Brian Dennehy

Then I did, we did a very successful production, a beautiful production in Chicago of Iceman Cometh, which is an enormous challenge for an actor, and I couldn’t get that one right at all. Although Frank Rich was very kind about it as I remember. But anyways, you know what happens with O’Neill is it’s an unrequited romance. No, more than a romance. I love him. You cannot get him out of your mind; it never is completely satisfying, and it’s always satisfying at the same time because you’re doing it, and you know you’re doing something very very hard, very difficult, which is always going to elude you, and why would you want to do anything else?

Moderator: When you look at an O’Neill script, and some are better than others, and the language or the dialect that he writes, what’s your approach to that or a suggestion about that?

Dennehy: Well, you have to—first of all, you gotta—you have to try to be honest with it…O’Neill never made any bones about the fact that he didn’t like actors; and as far as he concerned, putting the part together and reading the stuff, that was your problem. His problem was writing the play; your problem was playing it. And he didn’t care about directors very much either. He hardly ever did any rewriting. He would do cutting, he would cut, he would make some cuts because even he knew that he wrote too much. For example, that’s why with Long Day’s Journey, when you actually see the published version…it goes on for weeks. And because it was never produced, he never cut. When you actually see a play that he worked on, he would make cuts, usually, I mean I’m sure the director had something to do with it. But pretty much O’Neill, when he heard it, knew that he had to cut.

He gets a rap for being not a good writer in the sense of not writing poetry, which is crap. He’s a beautiful writer, a beautiful writer. But it’s hard, it’s tough. It’s like any good writing. It’s not easy. You know, everybody loves, and properly so, Hemingway. But that stuff’s easy. O’Neill writes these qualifying sentences, you know, his sentences can run on for 26, 28 words, you know, 14 commas in there—you got to figure out how to say that. It can be done. You just have to keep working at it. It’s like Shakespeare. I mean Shakespeare, you know, we’re not, none of us are really familiar with that kind of writing, but we all know it’s beautiful, and your job as an actor is to make it work, and great Shakespearean actors make it work, so that you’re in the moment, and you’re hearing those words, and you’re feeling the…you have the emotional response, the proper one, and the proper intellectual response, and it’s usually as the result of an enormous amount of work. Same with O’Neill.