, she was directed to kiss his hand, a black man’s hand…And they were arrested someplace, I can’t remember where…in New York? [Audience: Boston.] I don’t think they did it in Boston. But they never did Desire Under the Elms in London until the ‘60s because of the seduction scene where the mother, the stepmother, tries to seduce the son. In fact, does seduce him. And the cast, when they opened in Los Angeles, the cast was arrested. Desire Under the Elms. They spent a night in jail. Obviously, they never heard of Woody Allen.