Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 227
Hairy Ape: Eugene O’Neill, who won the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature, continues to have an international reputation. Bon
Manush, a translation of his Hairy Ape, is here presented in 2013 by the Prachyanat theatre company at the National Theatre Hall
in Shilpakala Academy in Bangladesh. It was directed by Baqar Bokul, who writes in the program that the play “is a symbol of the
world where capitalism has engulfed everything and the oppression of the poor is becoming bigger day by day.” © Sadia Marium
visual arts. Expressionism, as an artistic style, externalizes
and exaggerates ideas and internal states: emotions
become luridly on display, ideas take grotesque physical
form, and interior struggles turn into exterior conflict.
The theatrical form of expressionism that was much in
vogue in Germany during the first decades of the twentieth
century (particularly in the 1920s) featured shocking
and gutsy dialogue, boldly exaggerated scenery, piercing
sounds, bright lights, an abundance of primary colors, a
not very subtle use of symbols, and a structure of short
scenes that built to a powerful climax.
In America, expressionist writers addressed the
growing concern that the country’s rapid industrial and
financial successes were crushing human freedom—and
human nature itself. During the 1920s, in the boldly
expressionist dramas Subway, The Adding Machine, and
Street Scene, Elmer Rice (1892–1967) angrily attacked
what he considered the dehumanization of modern
American life. And Eugene O’Neill, who had begun as a
realistic playwright in the previous decades, wrote a play
that became a landmark of expressionist theatre in 1921.
O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape is a one-act play featuring eight
scenes. Its workingman-hero Yank meets and is rebuffed
by the genteel daughter of a captain of industry. Enraged,
Yank becomes violent and eventually crazed; he dies at
play’s end in the monkey cage of a zoo. Scene 3 illustrates
the tenor of the writing:
The stokehold. In the rear, the dimly outlined bulks of the
furnaces and boilers. High overhead one hanging electric
bulb sheds just enough light through the murky air laden
with coal dust to pile up masses of shadows everywhere.
A line of men, stripped to the waist, is before the furnace
doors. They bend over, looking neither to right nor left,
handling their shovels as if they were part of their bodies,
with a strange, awkward, swinging rhythm. They use the
shovels to throw open the furnace doors. Then from these
fiery round holes in the back a flood of terrific light and
heat pours full upon the men who are outlined in silhouette
in the crouching, inhuman attitudes of chained gorillas. The
men shovel with a rhythmic motion, swinging as on a pivot
from the coal which lies in heaps on the floor behind to hurl