There’s nothing remotely like Eugene O’Neill’s drama “Strange Interlude,” an intimate chamber work, in some ways, and an unmanageable epic in others.
This Pulitzer Prize-winning 1928 experiment is both grand soap opera and Freudian field day. In telling his tale of promiscuity, abortion, latent homosexuality and madness — hot stuff back then that got the play banned in Boston — O’Neill came up with a Faulknerian twist. The characters speak their thoughts as well as their spoken dialogue, a drama that sometimes resembles a great novel and at others a comic book complete with thought balloons.
He also delivered one of the longest theatrical endeavors of the 20th Century. Its nine acts take about 5 1/2 hours to perform. A production of any sort is rare, to say the least.
Give, then, an “A” for effort to those involved in the current Actors’ Equity Showcase Production playing Saturdays and Sundays through March. For sets, they use various rooms of the old mansion that’s now the North Lakeside Cultural Center, performing from 3 to 8:30 p.m., including an hourlong dinner break at a nearby Thai restaurant.
Though it may well be the only live production of “Strange Interlude” we’ll ever see, it is nevertheless a bumpy, battered journey. Director Linda LeVeque proves a competent traffic cop getting her cast through this marathon — no small feat in itself — but she doesn’t provide a strong, overall, consistent playing style. Often, the actors seem to be directing themselves, a danger with this script, where everyone’s internal moralizing can take on any number of psychic modes.
Too often, the production plays as an amateurish effort to survive rather than interpret or illuminate. That said, the density, drive and endurance of the storytelling eventually take on a life of their own. By Act 5, when the actors really start kicking, players and audience are inextricably bound on an indeed strange, dreamy voyage. Even an uneven “Strange Interlude” compels in a way impossible for most entertainment.
Frank Farrell is probably the best as repressed Charles Marsden, described as one of those creatures who can’t figure out what sex he is. Karyn Lynn Dale’s Nina is too intense, at first, though she ages with a subtle grace (the story goes through some 25 years) and helps bring the production to its tragic, gloomy conclusion.
Eli Goodman, despite an annoying choice to shout a few key lines, is suave and reptilian as her lover, just as Douglas Rainey almost uncannily grows as Sam, her husband, from a bumptious idiot to a formidable force.
———-
“Strange Interlude”
When: Through March 30
Where: North Lakeside Cultural Center, 6219 N. Sheridan Rd.
Phone: 773-293-1358
