Eugene O’Neill wrote The Hairy Ape in a blazing three weeks’ time in late 1921. The urgency of O’Neill’s inspiration still surges through the drama in its latest revival by and at the Irish Repertory Theatre. Unlike O’Neill’s later, lengthier plays, this relentless story of a primitive man lost in the modern world is brisk and assertive. Opening on Sunday in a smart, capable staging by Ciarán O’Reilly, the one-act play packs plenty of drama in 90 minutes.
Considered quite an avant-garde work when the Provincetown Players premiered it on MacDougal Street in 1922, The Hairy Ape registers a century later as agreeably stylized. It is the tragic saga of Yank, discovered in his confident prime shoveling coal into the furnaces of an ocean liner where he is the proud king of his sweaty gang in the lower depths. Mildred, a socialite passenger going slumming below, witnesses Yank in all of his raging glory, calls him a “filthy beast,” and swoons. Yank is strangely shaken by this encounter. The remainder of the episodic play traces Yank’s vain attempts to belong somewhere in a New York City that coldly rejects his clumsy advances. The conclusion sees Yank one midnight at the zoo, trying to bond with a gorilla: “Ain’t we both members of de same club – de hairy apes?”
When so many new American plays today seem to be only about gender and race, The Hairy Ape is a rare drama about class. It’s also about social alienation. O’Reilly, Irish Rep’s producing artistic director, notes the word “belong” appears nearly 50 times in the text. He wonders what happens to people today whose occupations are lost to rapid technological change and find themselves, like Yank, adrift in a world offering no place for them.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Having directed the play previously, O’Reilly and his scenic designer Charlie Corcoran confidently present its vintage expressionist looks. A stage that moves vertically for scenes depicting above and below a ship’s decks, a jail, and Fifth Avenue, among others, somehow also suggests a series of cages. The mostly brooding lighting by Michael Gottlieb and the atmospheric sound design and music by Ryan Rumery heighten the drama’s unsettling nature. Designer Orla Long contributes 1920s clothes, filthy dungarees for the stokers, silver masks for the elite along Fifth Avenue, and a plausible gorilla costume.
For all this expertise and some solid acting, a preview performance the other evening was not as striking as might be expected. The crucial episode in the hellish stokehold when Mildred recoils from the primitive spectacle of Yank did not resonate sufficiently to kick the drama into a higher gear. The complicated staging of the tricky sequence appeared hastily executed and perhaps the actors were not in sync for that moment.
More crucial was an adequate but not especially compelling performance by Jon Beavers as Yank. Admittedly, Yank is a technically challenging character to portray between his many extended speeches, its awkward dis-and-dat waterfront lingo, and the need to project a soulfulness beneath a brutish exterior, so an actor has much to accomplish. It is possible in future performances, of course, Beavers will develop into a more vocally and emotionally varied Yank. Still, much as the make-up designer may try to dirty up his good looks, Beavers, although a strapping fellow, does not physically suggest any kind of an ape.
The nine-member supporting ensemble does better by O’Neill’s bold drama. In his 29th show with the company, John Keating sails sweetly, brogue and all, through an ancient Irish mariner’s lyrical reveries of bygone times aboard clipper ships. A mischievous Ariyan Kassam gives Cockney accents to the shipmate who blows a lot of radical hot air. Wearing vaporous white and heavy mascara, Elizabeth Teeter’s scowling Mildred suggests a restless vampire. Her grumpy dowager of an aunt is invested with a rich Dickensian quality by Joanna Glushak. Stripped to the waist for the stokehold or sporting stripes for the prison scene, an evidently well-rehearsed ensemble vigorously meshes their bodies and voices for the polyphonic dialogue that distinguishes the play’s expressionist passages.
The Hairy Ape opened October 4, 2026, at the Irish Repertory Theatre and runs through November 15. Tickets and information: irishrep.org
