Review: 'Longa Viagem de Volta pra Casa' by Eugene O'Neill

One of the most magical aspects of the on-going Eugene O’Neill festival at the Goodman Theatre happens when a company takes a play by the founding father of American Realism and crams it full of the abstraction and experimentation that has characterized the modern theatre. When badly done, the O’Neill’s Nobel Prize-winning dramas lose coherence and the characters become cardboard cutouts. In the hands of a skillful director and team, however, the themes behind O’Neill’s work become strikingly clear. Experimental takes on these nearly 90-year-old plays can reveal ideas buried deep in O’Neill’s heavy language. Companhia Triptal, hailing from Sao Paolo, Brazil, perform O’Neill’s early “sea play” trilogy (for the first time in the United States) with complexity and an inherent sense of wonder; it’s almost as if they never knew O’Neill was known for his realism.
To be honest, the text of the “sea plays” is not particularly great: they were among O’Neill’s first attempts at writing. The language can be wooden and antiquated. However, Companhia Triptal perform the plays in Portuguese, which has a revitalizing effect on the World War I-era colloquial. The subtitles projected above the stage, on the other hand, need to be rehearsed more. The errors in projecting the subtitles cause a pretty big rift between the audience and the actors. With everything else pumped full of creativity, it seems that they could have done something really awesome with the subtitles.
The real magic in the performance does not come from O’Neill’s language itself. Instead, the staging of the plays and experimentation with the space are the real draws. At one point in Longa Viagem de Volta pra Casa (or The Long Journey Home), the lead character is drugged, and to simulate “the spins” he climbs onto a doorframe and is rapidly spun around. There is live bottle blowing. Wooden crates are stacked up and knocked over. This isn’t merely O’Neill, this is O’Neill in the 21st Century.
O’Neill based his “sea plays” on his experience as a merchant marine in World War I. The Long Journey Home is about the difficulties the sailors faced once they landed ashore. For the metaphor lovers, it’s telling us that you can remove the sailor from the sea, but you can never remove the sea from the sailor. Supposing most of the audience aren’t sailors, Companhia Triptal is telling us that going home is harder than it sounds. The actors embody the themes incredibly, transforming from living statues to humans motivated by love and/or greed and then degenerate to unfeeling automatons. There is a fascinating use of repetition in the play that makes it appear like the story of the play is actually an everyday situation.
Although spinning these plays in a modern light can highlight hidden messages, the abstraction of O’Neill misses a good amount of the time as well. At one point the house lights turn on and this has no effect on the audience besides letting everyone see the people they are seated next too. And sometimes the bizarre physicality makes the characters ungrounded and unbelievable. They lose their reality in a way. O’Neill’s plays depend on his characters, and making the characters too weird conflicts with the text and the audience can’t figure out who to root for.
It takes bravery and intelligence to perform plays that were written before Prohibition. By using the past century of advancement in theatre, Companhia Triptal is able to sniff out relevance. People are still struggling; they are still getting screwed over. By appealing to universals and drawing upon a myriad of theatrical traditions, they can blow the dust off of these early works. It’s pretty amazing these “sea plays’ can pull out emotions almost a century later, but there was a reason O’Neill was awarded four Pulitzer prizes.

Star rating: ***