Director’s unique take pays off for ‘Hairy Ape’

Director Aaron Tuttle has taken a strong stand with "The Hairy Ape," and the result is a power-punch evening.

Eugene O'Neill's 1922 play is about a man working in the bowels of an ocean liner. Yank (Kris Pruett) considers himself pretty indispensable in his life's station. He's top dog. But when he meets an upper class lady (Diane Payne) who thinks she wants the adventure of getting to know how the lower class lives, he is made to feel the ultimate outsider.

O'Neill says in his stage directions that "the men should resemble those pictures in which the appearance of Neanderthal Man is guessed at," and Tuttle goes all the way. The male actors resemble literal apes in movement and appearance. They even groom each other. Gary Carton's set looks like a series of crowded zoo cages rather than an engine room. You can imagine then, how out of place Pruett looks when he roams about the cold skyscrapers of Manhattan, which Carton has magically made harsh, beautiful and even a tad realistic -- on a small, three quarters-round stage yet.

Tuttle stylizes everything. The down side is that the human relationships in the script are sometimes glossed over. But what we get instead is an intense, strongly held vision of a social world gone mad. Joe Aldridge's lights -- many placed on the stage floor -- are so harsh that they give the most innocent moments a nightmarish hue. Some degree of noise seems to be constantly threatening the action, so that no stage location ever feels safe.

Pruett moves with great, relaxed discipline. He internalizes his postures, so that we never feel he's doing an impersonation. It's moving to see him become more "manlike" as the play progresses.

Having seen multiple productions of "The Hairy Ape" where the material was presented much more realistically -- with the title being used merely as metaphor -- I was taken aback by Tuttle's fascinating Kafka-ish approach. Yet, his creativity feels right for this play. It feels born of the script. It's easy to imagine O'Neill happily nodding "yes."

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at DelValle@aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.