Desire Under the Elms, a play by Eugene O'Neill at the St. James Theatre, starring Brian Dennehy, Carla Cugino, and Pablo Schreiber, directed by Robert Falls. The curtain rises to a gargantuan set of huge hanging boulders, a pig being slaughtered by two slobs, and a big house hanging from the top of the stage, all to raucous music. What were they thinking? Amidst all this nonsense, this rococo excess, three considerable performances are swallowed up, at times lost. When the hothouse beauty Carla Cugino makes her entrance, it's hard to see her. What should be for O'Neill, a lean, tight, drama, is overburdened. We see Cugino giving birth, but we don't see her tragic crime. This is a pity and is perhaps the reason why Dennehy who should loom so large, can't compete with the boulders and house and why his menacing hulk barely registers. He seems merely pathetic and hardly like someone who dominates his family.
The hugely talented Pablo Schreiber manages somewhat better, his hick mannerisms quite a change from his last stage performance in New York in "Reasons to be Pretty." He has a good chemistry with Cugino but even so, the potential which is flashed is never quite reached.
Cugino alone gives a complete performance, remarkable in many instances. She is brave (not only by taking off her clothes) but she is a throwback, a full throttled melodramatic, no-holds-barred flamboyant dramatic actress of a kind that one can see in old films by the likes of Miriam Hopkins and Tallulah Bankhead. She brings it off and may just cop a Tony for her efforts. But she's a jewel in the wrong setting. It made us wonder what she could have accomplished if the director had let her be the show instead of the set.
That Falls has failed badly was demonstrated when the audience in the half empty theater cackled at what should have been the most poignant moment in the play.
Considering the cast, and the extravagent review in the New York Times, we had anticipated this would be the top drama of the season. Alas, it was a tedious clunker. Broadway Bridge and Tunnel Test Grade C.