The Hairy Ape (Park Avenue Armory) by Eugene O’Neill

There is something about watching a work from 1922 that is as relevant today as it was then that is somewhat disconcerting.  Have we really made so little progress?  Could this be happening today, this disillusion, this disenchantment, this divide?  Oh, wait……...

Bobby Cannavale is a feral and fabulous ‘Yank’ Smith.  A stoker shoveling coal in the bowels of a giant ship he, unlike his down-trodden co-workers who look at the work as little better than slavery, feels powerful, strong, on top of the world.  This hell is the kingdom over which he has dominion.  He is the king of the belly of the beast, moving her through the waves like a working-class Triton.

All of this changes in a split second.  The daughter of the shipping line’s board of directors, a steel millionaire, forces the ship’s captain to allow her down into the ‘stoke hole’.  All of her faux socialist leanings go out the window as soon as she witnesses the reality of men caged in and stoking the giant engines and Yank, thinking he’s seeing a ghost lashes out.  She refers to him as a Hairy Ape before fainting in the arms of the poor officer assigned to take her there.

This incident becomes the burr under Yank’s saddle of which he cannot rid himself.  When the ship docks in New York he hunts for this girl.  He needs to inflict some damage to alleviate his own newly discovered sense of being less than.  She has taken from him his kingdom and made him the court jester and she must pay.

His journey proves fruitless and sidelined by what he thinks is an organization looking for payback against the capitalist pigs that have ruined things, he finds they are simply a bunch of left leaning ideologues who want him to hand out pamphlets.

Yank, not surprisingly, ends up in a jail cell.  Upon his release he searches out the gorilla in the zoo and in trying to establish a connection to this other ‘hairy ape’ he proves the architect of his own destruction.

This entire ensemble cast is wonderful with David Costabile’s Paddy a standout. The set for this riveting play is stark and in eyeball searing shades. 

The cage theme is repeated over and over and reminds us that though there are social constructs and circumstances in everyone’s life, most of our cages are of our own making and/or imaginations.