Lumbering Love in 'Elms'

American Century's O'Neill Carries A Tragic Weight

From left, Parker Dixon, Susan Marie Rhea and Kevin Adams star in Eugene O'Neill's "Desire Under the Elms," set on a New England farm in 1850. (By Jeffrey Bell -- American Century Theater)

You can't blame William Aitken, director and set designer for the American Century Theater's "Desire Under the Elms," for toning down the elms. Eugene O'Neill's description of this play's setting -- a bleak New England farm in 1850 -- is so funereal as to be unintentionally hilarious.

"Two enormous elms. . . . brood oppressively over the house," O'Neill wrote in an introduction to the script. "They are like exhausted women resting their sagging breasts and hands and hair on its roof, and when it rains, their tears trickle down monotonously and rot on the shingles."

No such Goreyesque arbor looms over Aitken's austere set -- two platforms, a few spartan articles of furniture, a heap of stones -- but the production offers more than enough morbidity to go 'round. In keeping with TACT's mission -- to stage neglected 20th-century American plays -- Aitken and his colleagues have dutifully dredged up all the weather-beaten gloom of this 1924 drama.

Controversial at the time of its premiere for its sensational subject matter -- greed, infanticide, and quasi-incestuous lust -- "Desire" abounds in biblical imagery, but it is really a tragedy in the classic sense, tracing a remorseless connection between the protagonists' flaws and their sublimely dismal fates.

The characters here are the members of the Cabot family, headed by a 75-year-old widower named Ephraim (Kevin Adams). When this dour patriarch remarries, his 30-something bride, Abbie (Susan Marie Rhea), and 20-something son Eben (Parker Dixon) embark on a torrid affair that winds up in "Medea" territory.

It's not frothy stuff, so audiences who attend the generally effective American Century production will be grateful for the mild comic relief by Colin Smith and John Geoffrion, who play Peter and Simeon, Ephraim's older sons.

Drawling and cackling their way through O'Neill's oh-so-rustic dialect (lines such as "Purty, h'aint it?" predominate), the two actors are endearingly boorish -- Smith's slouching, gimlet-eyed Peter is particularly finely drawn. And the pair even look alike, with their beards and matching suspenders (Maggie Butler designed the rustic costumes).

Adams is equally persuasive, letting Ephraim's gnarled obduracy slip, now and then, to reveal a poignant loneliness. When the old man sits on his bed in his long underwear, explaining to Abbie that "God's hard, not easy," his vulnerability is touching.

Unfortunately, the other two performers fare less well. Dixon's Eben is aptly callow, but he seems so guileless and irresolute -- almost empty -- that his manipulation of Peter and Simeon, in an early scene, feels implausible. Rhea overplays her role, infusing almost all her lines with a breathy emotionality that makes Abbie seem cartoonish -- a flaw that particularly undermines the play's ending. And before that, when the young bride sits in bed in her nightgown, practically slavering over the prospect of seducing Eben, she looks like a figure on the cover of a Harlequin romance.

Director Aitken probably could have helped Rhea achieve a more natural performance if he'd given her a little more stage business. On a more positive note, his production has a visual starkness that suits the grim subject matter. (A subtly leafy lighting effect by designer Scott Folsom presumably alludes to the elms.)

Perhaps more important, though, the director and his cast wrap the tragedy up in 2 hours 15 minutes. That's quite enough time to spend with the hapless Cabots and their lugubrious, elm-shadowed problems.

Desire Under the Elms, by Eugene O'Neill. Direction and set design by William Aitken; sound design, Ian Armstrong. Through Feb. 3 at Theater II, Gunston Arts Center, 2700 S. Lang Street, Arlington. Call 703-553-8782 or visit http://www.americancentury.org.