Falls, Dennehy and Eugene O'Neill add up to a towering 'Desire Under the Elms'

Top: Brian Denney and Carla Gugino. Bottom: Pablo Schreiber, Brian Dennehy and Carla Gugino. Photos by Liz Lauren.

The first extraordinary and wordless moments of the Goodman Theatre’s “Desire Under the Elms” tell you all you need to know about Eugene O’Neill’s New England. To work the land here is to risk being crushed by it. There is God in the stones, as patriarch Ephraim Cabot says, but it is the God of Old, the God of the Lonesome. That hard-hearted deity has created a place of overwhelming, Sisyphean labor in Cabot’s farm. There’s no softness, no greenery in Walt Spangler’s bleak set. There are only backbreaking boulders, dangling overhead like massive swords of Damocles and covering the ground in merciless, desolate view. This is purgatory on earth, land fertilized by blood.

Director Bob Falls’ work has polarized people in the past, and this elm-free “Desire” will do so in the present. Like his “King Lear’ a few years back, “Desire’s” radically edited (three hours cut down to an intermission-less hour and 40) , boldly staged production will have some screaming theatrical sacrilege and others declaring sheer brilliance. We fall unequivocally into the latter camp. “Lear” distilled tragedy as huge as the heavens into lightning in a bottle. “Desire” does the same. The ghosts lurking in every corner of the Cabot farmhouse (which tellingly, hovers out of reach of its inhabitants for much of the production), are unseen. Falls makes you feel them, as surely as you’d feel the vibrations of an approaching freight train while standing at a bend in the tracks.

In “Lear,’ the Rolling Stones played a pivotal sonic role in a once-mighty king’s utter dissolution. In “Desire,” Falls turns to Bob Dylan to inform a long, dialogue-free segment that captures the beautiful fatalism of the piece. “Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear,” the modern-day troubadour laments, “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting’ there.” The moment is evocative perfection. This is pure Eugene O’Neill, gloriously realized by an uncompromising directorial vision and a cast that is up to that vision.

That cast is led and dominated by Brian Dennehy, a towering presence who at 70something, cuts no corners in a fearsome, exhausting role. As Ephraim, he’s the overbearing head of the farm, a patriarch who takes cruel satisfaction in working his sons like slaves and taunting them that what is his will never be theirs.

Obsessively, angrily coveting the land is Ephraim’s young wife Abbie (Carla Gugino, tough as nails, lush as velvet) and his stepson Ebon (Pablo Schreiber, knotted with hostility and tortured by want). The three form an Oedipal trio, driven by desire. Falls (closely following O’Neill’s intricate stage directions) creates a sense of physical want so overpowering that sex alone won’t diffuse it: The only true release here can come in death. Watch as Dennehy gives a Biblically powerful monologue about his love of home, Abbie and Ebon - unseen to each and separated by walls - drive each other to lust-induced, hair-ripping, five-alarm madness, their minds seeming to connect where their hands cannot. This isn’t love or even sensuality, it’s the all-consuming carnality of annihilation.

That there are no elms on stage only enhances the tragedy’s power. O’Neill’s description of the title trees demands that they hover with “sinister maternity” – any designer trying to actually capture that in a literal version of a tree will only fail, robbing the text’s most potent symbol of its power.

Falls and Dennehy go back decades – this is their fifth production on a Eugene O’Neill work. There’s artistry bordering on magic in the collaboration.