Desire Under the Elms

Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun Times

"Eugene O'Neill's "Desire Under the Elms" is a tight, primal blood knot of a play -- a work that is full of biblical overtones while as rife with incestuous possibilities as any Greek drama.

With language at once lean and lush, O'Neill gets to the heart and soul of the matter on every count, wasting no time as his characters seal their fates with such seething resentments, lustful natures, intense greed, doubt and opportunism that they seem to ignite like so many uncontrollable brush fires.

"Desire" is definitely not an easy work to carry off, but with the Hypocrites' production at the Chopin Theatre studio space, director Geoff Button and his cast have created a lip-smackingly good production. And set designer Tracy Otwell deserves special applause for devising a fabulous environment -- with moist soil covering every inch of the performance space, and conjuring a sense of the hardscrabble existence and rock-strewn soil of a New England farm.

The farm has been worked for decades by the patriarch, Cabot (J. David Moeller, whose Old Testament looks and scratchy presence are a big plus here), and he has buried two wives in the process. His sons by his first wife -- the rather dim-witted Peter (Vince Teninty), and the not so much shrewder Simeon (Gregory Hardigan), whose interplay is expertly captured by the actors here -- are tired of the hard labor and their father's abuse.

And they agree to a deal with their angry young step-brother Eben (Ian Westerfer, a most sensitive, alert and intelligent actor) to sell their shares in the farm in exchange for enough money to get them to the gold mines out West.

Eben, meanwhile, is hellbent on inheriting the farm that belonged to HIS mother. But Cabot has different plans. In a surprise move, he marries a young and very attractive widow, Abbie (Audrey Francis, a fearless, attention-grabbing actress who seizes hold of her blazing motivation, runs with it and achieves sensational results).

Now SHE stands to inherit the farm, and will stop at nothing to do so. The bitter enmity -- as well as the intense lust -- that flares between new wife and innocent stepson is instantaneous.

And it leads to a series of monumental catastrophes that along the way pose many questions about love, betrayal, hunger and madness -- questions that hang in the air even at the play's end. With O'Neill it is clear from the start that a master is at work -- a writer who can set a story on fire.

The actors follow through, so that the scenes between Abbie, and the father and stepson whose lives she enters, are truly incendiary. Just another radically dysfunctional American family? Perhaps. But this one is the genesis of it all --the real thing"