Martin Scorsese | Silence / 2016

the lost christians

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jay Cocks and Martin Scorsese (screenplay, based on the novel by Shūsaku Endō), Martin Scorsese (director) Silence / 2016

 

In hindsight, it seems to me that the Academy Awards should be highly embarrassed for not including Martin Scorsese’s Silence in its nominations for best film and director. If La La Land was an enjoyable lark, Manchester by the Sea a dark signature piece for its actor, and the winner, Moonlight, an impressive indie work that deserved to be lauded, Silence—despite its length and often too languorous pacing—is the better of those movies, and certainly the most profound, given its broader issues of faith and doubt. While the three nominees I mentioned dealt primarily with individual issues, Silence is concerned with broader cultural and even universal concerns. Despite the often heavy-handedness of Scorsese’s script—something that might also be said about Moonlight—the film was simply better, particularly in its cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto.

      The story is a fairly simple one. After a Dutch trader delivers a message to a Jesuit mission in Macau that their founder and mentor, Father Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson), has become an apostate in Japan, two of his students, Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver), determine to go on search for him, refusing to believe the accusation. Given permission for the journey by Father Alessandro Valignano (Ciarán Hinds) and with an alcoholic Japanese guide, Kichijiro (Yōsuke Kubozuka), they set to sea.

      After a long and difficult voyage, the three arrive at the island village of Tomogi where they discover an ardent group of Christians struggling simply to survive, gathered u nderground, much as the earliest Christians were forced into hiding. When their very presence threatens the small community, Rodrigues moves on to another village, on Gotō Island, and returns to Tomogi to tell Garupe. To protect the villagers from certain destruction by the shogunate, they travel in different directions, Rodrigues returning to Gotō to find it totally destroyed.

     There he again encounters Kichijiro, who admits that is an apostate Christian and demands confession from the priest. Rodrigues hears his confession, but soon after finds that his “friend” has betrayed him to the authorities for 300 silver pieces, obviously calling up the betrayal of Christ by Judas.

      Now in jail, Rodrigues ponders God’s immense silence while the priest is forced to observe various methods of death imposed upon those who refuse to step on a small carving of Christ, fumi-e, representing their abandonment of their beliefs.

      Those who refuse are put upon crosses set into the beach, which, when the tide returns, forces them to drown. Others are burned alive. Many do step onto fumi-e, but even some of these apostates are threatened by further torture unless Rodrigues, himself, becomes an apostate.

     Finally demanding to see Governor Inoue Masashige (Issey Ogata), he discovers that the old man to who he been speaking throughout his ordeal is the “the inquisitor” himself.

      To further break him down, Masashige requires him to watch the arrival of a boat with apostates and Father Garupe. As the apostates are, one by one, drowned, Garupe tries to swim out to save them, only to be drowned himself.

     Finally, Cristóvão Ferreira pays a visit to the imprisoned Rodrigues, admitting not only that he is, in fact, an apostate, but that he married and has become a Japanese scholar, believing that Christianity is a lost cause in Japan and that finding God may be better served by giving up the cause to convert its citizens.

     We have already perceived in many of the notions of the Japanese Christians that not all of them have truly assimilated the Western-based ideas of Christianity; one believes that the very baptism of her child puts her already in “paradise.” Others have difficulty in even saying the word “Jesus,” and many have blended Buddhist and Christian ideas. Rodrigues, it is clear, must come to terms with just what conversion truly means. Is it worth all these individual’s lives, no matter how determined they have become to maintain their religious viewpoints? Is religion a matter of rigidity to its doctrines, or can God forgive even denial if it is done for the good and survival of others?

      These are towering questions which have long been at the center of religious exploration. Surely this Japanese inquisition might be compared with the Spanish Inquisition. Wasn’t this same intolerance behind the Holocaust? Today’s ISIS soldiers demand a rigid view of Islam that is, often, at odds with general Islamic beliefs. And most of us can easily name numerous modern countries: Turkey, Iraq, Egypt, Myanmar, and, yes, even the US, among them, where minority believers are outlawed, threatened, or simply in danger for their survival.

     Forced to make a decision, Rodrigues steps onto the fumi-e with what he imagines is God’s approval, joining Ferreira to become a student of Japan rather than an intruder determined to change it.  If these men might be described, along with all others killed and apostate, as “lost Christians,” perhaps by living they can find in themselves a belief that is more inclusive.

      The wonderful thing about Scorsese’s film is that it provides no easy answers, but simply asks all the right questions. And it in largest philosophical ramifications, Silence even explores what it means to be “found” and “lost.”

       As I have made quite clear in the pages of this volume, I am no longer a believer in any religion. But this film moved me to question the issues of belief itself fully. In a year devoted to just that question, and during a time in which shouting would-authoritarians demand belief under their terms only, Scorsese has chosen to return to a work that simply asks us to think and to imagine, to believe only what we can.

 

Los Angeles, January 4, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2017).

Zaza Urushadze | მანდარინები (Mandariinid) Tangerines / 2013, USA 2015

the kindness of strangers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Zaza Urushadze (writer and director) მანდარინები (Mandariinid) Tangerines / 2013, USA 2015

 

Estonian director Zaza Urushadze’s 2013 movie Tangerines (released in the US in 2015) is the kind of feel-good movie that international audiences love. Despite the violent clashes that the film depicts, focusing on the Russian-Georgian battles in the break-off region, Abkhazia, of the  newly independent Georgia, this movie— through the gentle ministrations of Estonian farmer Ivo (Lembit Ulfsak) and his neighbor Margus (Elmo Nüganen)—brings together two warring enemies who learn to, at least, respect one another and who, by film’s end, are even willing to fight for one another’s survival.

      If the film’s final premise is rather unbelievable, given what we’ve seen in other such battles—in the former Yugoslavia and currently in Ukraine—Tangerines almost makes it credible given the warm portrayal of Ivo, whose Estonian family has left the war-torn region, but who himself continues to live on, for reasons never explained, in the battlefield. All he and his friend Margus want to do is to pick the tangerines and box them, in crates made by Ivo, hoping to get them to market before the war strikes their own small homes.

    Unfortunately, in the very first scene of the film, we realize that their efforts have come too late, when two Chechen mercenaries show up at Ivo’s door, demanding food. He feeds them good bread and cheese, and they leave him in peace, while warning him that not all the rebels will be so friendly. Yet hardly have they left his doorstep than their vehicle is attacked by Georgians. One of the Chechens is left dead, while it appears all of the Georgians have been killed.

      Ivo takes in the wounded Ahmed (Giorgi Nakhashidze), and begins to bury the dead Georgians with Margus, only to discover that one of the Georgians is still living, although seriously hurt.

     Taking in the Georgian victim, Nika (Mikhail Meskhi) as well, the men call their local doctor who does his best for the badly wounded soldier.

      Made aware of an enemy in the same house, Ahmed insists he will kill Nika as soon as he    can again walk; but Ivo locks him away while nursing Nika to better health, demanding that they cannot kill one another within his house.

       At first the pair, quite obviously, are wary of one another, distrusting one another’s every move. But at dinners and suppers Ivo asks them personal questions which make it clear that both of the soldiers have similar reasons for being involved in a war in which they are not directly connected. Slowly, a kind of bond begins to grow between the two, particularly on account of the gentle kindness offered them by Ivo, despite their individual prejudices.

      Yet the war will not leave anyone alone. In one onslaught, Margus’ home and orchard is completely destroyed, and Ahmed offers him a large wad of money in payment for the bombing, which Margus refuses to accept.

     Soon after, Russians show up on Ivo’s doorstep. Knowing that he will be immediately killed if they discover he is hiding a Georgian within, he demands they both pretend they are Chechen. Amazingly, Ahmed goes along with it, claiming that Nika is also a mercenary, whose injuries have made it impossible for him to speak. Yet the Russians ultimately refuse to believe that Ahmed is Chechen, and intend to arrest him. Seeing Ahmed about to be taken off, Nika grabs his rifle and shoots at the Russians; but in the shoot-out Margus and Nika both are killed as well as the Russians.

     With Ahmed, Ivo buries them both next to his son, who was killed a few years earlier—perhaps a hint of why he has refused to leave the territory with other Estonians. He tells Ahmed that had he been the one to die, he would have been buried next to his son. And Ahmed determines to leave the warzone, returning home to Checken, surely to face another war there two years later.

 

Los Angeles, May 26, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2017).

Charles Chaplin | The Kid / 1920

the unlikely father and his beloved son

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Chaplin (screenwriter and director) The Kid / 1920

 

Charles Chaplin’s 1920 release, The Kid, was his first longer film—an hour in length—and was produced, beginning in 1919 during a period of his unsurety about continuing his shorts and personal depression, since during this time he was also divorcing his wife.

 

     Fortunately, he found the perfect child actor to play The Kid in Jackie Coogan, and, basing the film, in part, on his own childhood in British slums, he produced a brilliant and touching film about the New York City slums that might have been predicted by the reformer photographer Jacob Riis.

      Chaplin’s film, however, never preaches, but tenderly shows us how an accidental encounter with a baby left on the streets to die, results in a close father-son kinship between The Tramp and The Kid as he grows up and survives in dire poverty.

      The first few scenes represent almost brutal child abuse. The baby’s unmarried mother (Edna Purviance) begins this as we see her leaving the Charity Hospital. She obviously has no money and nowhere to turn. Seeing a beautiful mansion with a new car sitting on the street outside, she carefully puts her baby in the backseat, hoping that he will be taken in by the people nearby, leaving a note “Please take care of this orphan child.” And in that sense we begin almost where Oliver Twist began.

       It so happens, however, that the car belongs to gangsters on the run who, when they discover the child in the backseat, leave him next to a garbage can on the slum street where they have temporarily stopped. They even debate shooting The Kid.

     When The Tramp (Chaplin) accidently comes across the baby, he too tries to rid himself of it, placing it in a pram a woman is pushing with another child in it. But she virulently rejects it. When the local policeman sees The Tramp with the child, he pulls it away and also attempts to put it in the same pram.

      She again rejects it pointing out that it belongs to the Tramp, so Chaplin ends up holding the child again, briefly pondering what to do with it; for an instant he even looks the grate that leads to the sewers, but kind man that he truly is, he takes him into his almost barren room.

      Before long, he has ensconced the baby in a kind of hammock, gerry-rigged up to what seems to be whisky jug to deliver the child’s milk. In short he quickly becomes a natural father.

      As the baby grows up to Coogan’s age, the Tramp cooks up big meals for him (unlike Oliver’s fate), forces him to wash his face and hands, and to say his prayers and meals at night.

      Working as a glazier, The Tramp may “use” his son at moments to throw rocks through windows so that he might be asked to repair them. But even that seems more as a sport for the boy than child abuse.

      In short, the newly-minted father and son relationship is as healthy—perhaps healthier—as those in the best homes of the city. Coogan’s love for his on-film father is truly apparent, and people involved with the film have said that Chaplin treated Coogan so lovingly that he might almost have truly been his father, although the boy’s real father was on set most of the time and plays the role of the pick-pocket when the two are forced to take refuge in an overnight sleeping shelter for the poor.

     As in many a Chaplin film, the only true blockage to this loving relationship are policeman and other authorities, and the rich. The child’s mother has since become a famous and successful singer, and out of guilt often visits slum neighborhoods with small gifts for the children There she encounters her own son without knowing it, also providing him with two small toys, which he comes to love and which, later, a bully steals from him. 

     When she later returns with other such trifles, the mother discovers that The Kid is extremely ill, and demands that The Tramp call the doctor.

     Unable to afford a good doctor, he calls in a Country Doctor who is a bumbling fool, who first sticks the thermometer into Chaplin’s mouth instead of The Kid’s, and proceeds to clumsily fuss around the boy rather than actually check him out.

    When he asks The Tramp whether or not the child his truly his son, Charlie answers “Practically,” providing the doctor with the note that was wrapped up in the baby’s blanket.

     That act leads the doctor to call the Orphan’s Home for them to come and cart off the child. A fight ensues, with the boy nonetheless being locked up in the back of an open truck, as if he some animal being led off to slaughter.

     The Tramp, with the policeman on his tail, scales the roof and jumps down the other side as the truck turns the corner, throwing the head of the orphanage off the vehicle, embracing The Kid, and scaring off the driver.

     Locked out of their own house, they take to the shelter I mentioned above. But meanwhile, the mother has returned to check up on the child only to find the doctor who, speechless over all that has just occurred, merely shows her the note she herself has written. Recognizing the situation, she puts an advertisement in the paper saying that there will be a financial reward for anyone who brings the boy into the police station.

       The manager of the sleeping shelter reads this as his customers fall to sleep, and rushes the child off to the station over The Kid’s pleas for his freedom.

       Missing him in the bed, The Tramp goes looking everywhere for his son, without any success, finally returning to his old home which in locked. Sitting on the doorstep he falls asleep.

       What follows is perhaps the most kitsch and silly scene in all of Chaplin’s oeuvre, as many of the characters we have already seen wildly dance together in the streets, all attired in angel wings.

Perhaps that was only to prepare us for the slightly unbelievable ending, in which the policeman, finally capturing the previously evasive Tramp, takes him personally to the mother’s house, wherein The Kid is now ensconced. The Trap is invited in as if he might be asked to stay forever.

       It may be that this new world represents Chaplin’s current position in life as opposed to his previous childhood poverty, but we might realize in this just what Chaplin, in his own life, might be missing in his current opulence.

      The rest of the film, however, has been so poignant and touching that The Kid and The Tramp’s redemption are almost forgettable.

      In many respects these last scenes parallel Oliver Twist once again, when Oliver, discovered by his rich uncle is given all the love and benefits he was previously been missing But his new world seems partially dead, whereas everything was so alive and wondrous in Fagin’s den.

 

Los Angeles, June 9, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2020).

Cosima Spender | Without Gorky / 2011

the fatalist

by Douglas Messerli

 

Valerio Bonelli and Cosima Spender (screenwriters), Cosima Spender (director) Without Gorky / 2011

 

Cosima Spender’s film Without Gorky is truly a family affair, but don’t imagine that you’ll encounter in this fascinating work something similar to a living room projection of what fun it was to be part of the Gorky tribe. This rather somber film is something closer to the homemade films of The Friedmans of Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans without any of the judicial accusations that accompany the father and son of that film.

     Here the accusations, rather, are muted, almost at times inexplicable, as Cosima interviews her grandmother, the now famous painter Arshile Gorky’s wife, Agnes “Mougouch” Magruder, a woman liberated years before such a concept might even have existed. Rolling her own cigarettes while recounting her more-than-painful later years with the artist, she, the daughter of Admiral John Holmes Magruder, Jr., was—as the cliché goes—almost swept off her feet by the dashing storyteller who, in his early days, Gorky was.

     Close friends with artists Roberto Matta, Wilhelm de Kooning, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and many others, Gorky introduced her not only to a high-powered art world, but, mostly on foot, to the New York City which her soon-to-be husband loved.

     Working out of a large studio near Union Square, Gorky painted up a storm of portraits (including the famed works of the artist and his mother) and early abstractions before the impact of the Abstract Expressionism which later gained him, after his death, great fame.

      Mougouch (an Armenian term of endearment) soon married him, but with the birth of their first-born daughter, Maro, found life difficult living with a child—and soon after a second daughter Natasha—in a working artist’s studio. As Maro explains, “he let me paint on the back of his canvasses, but when, on occasion, I tried to move to the front, he grew furious.”

     Much of their mother’s time was spent in parks and on the busy streets daily attempting to entertain her children until she might return home to eat dinner.

      Gradually, the family, through temporary loans by friends of country houses, was able to split its time between New York and Connecticut, the later far preferable to Gorky’s wife and children, while lacking for the artist the intensity of the city and his interchange with his artist friends. Although, he there worked to free himself, by immersing himself in nature, of his former practice of sketching and working with smaller paintings before tackling the larger canvases, thus creating a new excitement of directly applying paint to canvas without any preconceptions, Gorky found his temporary locations could not compare with his orderly studio.

     Both their mother and her daughters recall the heated arguments between the couple, along with Gorky’s increasing abuse of alcohol. In 1946, a series of serious health problems occurred which brought the family into further crisis.

       Gorky’s studio barn burned down in a fire, taking with it numerous of his most recent paintings. The artist seemed almost fatalistic about their destruction; as we later discover, he was doomed by birth to become a kind of fatalist. But soon after he was forced to immediately undergo a colostomy because of developing cancer, which further exacerbated the fraught relationships between Mougouch and him.

      For her part, his wife recognized that he was considering suicide, and whenever she saw him carrying about a rope, hurried the girls out to greet him and bring him inside. Nonetheless, things grew even more difficult, in one instance Gorky “helping,” as his wife puts it, her to tumble down a narrow flight of stairs from their bedroom.

       In the process of filming, Cosima takes her aunts back to the house, which in Maro’s case brings memories that are simultaneously lovely and horrific. Nathasha, on the other hand, can recall nothing—except for the stairs, which ends, for her, in tears, frustrated that she has clearly blocked nearly all memories from her mind, but also momentarily growing inexplicably frightened by the image of the staircase.

       That event, in turn, brought a series of even more frightful turns. Terrified by her husband’s violence, Mougouch returned to New York, spending a weekend of reassuring love with Matta. When she arrived back in Connecticut, Gorky was ready both to beat her and possibly kill his artist friend. His sister, with whom he was in regular communication, insisted “In America we do not beat our wives,” and after a few rounds in Central Park, Gorky and Matta sat down on a bench to discuss the situation between them.

       Unfortunately, soon thereafter Gorky was involved in an automobile accident with his gallerist Julien Levy at the wheel. Gorky’s neck was broken and his painting arm paralyzed.

       Soon after, Mougouch took the girls and left Gorky, who committed suicide by hanging in 1948 at the age of 44, at the very moment when audiences and critics were finally beginning to notice his great achievements in art.

      It is clear from the tensions in the interviews and conversations that Cosima films that Maro, now a painter herself, was never quite able to forgive her mother, particularly since Mougouch sent both her daughters to a strict Swiss boarding school, while she continued an affair with Matta.

Natasha, in particular, was almost daily punished for wetting her bed at age 3.

      Yet through their conversations in this film, at least Maro begins to realize just how difficult Gorky was to live with. Moreover, in the years since the entire family has come to realize that numerous things the artist had told them about himself—for example, that he was the great-grandson of Maxim Gorky—had all been lies. As more and more art shows were organized they came to discover that their father’s real name was Vosdanig Adoian, and that his family lived in Armenia, forced to take part in the Turkish-led marches away from their homeland which led to the murder of millions of individuals, including Gorky’s mother who died of starvation along the long trek.

      Late in the film, Maro with her husband sculptor and writer Matthew Spender (the son of poet Stephen Spender) and Natasha travel to the original home of the Adoians in Khorgom, Vilayet of Van. In that beautiful landscape nestled in low-lying hills which catch the afternoon shadows and filled with flowers and shrubs they recognize what might have a child’s eye-level view of the world he painted in abstraction again and again throughout his later years. Exploring a home similar to one in which their father and grandfather might have lived and witnessing the very splendor of Gorky’s childhood world they seem to come to some sort of reconciliation, however brief, with the failures of both their mother and father, now able finally to embrace their lives without Gorky.

      This is not an easy film, for either Gorky’s family nor for the viewer, but along with the visual presentation of many of his great works, we do gain a new appreciation for the man who rejected all of his painful past just to come to the US and be embraced by the new culture. Unfortunately, as they muse, he did not live long enough to witness that.*

 

*My husband Howard N. Fox began his curatorial career at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. working with Cynthia Jaffee MacCabe on a show of artists who had come to the US with the same hopes and desires that Gorky had, The Golden Door: Artist-Immigrants of America, 1876-1976, a show in celebration of the American Bicentennial, including more that 200 artists. The first thing that fell out of the catalogue when I opened it up yesterday to explore its wonders was a black-and-while photograph of Gorky’s The Artist and His Mother from 1926-1929, obviously a reproduction to be used by newspapers and magazines. I recall that painting from the show along with many others.

 

Los Angeles, August 27, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2020).

 

José Quintero and Gordon Rigsby | A Moon for the Misbegotten / 1975 (TV video)

dancing with a dead man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eugene O’Neill (writer), José Quintero and Gordon Rigsby (directors) A Moon for the Misbegotten / 1975

 

As some critics, over the years, have commented, Eugene O’Neill’s last play, a kind of sequel to the then (A Moon for the Misbegotten premiered in 1947) unproduced Long Day’s Journey into Night, is a fragile work that needs a near-perfect cast to bring it to life, reiterated, almost, by the various lengths of the play’s runs.

     The original Broadway production, directed by Carmen Capalbo, despite some first-rate actors in Franchot Tone and Wendy Hiller, lasted only 68 performances, a flop by any definition. Its failure also meant the playwright’s break with the Theatre Guild, who had previously produced a great many of his works.

     The Off-Broadway revival of 1968 by the Circle in the Square Theatre, directed by Theodore Mann and starring Salome Jens as Josie, ran for less than a week.

      The second Broadway revival of this play at the Cort Theatre, directed by David Leveaux, in 1984. Kate Nelligan, as Jocie, was nominated for a Tony, but it ran only for 40 performances, even less that the original production.

      The third revival, directed by Daniel Sullivan in 2000 at the Walter Kerr Theatre, with Cherry Jones as Jocie, lasted a bit longer at 120 performances. Perhaps by that time audiences had grown somewhat more accustomed to O’Neill’s longish monologues, the tough-and-rough language of Jocie and her father, and the long pauses in the rhythm of the play.

     In 2007 there was yet a 4th revival at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre—starring the wonderful Eve Best as Jocie—which lasted for 2 ½ months, after a 112-performance run at London’s Old Vic.

     As dreary as these figures are, however, there was one extremely important exception, revealing the effectiveness of this play.

     In 1973, José Quintero directed three actors with long careers and life-long devotion to O’Neill works: Colleen Dewhust, Jason Robards, Jr.,—who later performed the same character, at a younger age, in the 1962 film version directed by Sidney Lumet.

     For the acting in this production both Dewhurst and Ed Flanders as her father, won Tony awards, as the play when on to run for 314 performances (a solid run for a serious Broadway drama), and is pretty much recognized now by most critics as the definitive production.

     As O’Neill scholar Travis Bogard wrote: “Doomed to failure without superb acting…no subsequent production ever recreated the magic of those 314 performances.”

     That version, after its Broadway run, went on to be performed at Washington D.C.’s The Kennedy Center, where, amazingly, Howard and I saw it also in 1973.

     Yet, I remember little of it, only perceiving it fully in the ABC taping of the same production, which I saw yesterday. The film received 5 Emmy nominations, with Ed Sanders winning the award for Supporting Actor.

     O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten in terms of plot, is hardly complex. The work begins with with the farmer Hogan’s (Flanders) third son, Mike, escaping the hard work and abuse from his father he has had to endure for most of his life to live with his two other brothers. His sister Jocie, abets that escape, even producing the boy with a few dollars she has stolen from her father’s money box.

     She remains in good stead with the now furious father through her bluster, her quick-witted tongue, and a large stick she holds onto so that her father can feel justified for his inability to beat her for her participation in the betrayal.

     Their hardscrabble farm is owned by Jamie, now spoken of as Jim and Jimmy, whose father, the noted actor James Tyrone, Sr. one day inexplicably purchased it. The younger James is a regular visitor to the farm, loving to chat with her father, and secretly in love with Jocie, who also has the reputation of being the nearby town’s whore, a moniker she seems herself to encourage.

     Yet James realizes the lie of that boast, perceiving her (correctly) still as a virgin, and finding her tall, somewhat imposing stature (She describes herself “a cow of a woman”) as a thing of beauty.

      If in the early scenes there is a great deal of coming and going, James paying them a visit to announce that their wealthy, pompous neighbor Steadman Harder will soon be paying them a visit to protest the fact that Hogan’s pigs occasionally escape their pen and slip into Harder’s pristine pond.

     But the major events occur in the second act in a series of non-events surrounding the central two figures. We first glimpse Jocie, attired in her best dress, including socks and shoes—throughout most of the play this Amazon is barefooted—awaiting the would-be lover who is now several hours late.

     Furious, she pulls off her stockings and shoes, as her father finally returns from the same nearby bar where he has gone with James.

     Under the cover of drunkenness, he angrily complains to his daughter that they can no longer trust James, since at the bar their landlord has agreed to the now outrageous price for their worthless farm for $10,000, enough surely that Jim might return to New York and his “Broadway tarts.”

     Still furious for being stood up, and now hearing what she believes as the truth, Jocie plots revenge. If her father will bring James to her, she will drink with him (she is a near teetotaler), getting him drunk before carrying him in her bed, while her father and others he brings with him at daybreak will attest to sexual misconduct, allowing the Hogans to get back the $10,000 which they know he will pay out of guilt.

     Hogan goes off, but James, hours late, finally does finally show up, while Jocie attempts to get him soused. Knowing her as well as he does (he has long perceived the lie of her sexual indiscretions), he refuses to allow her to drink.

     And as they two talk in the moonlight, she gradually uncovers the truth, that the offer from Harder was verbally accepted only so that the next day he can again refuse him, bedeviling the vile, rich neighbor.

     Recognizing his honesty, Jocie nearly swoons over a couple of kisses between the two of them and his frenzied head buried on her lap, as he alternates between coherent banter and almost shrill drunken memories that continue to haunt him.

     Allowing herself to be taken in love, she brings him into her bed, where he quickly, again in his drunken state of mind, attempts to rape her, she running from the room declaring that she is not a “whore.”

     He apologizes but also suggests it may be good that she has seen him like that, his real self who would totally destroy her if they become more romantically entwined.

     Finally, he drunkenly mumbles out the terrible story of how, upon his mother’s death and, with her coffin in baggage, during his voyage to her final burial he called each night for a $56 dollar whore with whom he had sex. He was so drunk by the time they reached their destination that he missed his mother’s final funeral.

 

    Jocie is shocked, but ultimately forgives him, and realizes that he has told her something he had told no other. She allows him to rest on her lap for the rest of night, only awakening him with the sunrise.

     The result is obvious since James is off to New York by the end of the week, probate on the family home finally coming to an end.

      Not only has Jocie realized the truths of his private confession, but accepts it as an unconditional offering of love, while still perceiving that the man whom she loves is actually, like his entire family except Edmond (O’Neill) who is extremely ill ghosts.

      What most fascinates me about this dance with a dead man is Jocie’s—and to a certain extent James’— constant effort to pull and push away from one another while at the very same moment they entice each other back into embrace. It is truly a kind of dance with death punctuated with fearful hope and utter disgust. By the exhausting end of this “dance,” Jocie can hardly walk, so tied up in knots are her legs for holding and protecting him all night.

      But by the daylight, when her father returns, claiming it was all scheme, not for the money, but to bring the two of them together, his daughter has grown strong knowing that once in her life she did possess love, even if it was delivered from the dead of the Tyrone family. She threatens to finally leave her father, but by the end of the play remains with him.

      And it is, ultimately, this alternating sense of love and rejection which makes O’Neill’s work so very brilliant—even if it takes only great actors to achieve it on stage.

 

Los Angeles, June 18, 2020

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance