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Strange Interlude by Eugene O’Neill A publication of the Shakespeare Theatre Company ASIDES 2011|2012 SEASON • Issue 4 Michael Kahn directs Strange Interlude by Eugene O’Neill Michael Kahn talks about his journey to Strange Interlude page 3 The Eugene O’Neill Festival Guide page 20 Celebrating 25 years of Classical Theatre A publication of the Shakespeare Theatre Company Dear Friend, ASIDES This issue of Asides highlights In Pursuit Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, a play I have wanted to share with 3 In Pursuit of Happiness you for a very long time. This rarely by Norman Allen of performed masterpiece earned O’Neill his third Pulitzer Prize for 5 The Battle at Journey’s End Drama, and played a part in winning him the by Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb Nobel Prize in Literature. Its novelistic complexity Happiness and experimental form have rendered it a classic, 8 Eugenic O’Neill and with intriguing possibilities for reinterpretation Michael Kahn’s Journey Strange Interlude and restaging. by Tamsen Wolff to Strange Interlude 10 A Strange Sensation Strange Interlude attracted the attention of by Laura Henry everyone from George Bernard Shaw to the by Norman Allen Marx Brothers. It is a remarkable, intricate work 12 See All Sides of O’Neill with innovative form, and it displays O’Neill by Hannah J. Hessel at the height of his power as a dramatist and 13 Creative Conversations thinker. This issue of Asides examines the ways in which Strange Interlude continues to push the 14 Play in Process boundaries of text, concept and performance. 15 Strange Interlude Cast and Artistic Team STC keeps classical theatre alive by staging works of historical and intellectual stature, and Strange © The Al Hirschfeld Foundation. 16 Past and Future Lives Interlude fits this mission. O’Neill has often been www.AlHirschfeldFoundation.org. by Drew Lichtenberg Al Hirschfeld is represented by called America’s Greatest Dramatist. His works The Margo Feiden Galleries. 18 What is a benefit from a fresh look and reintroduction to audiences as they were meant to be experienced, “Strange Interlude”? Illustration of Michael Kahn by Al Hirschfeld (2001). by Drew Lichtenberg on the stage. Opening on Broadway in 1928, Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude shocked audiences with a plot line that 20 The Eugene O’Neill As Artistic Director, I continue to search for incorporated abortion, adultery and eugenics. For STC Artistic Director Michael Festival Guide opportunities for STC to engage in local and Kahn, the play’s power comes from an even more complicated topic: happiness. national dialogue about classical theatre. I’m “Everyone wants it,” he says. “That’s what the play is about, people trying to find pleased that we are able to join Arena Stage for happiness, trying to figure out what it is and where they’re going to find it.” this year’s Eugene O’Neill Festival, which includes mainstage performances and educational Kahn first came across the Pulitzer Prize winner as a child. “My mother had been Lansburgh Theatre discussions. The festival will take place through 450 7th Street NW married to a bookseller before she married my father,” he explains. “So our home Washington, DC 20004-2207 May 6, 2012, and a schedule can be found in a was full of books, including first editions of O’Neill’s plays and, among them, Strange special insert to this issue. I encourage you to Interlude. I read it when I was very young and I didn’t understand a thing, except that Sidney Harman Hall attend these events. it was huge. Years later I saw Geraldine Page play Nina and I realized that I love the 610 F Street NW play, that it was this Mount Olympus that needed to be climbed.” Washington, DC 20004-2207 Please continue to visit Asides Online (Asides. ShakespeareTheatre.org) for more information Before assaying Olympus, Kahn tested his strength with O’Neill’s other works. He Box Office and updates on the production, historical context 202.547.1122 directed Mourning Becomes Electra with Jane Alexander at the Stratford Shakespeare and the Festival. I hope to see you in the theatre. Festival in 1971, then with Kelly McGillis at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Administrative Offices 1996. His production of Beyond the Horizon at the McCarter Theatre was filmed for 516 8th Street SE Warm regards, Washington, DC 20003-2834 PBS’s Great Performances in 1976. A year later, he was in Boston directing José Ferrer 202.547.3230 and Kate Reid in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. It was in the early 1980s that Kahn suggested Strange Interlude to Roundabout ShakespeareTheatre.org Theatre Company as a follow-up to his highly successful A Month in the Country. “I Michael Kahn Asides.ShakespeareTheatre.org was encouraged to send the script to Glenda Jackson,” Kahn remembers. Jackson Artistic Director, Shakespeare Theatre Company declined the Roundabout offer but was soon playing the role in a London production that came to Broadway in 1985. Connect with Us! “It was very disappointing,” Kahn says, “I thought there would never be another revival of Strange Interlude. It had been done.” It wasn’t until he was planning the Strange Interlude is presented by the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s 25th Anniversary Season that Kahn returned to the HRH Foundation. script that he loved. Cover: Photos of Ted Koch, Robert Stanton, Baylen Thomas and Francesca Faridany by Strange Interlude is supported Scott Suchman. in part by an award from the © The Al Hirschfeld Foundation. www. National Endowment for the Arts. AlHirschfeldFoundation.org. Al Hirschfeld is represented by The Margo Feiden Galleries. 3 Strange Interlude • 2011|2012 SEASON • Issue 4 Celebrating 25 years of Classical Theatre “Like all of O’Neill’s plays, Strange O’Neill lets us see what happens over Interlude is profound and intuitive and a lifetime.” a little over-written,” he says. “It was originally six hours long and was done Nina’s life spans one of the most with a dinner break.“ volatile periods in the nation’s history, The Battle at encompassing world wars, the advent Having gained permission from the of new technology and a radical shift in O’Neill estate to edit the script, Kahn social norms. “It’s about America, the spent a year studying its every nuance. American dream,” Kahn says. “Everyone Journey’s End “O’Neill, coming out of the life he had, in this play is striving for happiness. And and his theatre family, writes with a each of them believes there is a way to Eugene O’Neill and Carlotta Monterey O’Neill vestige of melodrama,” Kahn admits, get it—through work, through achieving by Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb “but he also writes with passion and success, through children, through sex, understanding and daring. Before through service to others or through I cut a word, I wanted a complete possessing someone.” understanding about why it was there.” Eugene O’Neill, by the winter of 1951, The result is a play he hopes is more When asked if anyone in the play had long suffered from a degenerative accessible to modern audiences. actually finds that happiness, Kahn neurological disorder that finally shut pauses to consider. “I think we need to off his ability to write. Aggravating his While working on Strange Interlude, Kahn discover the answer to that question,” he depression was the fact that The Iceman returned to another literary masterpiece says. “At the end of the play, there is a of epic proportions. “I had read Proust’s cleansing of a sort. The frantic pursuit Cometh, his last play on Broadway in In Search of Lost Time twice before,” he for happiness ceases. They have this his lifetime, was not the success he’d says. “The first time I was very young and bittersweet ability to say yes, I’ve given hoped for in 1946. Now 60, but looking completely involved with how unhappy up the struggle.” some 20 years older, he was living a the characters were, and how unhappy bleak, isolated life in Marblehead Neck, Kahn is speaking of the older characters, my own love life was, and that’s what Massachusetts, with his wife, Carlotta. I saw in the book. Then I read it again whom we’ve watched struggle toward a hard-won contentment, but a more when I had more of a social life in New She was a former actress and York City, and I became fascinated by the vital happiness remains a possibility for internationally acclaimed beauty, the depiction of the rituals and masks of the drama’s younger players. “The play society. Reading it now, I’m keenly aware begins with news that the man Nina same age as O’Neill, worn out from years of how much I didn’t understand before. loves, a World War One pilot, has been of catering to her world-famous, Nobel It’s especially interesting to read it shot down,” Kahn points out. “It ends Prize-winning husband. She herself alongside O’Neill. Each of these authors with a young pilot, named for the one was afflicted with various ailments, who died at the beginning, flying up came to a point where they wanted to including severe nervous tension and examine what life is, to examine what into the sky with the woman he loves. consciousness is.” Happiness—whatever you think that depression. Both were taking strong is—remains the engine of the play.” He medications containing bromide that In Strange Interlude, O’Neill gives voice to shrugs. “Ultimately, it’s about us.” had hallucinatory side effects of which Eugene O’Neill his characters’ stream of consciousness.
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