The Hairy Ape:
Photo: Glen McIntosh. Louis Lemire and Donnie Laflamme.
Eugene O’Neil’s The Hairy Ape, written in 1921, appears extremely modern with its discussion, in Act II, about labour unions, the exploitation of the working class and the suppression of left wing discourses foretelling the Joseph McCarthy era even though the play appeared long before that communist scare decimated the artistic community in the USA. It even foretells the highly stylized visual techniques Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, created later in 1927, where the exhausted workers are transformed into automats as they stoke the engines of the Commercial liner in the first scenes of the play. Constructivist stage structures meet an expressionist atmosphere as the setting reflects the frustration, the anger and even the rage of the men toiling in the bowels of that huge commercial liner.
Director Lisa Zanyk has choreographed moments of the play that take us back to those episodes of silent film the dirty working body is fore grounded against the gentile dainty creatures of the upper classes who mimes as much as she talks, when she comes to see those men as “filthy beasts”. Thus Yank, the principal protagonist in this dramatic comedy, sinks deeper and deeper into his raging depths, coming close to his primitive origins as he feels more and more alienated from New York Society and those whom he assumes are making fun of him.
