Brian Dennehy

Moderator Robert Richter: Thank you for that, Brian. [Dennehy: I thought Lois [MacDonald, curator at Monte Cristo Cottage] was going to be here. Richter: No, Lois wasn’t able to make it today.] A number of comments or questions this morning, and since our focus with you this afternoon is the actor’s perspective, and I think we have some veterans here, we have some novices here. Approaching O’Neill, many people are daunted by the language, and as I was thinking the other day and rereading Desire Under the Elms and O’Neill’s writing and dialect—and what are your thoughts as an actor? How do you approach it?

Dennehy: Well, Desire was written in 1924, which I guess you could call the early…late adolescence, or early mature O’Neill. He had become, by then, the great American, serious American playwright; however, it must be pointed out that before Eugene O’Neill, there was no serious American playwright. Eugene O’Neill invented serious American theater. There had been successful American playwrights, don’t get me wrong, but they were mostly comedies, historical plays. Probably the biggest success, American success, was the play about the guy who falls asleep upstairs…[Richter: Rip Van Winkle.] Rip Van Winkle. John Houston made a success of it. And there was another—that play was constantly revived, and there were a few others like that. And O’Neill had seen his father play Shakespeare, had been in and around theater for a long time, and, interestingly enough, 1910, 1912, 1913, 1914, the national theater companies from places like Ireland, which was the Abbey Theatre, I guess that would be in the teens, came to New York. He saw the Abbey Theatre, he was dazzled by it, he also saw the Moscow Art Theatre, which came to New York. He saw Ibsen, and whose the other one?…[Richter: Strindberg?]—Strindberg, yeah—and he said, “Wow, this is different.” Now, he was familiar with Shakespeare, obviously. He admired Shakespeare, but he was a man of his times, he was a modern man, and so he was tremendously influenced by Chekov, Ibsen, Strindberg, Synge, writing for the Irish National Theatre, the Abbey, and he began to write—and again, nobody had done it. And he was almost immediately, hugely successful.

Some of the plays are almost undoable because they are so creaky, which is always the complaint about O’Neill. In 1924, when he wrote Desire Under the Elms, he had just finished reading all of the Greek plays, he was very very influenced by Greek tragedy and Greek comedy. But more interestingly, for someone of 1924, he had read all of Freud and Jung. He actually taught himself German to some extent so he could read it. So that when you try to deal with Desire Under the Elms, which is not easy, it’s this combination of Freud and Jung and Aeschylus and Aristotle and, of course, Congregationalism and New England history. He hasn’t started to write about the immigrant interloper or immigrant experience yet, although you can probably say that Abbie, even though her name is “Abbie Putnam,” which is hardly an immigrant name, she represents this new strand that’s introduced into the New England countryside.