Mourning Becomes Electra

Advertisements for the 2024 Eugene O’Neill Festival’s production of Mourning Becomes Electra intimated that Tao House, the home of Eugene and Carlotta Monterey O’Neill in the hills above Danville, California, would play an integral role. Indeed, the playbill read, “Tao House takes center stage in this theatrical adventure!” The artistic director of the Eugene O’Neill Foundation, Eric Fraisher Hayes, conceived and implemented a compelling vision for producing O’Neill’s trilogy, which adapts Aeschylus’s Oresteia as Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted. Part of the show was staged in front of Tao House, with the spectators seated in the courtyard, so the performance captured the epic nature of the Mannon family’s history of sins, betrayals, and crimes. Another part was staged in the more traditional space of the Old Barn, with those scenes conveying the entrapment and fatalism that beleaguers the Mannon children.There were three performing spaces for scenes at Tao House, the two-story Spanish Colonial–style ranch house constructed in 1936 under the supervision of Carlotta Monterey O’Neill. The first space was the lawn and brick walkways in front of the house, which were furnished with a simple bench for the performance among the ornamental trees and rocks lining the façade. The second was the brick porch with potted plants arranged between windows, which are part of the grounds maintained by the National Parks Service and was unchanged for the production. The third was the second-story balcony, also unchanged. Not the Grecian temple portico described in O’Neill’s stage directions, Tao House was nevertheless a poignant backdrop to the Mannon tragedy with the house’s white façade, red shutters, and terra-cotta roofing. The playbill, impishly, credits Robert Bo Golden and Carlotta Monterey for the set design.After Ezra Mannon (Josiah Polhemus) returned from the battlefield, the spectators gathered their belongings and relocated to the Old Barn for act 4 of Homecoming to witness Christine (Cynthia Lagodzinski) poison Ezra and initiate the catastrophic events that lead to the eventual downfall of the Mannon family. The setting included a bed, a rug, side tables, and chairs. A folding screen at stage left featured portraits of the Mannons, which stared out at the audience and with which Lavinia (Adrian Deane) and Orin (Hans Probst) engaged at critical points. The show remained in the Old Barn for much of the rest of the trilogy, with furnishings changed to represent a study, a sitting room, the docks in Boston, and Captain Brant’s boat. During act 3 of The Hunted, when the family gathers to view Ezra’s body, the coffin occupied the same place as the bed from act 4 of Homecoming, a decision perhaps dictated by the limited performing space of the Old Barn. Nevertheless, this superimposition of coffin and marital bed was illuminating in terms of Ezra and Christine’s marriage and the tensions between passion and propriety or life and death for the Mannons.Staging part of Mourning Becomes Electra in the courtyard certainly had its challenges. Although Hayes trimmed the play to around three hours from the six-hour marathon that debuted at the Guild Theatre in 1931, this still required theatergoers to sit in the courtyard for an hour in the late-afternoon sun. On the Saturday I saw the production, it was so unseasonably hot in Danville that the National Parks Service delayed the show one hour to lower the chances of heat-induced stress. Unfazed by the temperature, mice darted in and out of the hedges lining the walkway, perhaps annoyed at the goings-on or determined to upstage the show. At one point, a spectator next to the hedge jumped to her feet because of one rodent’s audacity and insisted on changing seats. The more substantive challenge came during the transition from the courtyard to the Old Barn for act 4 of Homecoming. This was a necessary change since a scene with Christine and Ezra lying in bed on the porch of Tao House would have strained credulity. Yet the transition rendered Christine’s poisoning of Ezra a little anticlimactic since we settled into our seats in the Barn to watch one scene before stepping outside for the first intermission.Nevertheless, Hayes’s use of Tao House paid off when we returned to the courtyard for acts 3 and 4 of The Haunted. Hayes moved Orin’s final scene from the sitting room as described in O’Neill’s text to the front of Tao House, which made his invocation of his dead mother even more compelling. “You’re here in the house now!” he declared, surrounded by the evening darkness. “You’re calling me! You’re waiting to take me home!” he shouted before exiting the performing space through the front door, followed shortly by the gunshot that takes his life. More compelling was Lavinia’s monologue in act 4, the lines of which were shouted toward the façade of the building. “I’ve got to punish myself!” she exclaimed, “Living alone here with the dead is a worse act of justice than death or prison! I’ll never go out or see anyone! I’ll have the shutters nailed closed so no sunlight can ever get in. I’ll live alone with the dead, and keep their secrets, and let them hound me, until the curse is paid out and the last Mannon is let die!” Jeffery Beyer’s lighting projected Lavinia’s enormous shadow against the house, creating an epic scale that matched the intensity of the monologue. As Lavinia sealed herself in, the ghostly figures of Ezra, Christine, and Orin, along with Captain Brant, appeared on the balcony—a manifestation of the ghosts that will hound Lavinia. By embracing Tao House, Hayes conveyed the magnitude of the family’s tragedy in ways that likely could not have been accomplished in the Barn.The leading performances were excellent. Adrian Deane negotiated what Fred Wilkins once described in the Eugene O’Neill Newsletter as the “wild swings in Lavinia’s behavior” with skill and nuance. During the early scenes, Deane was the serious and reserved New England woman, keeping her hands clasped behind her, standing stiffly, and often avoiding eye contact, especially with her mother. Yet she revealed the emotional complexity of Lavinia at times—like during a scene with Captain Brant (Woody Harper) in Homecoming. As he stood behind her describing the South Sea Islands that represent sensual freedoms in the play, she relaxed against his chest, listening intently, losing herself for a moment. She only shouted, “Don’t you touch me!” when he closed his arms around her. When Ezra entered soon thereafter, Deane became nervous and childlike, shifting her weight from one foot to another, trying to please her father. Moments like this prepared us for Lavinia’s transformation in The Haunted. In this act, Deane’s Lavinia was free and sensual with her movements, laughing, smiling, and even twirling at times. During the proposal scene with Peter, she kissed him passionately, embracing desires she had sublimated during much of the play. It was an absorbing and revealing performance.Cynthia Lagodzinski was equally compelling as Christine Mannon, imbuing her with a rich and yet troubled emotional interiority. During scenes with Captain Brant, she was charming and seductive, smiling, rubbing his shoulders, and embracing her desires without qualms. During scenes with Ezra, by contrast, she was alternately withdrawn and looking far away from him or revolted by his proximity and declarations of love. Yet Lagodzinski never let Christine become merely the villain. She revealed her love for Orin, however complicated O’Neill imagined this emotional connection, through her effusiveness for her son, hugging him and doting on him when he returns from the war. She revealed vulnerability in Christine, too, during the scene with Hazel following Ezra’s death where she hinted at psychological conflicts about having killed her son’s father. The most gripping moments of Lagodzinski’s performance, however, came during scenes with Lavinia, where she would alternate between calculating calmness and volcanic anger as she attempted to challenge, mollify, or manipulate her daughter, who learns the truth of her crimes. All of this culminated in a remarkable scene. When Christine learned of Brant’s death, she became frantic, moaning and repeating “love” hauntingly as she staggered from the stage.Many of the supporting performances were strong too, including Polhemus’s Ezra, who was vulnerable, uncomfortable, yet hopeful while trying to reconnect with Christine. David Boyll’s Seth was charming, singing “Oh Shenandoah” often with drunken enthusiasm and commenting on the Mannon household. Woody Harper’s Captain Brant was fascinating, even sympathetic as he conveyed the character’s determination to avenge his mother, which aligned with the play’s concern with family, legacy, and tragedy. Heather Kellogg Baumann and Brad Satterwhite were strong as Hazel and Peter. Mourning Becomes Electra’s prodigious cast (seventeen characters) required many performers to play multiple roles: John Mannion (Amos Ames, Josiah Borden, and the Chantyman), Megan Soledad (Minnie and Mrs. Hills), and Marsha van Broek (Louisa, Emma, and Mackel). In addition to their major roles, Polhemus performed Dr. Blake and Silva, while Harper played Everett Hills and Abner Small. Hans Probst as Orin was weaker than others, leaving the character flat and lacking motivation for his wild swings of emotion, though he had a strong scene at the end of The Haunted when Orin succumbs to madness.One of the more enjoyable scenes came during act 4 of The Hunted with the Chantyman, played by Mannion. Falling between Lavinia’s convincing Orin of their mother’s crimes and Orin’s killing of Brant, the Chantyman scene provides relief from the murder, revenge, and tragedy of Mourning Becomes Electra—like the Porter scene in Macbeth. Roused from his slumber by singing, Mannion stumbled drunkenly to his feet, swayed a bit, then threw himself into “A Sailor Likes His Bottle”—a halyard shanty (often sung while sailors set the ship’s sails) that celebrates the premise of its title: “A bottle o’ wine and a bottle o’ beer / And a bottle of Irish whiskey oh!” Mannion sang vigorously, stomping his feet and gesturing to the theatergoers. After the song, his realization that the “yaller-haired pig with the pink dress” had “plucked [him] clean” the night before was played to the hilt: over-the-top and hilarious, eliciting laughter and applause. After his scene with Brant, Mannion strolled out singing “Hanging Johnny”: “Oh, they call me Hanging Johnny! / Away—ay—i—oh!” much to the pleasure of spectators. This was a perfect break from the tragic action and reminded me that the Dionysian festivals in which Aeschylus’s Oresteia appeared typically included three tragedies and one farce.Music and singing were important throughout the production. In addition to Mannion’s shanties and Boyll’s “Shenandoah,” Megan Soledad sang nineteenth-century songs, beginning with “Weeping Sad and Lonely” during the preshow. By Charles Carroll Sawer and Henry Tucker, “Weeping Sad and Lonely” (1863) was popular during the Civil War from which Ezra and Orin return in O’Neill’s tragedy. Later, Soledad sang “Listen to the Mockingbird” (1855), by Septimus Winner and Richard Milburn, which tells the melancholy story of a mockingbird’s song that the singer and his sweetheart once shared that the bird now sings at her grave. “Listen to the Mockingbird” served as marching music during the Civil War. Elsewhere, Soledad sang “Home Sweet Home,” which was adapted from John Howard Payne’s 1832 opera, Clari, or the Maid of Milan (lyrics by Payne, music by Sir Henry Bishop), another Civil War favorite. Coordinated by Rob Evans, the songs established the atmosphere from the time of O’Neill’s play and offered entertaining and trenchant commentary on the tragedy of the Mannons.Hayes’s “Director’s Notes” elaborate on the complex resonances between Tao House and the Mannon house that informed this production. For Hayes, Tao House represented “an island that Eugene and his wife Carlotta escaped to so he could realize his creative potential . . . oceans away from his former life.” This contrasts with the “grand house” of the Mannons that was “built from greed, jealous[y], and betrayal” and became “a place of secrets and shame that gets passed down to successive generations.” “With the Tao House production of Mourning Becomes Electra,” Hayes observes, “O’Neill’s island refuge becomes the Mannon family’s island prison. Not the island they seek but the island that confines them and pressures them to conform to unhealthy beliefs and expectations. . . . Relief only comes with the realization that the island they wish to escape from, or escape to, travels with them.” In all, this production of Mourning Becomes Electra underscored the significance of place in dramas, in the lives of playwrights and their families, and in the performance and reception of O’Neill’s tragedy.