No one in Denver knows Eugene O’Neill like Ed Baierlein.
And the master professor will be conducting a crash course all semester long – a class, by a man in a class by himself.
Enroll now.
In what is believed to be an unprecedented twin bill anywhere, Baierlein is staging O’Neill’s “A Touch of the Poet” at his Germinal Stage Denver, followed in November by the even rarer sequel, “More Stately Mansions.”
Baierlein is not only directing, but at 64 he’s also an actor without local peer. He’s always in total control, playing everything from eccentrics to clowns. But this is something else entirely. In a masterful pantheon of thought-provoking and intelligent performances over 34 years, this volcanic, dangerous portrayal of a vile, acidic poseur will stand as a milestone.
“Poet” was the first of what O’Neill intended to be an epic 11-play cycle tracing the Harford family from the Revolution to 1932. And like August Wilson’s black decalogue, O’Neill similarly intended a savage commentary on the corrupt inequities of the American dream. O’Neill’s quest was cut short by Parkinson’s, alcoholism and depression.
Kind of like Cornelius Melody, the domineering former British Army officer Baierlein plays here. It’s 1828 Massachusetts, and “Con” is 20 years removed from leading a triumphant battle in Spain. He thinks himself a nobleman, but he’s been reduced to owning a shanty tavern for grunts who despise his arrogant, delusional air of superiority that extends to his compliant wife, Nora, and spitfire daughter, Sara.
The vicious personal interplay between father and daughter leaves audiences agape. With pitiless candor, Con calls Sara a common, greedy, cunning, scheming peasant. He’s more fond of his prized mare. But Sara, her father’s mirror image, taunts the drunken devil in return. It’s been suggested this brutal warfare is O’Neill’s revenge upon his real daughter for marrying Charlie Chaplin.
Only when Sara (L. Corwin Christie) nurses a wealthy young man (a Harford) back to health does Con come face-to-face with his delusions. For when these lovers wish to marry, the groom’s father rejects Sara as filthy mick scum, yet it is Con’s “honor” that is impeached. A lifetime of pretense crashes down on him like a rockslide.
When Con takes shocking action to eradicate the one living reminder of all his lying, boastful dreams, it completes a naked fall violent enough to wake Willy Loman and Alma Anderson from their coffins. This is a triumph of concession; a victory for dreamless sleep. And Baierlein makes it all the more heartbreaking by somehow infusing the repentant, defeated wretch with a vulnerable kind of tenderness.
It’s a lot to ask for young Christie to go chin to chin with Baierlein, but she holds her own. And the moving Trina Magness and Lori Hansen distinguish themselves with very different depictions of long-suffering women.
The influence of (or on) Anton Chekov, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller envelops “Poet.” It’s ever-present in Con’s drunken self-deception; it’s there in Sara’s dream of escape. And when you see the climax, it’ll be impossible to imagine “Poet” not lining a young Martin McDonagh’s bookshelf.
For O’Neill, the title might be a euphemism for “a touch of diphtheria.” To have a touch of “the poet” is to have an infectious disease. The joke here is it’s got a hold of both Sara’s never-seen lover (a failed poet) and Con, who constantly spouts Byron while conflicted and adrift in a world he can’t understand.
“I stood among them … but not of them,” Con bemoans.
From a happier context, the same can be said of Baierlein.
“A Touch of the Poet” *** 1/2
DRAMA|Germinal Stage, 2450 W. 44th Ave. | By Eugene O’Neill | Directed by Ed Baierlein | Starring Baierlein, L. Corwin Christie and Lori Hansen|THROUGH OCT. 7 | 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays |2 hours, 15 minutes | $15.75-$19.75 | 303-455-7108
More information about the coming sequel
The following is taken directly from a press release issued by the Germinal Stage Denver:
“Germinal Stage Denver has acquired rights to Eugene O’Neill’s drama “More Stately Mansions” and will produce the play from Nov. 9-Dec. 9. As far as we can determine, this is the first time ever “A Touch of the Poet” and its sequel, “More Stately Mansions” will have been presented back-to-back.
During the last 14 years of his life, O’Neill was working sporadically on a multi-play cycle entitled “Tales of Possessors
Self-Dispossessed.” “A Touch of the Poet” was the only play he completed for production. However, a manuscript copy of a more than six-hour
version of “More Stately Mansions,” along with other scenarios and notes for the 11-play cycle, was given to the O’Neill Archives at Yale
University.
The cycle was to follow a New England family, the Harfords, from post-Revolutionary days through 1932 – and was meant to show how American
idealism had been corrupted by self-interested capitalism. Originally “A Touch of the Poet” was to be the first play of a five-play cycle and “More Stately Mansions” the second. However, O’Neill decided to go further back in the history of the Harfords, and actually completed two more plays,
“Greed of the Meek,” and “And Give Me Death,” which would trace the Harfords from pre-Revolutionary days.
Feeling these plays were too long in their drafts, O’Neill split them, thus creating four plays to prequel “A Touch of the Poet.” As is the case with many of his unfinished plays, O’Neill and his wife Carlotta burned the manuscripts in the fireplace at Tao House in 1943.
However, “More Stately Mansions” survived. In 1957, four years after O’Neill’s death, Carlotta gave the play to Karl Ragnar Gierow, director
of the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, who had first
produced O’Neill’s epic “Long Day’s Journet into Night.” Gierow worked on an acting version of “More Stately Mansions” for five years, and the play
was first presented in Stockholm in 1962.
Donald Gallup, Director of the O’Neill Archives at Yale, took Gierow’s version and further edited it, developing a two-and-a-half-hour acting
version that was first presented on Broadway in 1967, starring Ingrid Bergman, Colleen Dewhurst, and Arthur Hill. This is the version that
will be presented by Germinal Stage in November.
That play will be directed by Ed Baierlein and L. Corwin Christie will again play Sara Harford (nee Sara Melody), as she does in “A Touch of the Poet.”
Our scheduled production of Pinter’s “The Birthday Party” will be postponed until the spring, replacing Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkmann. For further
information, call 303-455-7108.
3 more
“ELEEMOSYNARY” An elegant and melancholy character study of three generations of women (Annawyn Shamas, real-life daughter Ellen Shamas-Wright and Tessa Nelson). You have to love a night of theater that breaks your heart and builds your vocabulary at the same time. 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays through Oct. 14 at the Playwright Theatre, 2119 E. 17th Ave. $20 (303-499-0383 or
).
“NUNSENSE A-MEN” So I only just now finally got the pun. Nuns – only they’re men. Amen! Hilarity? We’ll see. This must be the 47th wretched rip-off of the “Nunsense” franchise. 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays through Oct. 21 at Town Hall Arts Center, 2450 West Main St., Littleton. $18-$34 (303-794-2787 or
).
“THE HOSTAGE” Upstart Crow has blended three versions of IRA veteran Brendan Behar’s 1960 play about an innocent British soldier facing execution at the hands of said IRA. 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sept. 23 at the Dairy Center, 2590 Walnut St., Boulder. $16-$20 (303-444-7328, ).
–John Moore
Weekly podcast
“RUNNING LINES” WITH … JOAN AND RICHARD BELL: She’s the director of Brendan Behan’s “The Hostage” for Boulder’s Upstart Crow. He’s the co-founding president and an actor in the play. Together they talk with Denver Post theater critic John Moore about one of our most longstanding and unique of theater companies. listen by
