Three, the hard way
A desolate love triangle drives ART's visceral 'Desire'
CAMBRIDGE -- The American Repertory Theatre's slogan for next season is ''7 Love Stories & 2 Trips to Hell." But why wait? The company's current production, ''Desire Under the Elms," feels like two love stories and seven trips to hell.
Which isn't a negative. In playwright Eugene O'Neill's vision of life, every spot of pleasure required at least two doses of pain. Here, the love that its main characters, Eben and Abbie, feel for each other, has some obstacles. One is rather a biggie. Abbie just married Eben's obstreperous father, Ephraim. Eben is also mourning his late mother, mooning over his new one, and resenting just about everything about dear old dad. And the farm Eben hoped to inherit is likely to pass to Abbie rather than to him.
This hyper-Freudian, post-Strindbergian descent into the familial maelstrom is not one of O'Neill's most frequently produced plays, and it's easy to see why. The archaic New England language makes Hawthorne's prose seem conversational and the Oedipal goop can be like quicksand if the actors and director lose their way.
Janos Szasz's intense, relentless production is forever dancing around that quicksand without falling in. The front yard of the slanted house in Riccardo Hernandez's eye-popping set is all gravel and rocks. As Eben (Mickey Solis) and his two half-brothers start moving the rocks from one end of the stage, yelling and moaning as they go, there's a fear that the play isn't going to get under way until every last one of them is moved. And some of the actors are so wound up that their performances occasionally border on the laughable.
Take Raymond J. Barry as the patriarch Ephraim. The overpronounced ''h" in ''hain't" and his flexing and posing suggest an avant-garde actor overdoing a country bumpkin. (Barry has worked with the Wooster Group and Living Theatre.) By the same token, the strong, hard figure he cuts comes closest to bringing out the mythology and poetry that Szasz underlines in the script.
If your one memory of ''Desire Under the Elms" is the movie starring Sophia Loren, you're in for a shock. Amelia Campbell as Abbie comes out more like Tonya Harding, wearing roller-derby knee pads under her minidress and crouching like a boxer, ready to kiss whomever she desires or to hurt anyone who gets in her way. Her shrieks are enough to break the rocks.
But the actress and director make it work, partly through the sexiness of her performance and partly through the expressionism of the production, wherein everything -- the rocks, the clothes, the sex, the sound, the changes in the script (most of that archaic language is gone and the ending is more ambiguous) -- contributes to a sense of hardness, desolation, and desire.
Szasz is no stranger to tweaking the classics and bleaking their landscapes. He had the marquis die instead of Marat in ''Marat/Sade" and ''Uncle Vanya" injected a large dose of Beckett into Chekhov. Beckett is in this production, too, particularly in its barren landscape. It could be subtitled, ''The Postman Always Rings Twice -- and Godot Still Doesn't Answer."
The only problem is that at the end of those plays, and ''Mother Courage," all of which he staged at ART, you left thinking that you had just seen a great play invigorated by a masterful director. This seems more like seeing a good play refreshed by an interesting director.
It is always, nevertheless, riveting to watch. There may not be any elms onstage, but there's plenty of desire from Solis, who looks, and even sounds a bit, like a young John Cassavetes, and Campbell. And that's only part of the physicality. The way the men throw each other around you hope they're wearing knee pads under their clothes, too. If not full body armor.
This ''Desire" makes you appreciate how much O'Neill there is in Sam Shepard, particularly ''Buried Child," while Szasz and the cast also make it apparent how much Abbie there is in Susan Smith, who drowned her children several years ago, or, put another way, how much real agony there is in the lives of the wretches offered up for media fodder.
All that doesn't make this great O'Neill, but it does make for a visceral night of theater.
Ed Siegel can be reached at siegel@globe.com. 