Eugene O'Neill is considered by many scholars to be the quintessential American playwright: from 1916 to his death in 1953, his prolific and astonishingly eclectic canon encompassed realistic drama in The Iceman Cometh and Anna Christie, expressionistic experiments like The Hairy Ape and The Emperor Jones, reworkings of classical themes in Mourning Becomes Electra and Desire Under The Elms, and autobiographical insights in A Moon For The Misbegotten and Long Day's Journey Into Night. What is it, then, that so appealed to Andre Garolli, a Brazilian mechanical engineer, that he started his own theater company, whose repertoire, over the eighteen years of its existence, includes no less than 25 plays by the New York City-born playwright -- among them, the three one-act "sea plays" currently playing at Chicago's Goodman Theater under the collective title Homens Ao Mar ("Men to the Sea") as part of that company's "global exploration" of O'Neill plays.
Garolli was employed in the sales department of the Voith paper-manufacturers when he was first introduced to the theatre. Seeking to combat his shyness, the young tradesman enrolled in a class utilizing theatrical exercises to improve its students social skills. He began to devote increasing amounts of time to the techniques he learned there, finally quitting his job to become a professional actor with the Grupo TAPA in São Paulo. Then, in 1990, he founded the Companhia Triptal, for which he now serves as artistic director.
"I think that my knowledge of engineering helped me to understand better the geometry of the stage, and to deal with the concept of time and space in a very concrete sense," says Garolli in an interview, "The actor is one of the gears that make the machine that is the scene work. The story begins to be told when the friction between each of these gears sets the machine in motion. In this interaction of the parts, the actor begins to exist as a character -- never isolated, but always acting in relation to someone or something. Thus, any change or misalignment can alter the course of the production."
In choosing these plays -- In The Zone, The Long Voyage Home and Bound East For Cardiff -- for their project, the Companhia Triptal explores not only the sailors' masculine universe but the elements of modern tragedy. Each of the play's individual themes were discussed by Garolli and his ensemble "through a contemporary lens ... to investigate how human issues can penetrate the centuries."
Garolli calls the scripted plays "pre-texts ... dramatic structures that do not necessarily define the way they will be staged. The purpose of our project is to open cracks that reveal the worlds only suggested by the [written] texts. Symbolic fields emerge and the strictly human matter is manifested, distilled in realistic language."
Because of their widely varying presentation styles, the plays are scheduled to run serially, each for one week, rather than in repertory. But audiences fearing that spreading the dramatic experience over so lengthy a time may diminish its excitement may rest easy. The juxtaposition of these century-old stories with our modern sensibilities, says Garolli, "will create the sparks [to] keep the furnace burning, and the boat on its
Course."
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