TT: Eugene O’Neill, master of mirth

Because so many shows are opening on Broadway in the final week of the current season, I’m filing two separate drama columns for this week’s Wall Street Journal. Today I write about Desire Under the Elms and The Philanthropist, the first of which is horrible and the second lackluster. Here’s an excerpt.
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Was Eugene O’Neill really a great playwright? Nobody was asking that question when he died in 1953, but nowadays his greatness tends to be asserted by critics rather than demonstrated by actors: O’Neill’s work is no longer seen on Broadway with any regularity, and most of the plays that made him famous in the ’20s are rarely done elsewhere. Robert Falls’ revival of “Desire Under the Elms,” O’Neill’s 1924 tragedy about an aging farmer (Brian Dennehy) whose nubile young wife (Carla Gugino) lusts after her angry young stepson (Pablo Schreiber), marks the first time that this once-shocking, now-dated play has been performed on Broadway since 1952. I wish I could say it was worth the wait, but the play is silly and the staging comprehensively ludicrous, Ms. Gugino’s steam-heated performance notwithstanding.
Connoisseurs of unintentional comedy, on the other hand, will find much to like about Mr. Falls’ production, which has just transferred to Broadway after an inexplicably successful run at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. Imagine “Tobacco Road” set in a rock quarry and you’ll get the idea. The evening begins with a tableau in which two knuckle-dragging idiots (Boris McGiver and Daniel Stewart Sherman) slaughter a jumbo rubber hog and extract its internal organs one by one, accompanied by thunderous electronic music. The idiots in question turn out to be Mr. Schreiber’s half-brothers, who live with him and their father in a two-story house that flies into the air at random intervals. Other pieces of furniture, including a stove, a kitchen table and a brass bed, appear and disappear no less randomly through trap doors….
Ms. Gugino, a vibrant and compelling TV and film actress who has had the misfortune to appear in two bad plays in a row, “After the Fall” and “Suddenly Last Summer,” is now three for three. Here as before, she manages to slice through the surrounding stupidity and give a performance that leaves no doubt of her exceptional gifts, but everything she does is wasted by Mr. Falls, who seems more interested in simulating sexual intercourse onstage than in making the best possible use of a major talent….
Christopher Hampton’s “The Philanthropist,” written in 1969 and last seen in New York a quarter-century ago, has now been revived by the Roundabout Theatre Company as a vehicle for Matthew Broderick. A postmodern inversion of Molière’s “The Misanthrope,” it revolves around an unworldly, anagram-spouting professor of philology (Mr. Broderick) whose inability to say a bad word about anybody or anything enrages everyone he meets. At once clever and aimless, “The Philanthropist” can’t decide whether to be funny or serious, and never quite manages to be either….
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Read the whole thing here.