Comments on: Review: Desire Under the Elms/Goodman Theatre http://newcitystage.com/2009/01/27/review-desire-under-the-elmsgoodman-theatre/ Theater, Dance, Comedy and Performance in Chicago Tue, 24 Apr 2012 02:35:36 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 By: brianhey http://newcitystage.com/2009/01/27/review-desire-under-the-elmsgoodman-theatre/comment-page-1/#comment-91 brianhey Mon, 02 Feb 2009 17:46:45 +0000 http://newcitystage.com/?p=1316#comment-91 I saw this Friday night and was pretty blown away by the whole thing, so much so that I bought the script and read it right away. The dialect seemed to come from its own universe, which makes it difficult to understand at first, but eventually grew infectious. While Falls didn't do too much to the text, save pruning a few scenes a bit, the setting was dramatically reimagined (much to the chagrin of the naysayers waging war of the words on <a href="http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/the_theater_loop/2009/01/desire-under-the-elms-at-the-goodman-.html" rel="nofollow">Chris Jones' blog</a>) and in the process, the tone of the play was reshaped. Where O'Neill described a farmhouse overshadowed by the boughs of the elm tree—which he saw a metaphor for the omnipresence of the departed "maw"—the Goodman gang set the farmhouse in a rock pit of sorts, where burly, savage men moved giant boulders around, rearranging their own prison, and graphically pulled the guts out of slaughtered pigs. In other words, a harsh overtly masculine world into which the arrival of Abbie Putnam with her feminine and fertile presence would upset the order. O'Neill's setting, by contrast, would be a more feminine world, with the presence of maw's spectre a much more powerful force. A different play entirely, neither better nor worse. A further thought on the setting: the "rock pit," which conjures up the imagery of prison chain gangs breaking rocks, is anything but fertile. Why do these sons—and in turn Abby—long for the deed to such land so? Falls seems to be saying things about the powerful pull of the earth, the notion of home transcending the beauty of place, and the prison we let our lives, and our ancestors' way of life, become. I saw this Friday night and was pretty blown away by the whole thing, so much so that I bought the script and read it right away. The dialect seemed to come from its own universe, which makes it difficult to understand at first, but eventually grew infectious. While Falls didn’t do too much to the text, save pruning a few scenes a bit, the setting was dramatically reimagined (much to the chagrin of the naysayers waging war of the words on Chris Jones’ blog) and in the process, the tone of the play was reshaped. Where O’Neill described a farmhouse overshadowed by the boughs of the elm tree—which he saw a metaphor for the omnipresence of the departed “maw”—the Goodman gang set the farmhouse in a rock pit of sorts, where burly, savage men moved giant boulders around, rearranging their own prison, and graphically pulled the guts out of slaughtered pigs. In other words, a harsh overtly masculine world into which the arrival of Abbie Putnam with her feminine and fertile presence would upset the order. O’Neill’s setting, by contrast, would be a more feminine world, with the presence of maw’s spectre a much more powerful force. A different play entirely, neither better nor worse.

A further thought on the setting: the “rock pit,” which conjures up the imagery of prison chain gangs breaking rocks, is anything but fertile. Why do these sons—and in turn Abby—long for the deed to such land so? Falls seems to be saying things about the powerful pull of the earth, the notion of home transcending the beauty of place, and the prison we let our lives, and our ancestors’ way of life, become.

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