A Quick Note on Homecoming

Homecoming, by Mr. Eugene O'Neill, was finished last night out on the porch.


Previously, this would be cause for excitement, if not a drunken bitch session with other theatre students/normal people who felt like I did after I read The Hairy Ape: glassy-eyed, lethargic, filled with post-modern John Osbourne-levels of rage, and thoroughly bored out of my goddamn skull.



But confession time, folks: that was my one and only experiment with O'Neill, and it happened NINE YEARS AGO.  Crazy!  Since then I've matured as a reader and a thinker.  I mean, come on - that was freakin' freshman year of college.  Of course I hated it!  I wanted everything to be written in the schizophrenic, 15-second attention-span style of Christopher Durang and David Ives.  I wanted theatre to be thought-provoking (or I said I did, but did I really understand what I was talking about?  Maybe nominally, or as an abstraction) but never boring, nice, or decent.  My perception of what constituted a Deadly theatergoing experience was unavoidably filtered through my youth and inexperience, just like every young (and sometimes older) theatre professional.  And O'Neill seemed to me to be the dullest of the dull, bar none (statement may be retracted later.  I'm sure I despised other pieces we read equally).


Aside: We staged Ah, Wilderness! that year at Bradley.  I hated that too.


So here I am, 9 years later, finally picking up the anthology for my second dreaded O'Neill.  Why God, WHY did I decide this was a great opening series?  I discovered I didn't want to read it, still remembering that damn Ape.  But conversely, how can I (we) call ourselves theatre professionals if we don't know our roots?  That's the subject of a later post.  And O'Neill, considered a giant of our young country's playwriting tradition, no less!  For shame, Ben!


ANYWAY.


I finished Homecoming as I sat on our porch, listening to the Chicago rain and surrounded by my herb/flower garden, and as I put my pencil down and sat back, I realized my brain had been going, fully engaged, for the entire thing.  No check out.  Why was that?  This play would have sent me into a persistent vegetative state only years ago.  What was the difference?


I suspect they were three-fold:

1. It was a choice.  Cleaning your room isn't fun when you're forced to do it, either.  Now, it is (sort of)!  Magic!
2. Agamemnon had my back.  Constant reviewing/comparing/contrasting was happening as I glanced back and forth at my notes from the Oresteia's first play and Homecoming, and as a consequence I was able to sink deeper into both plays.
3. I'm riding a bicycle.  And you never forget how to ride a bike - it just takes some warming up.  My play reading/writing/thinking skills are rusty from years of neglect, but I think I can feel them starting to grind again, iron oxide scraping against neurons and woodland creatures moving their nests to a safer place (possibly the part of my brain devoted to picking up guys in bars).

End result?  A solid read!  Movement flows, it's effectively told, and it left me excited to read the next two in the series.  I also have another round of insight to carry into The Libation Bearers.  There were parts I had problems with, but I'll detail those in my followup.


WANTING to read another piece by Eugene?  Almost worth the price of admission.


Hasta luego,

Ben