Brian Dennehy

Brian Dennehy as Ephraim Cabot with Carla Gugino
as wife Abbie Putnam in the Goodman Theatre’s
2009 production of Desire Under the Elms.
Photo by Liz Lauren.

It’s very very difficult stuff. Now, we did a version, and I say “a version” because it was a version, and I always have difficulty in trying to improve Eugene O’Neill, but it was somewhat successful. Desire Under the Elms is a tough play to do.

What happened was that he wrote all these plays—now, of course, there is a lot of interest in some of those early, middle period plays like Emperor Jones, which is a fascinating play. In fact, speaking of versions, that company, what is it, Wooster Group? [Righter: Wooster Group.], they do a version of Emperor Jones which is brilliant. Now, Eugene O’Neill would throw a bomb into the theater if he ever saw it; but it is brilliant, because it is extremely free, very very inventive, and at the same time, extremely faithful to the points that O’Neill was making, which is really what you have to do. However, his late plays, Moon for the Misbegotten, Touch of the Poet, Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey, are extraordinary, and they are as naturalistic as anything written in this country. They are excursions into the soul. They’re not about sexuality—they’re not even really about relationships between human beings. They are more fundamental than that. They are plays about the relationship of Man or Woman with himself, with whatever exists inside. Some people would call that, O’Neill himself called it “God,” “I’m only interested in the relationship between, not between Man and other men or women, but between Man and God.” What he meant by that was of course the relationship that you have with yourself, your own soul—in his case, a tortured soul, which was never satisfied.

It’s hard to envision a day in Eugene O’Neill’s life when he could genuinely be called—forget about happy—contented, contented with himself. And he felt that if you really looked at yourself, that was true of all human beings: that what we do is we create in order to protect ourselves from that reality, in order to protect ourselves from this painful knowledge, increasing knowledge, of how hopeless our lives are, and how meaningless on the one hand and desperately unhappy on the other, is that we create these illusions about who we are. Touch of the Poet is a perfect example of that. But as O’Neill says, as Larry Slade says in Iceman, “I am condemned to always be the person who sees both sides.” And both sides are equally bleak, equally desperately frustrating. So one of the greatest American playwrights, perhaps the greatest American playwright—certainly Tony Kirschner, who’s a pretty good playwright himself, thinks that he was…and I think Miller, too, would pretty much say that—was…you can’t even call it pessimism, I don’t know what the hell you’d call it. Not nihilism, it wasn’t nihilist, but it was dark, extremely dark. And as an actor, that’s what you’re given, you’re given this cube of blackness, of darkness, that you have to work with. It’s fascinating stuff.