Here are some of the other major notices:
Newsday is
Mixed for the play,
Positive for the production, but I find it a really poorly written review by Linda Winer. It's like she's writing with no one else in mind but herself.
http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/ny-etdesire2812700382apr25,0,3479220.story Eugene O'Neill's "Desire Under the Elms" is a strange, ungainly fist of a drama. It was a hit and a scandal on Broadway in 1924. But until Chicago's Goodman Theatre revived it in Robert Falls' radical version, the big-footed erotic monster of a family tragedy has been considered virtually unstageable.
It still is - though you wouldn't know it from the almost-poignant intensity of that production, which opened last night with Brian Dennehy as the meanie old New England farmer with the hotblooded third wife (Carla Gugino) and the furious hunk of a son (Pablo Schreiber).
It is possible that "Desire" cannot exist in a conventional setting. I don't believe it works now. But Dennehy and Falls have given us monumental evenings of "Death of a Salesman" and "Long Day's Journey into Night." Grappling here with far less confident material, they have turned a strange imperfect play into strange but confident theater. There is courage and foolish grandeur here. That counts, too.
Daily News is
Negative Two out of five stars
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/arts/2009/04/28/2009-04-28_desire_under_the_elms_leaves_much_to_be_desired.html No trees. No subtlety. Lots of concepts. And rocks. In a nutshell, that's Broadway's new "Desire Under the Elms," Robert Falls' second baffling revival of the season.
First came "American Buffalo," David Mamet's tale of petty thievery, which was underdone. Now it's an audacious interpretation of Eugene O'Neill's Oedipal 19th-century farm melodrama, which is overcooked.
The production at the St. James can't decide between opera-scale symbolism (a house actually hovers above the stage) or folksy music video (Bob Dylan's moody "Not Dark Yet" underscores a long silent scene).
Either way, most performances are from the if-it's-loud-it's-important school and distance us instead of drawing the audience in.
Bloomberg News is
Negative 1 1/2 out of four stars
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aixZo01a5xUU Falls has cut a good bit of the play, but has also added much of his own, like this farm that seems to grow nothing but boulders.
The one thing the play egregiously lacks is the eponymous elms -- not a one in sight. But what?s missing in elms is made up for in oodles of desire, unrequited and requited. Who then will miss what O?Neill provided -- a dance attended by the gossiping townfolk, for example, or the closing scene with the sheriff and his men, reduced here to one silent, shotgun-toting figure atop the boulders?
Dennehy, a fine actor, cuts an imposing figure as the looming Ephraim, but one misses some of the drivenness that a George C. Scott, for example, could have conveyed.
As Eben, gangly Schreiber, who must be both a mama?s boy constantly bemoaning his dead mother, and a demon lover and hater for Abbie, is not up to the complex, contradictory emotions. Gugino is more delicate than the Abbie whom O?Neill envisioned, but she does not stint on the requisite steaminess.
Daniel Stewart Sherman is a spectacularly gross Simeon and Boris McGiver, as Peter, hops about semidementedly.
The play runs to 100 tortured, and torturing, intermissionless minutes, perhaps to deny us a respite during which we might speculate about just how lucrative the trade in boulders could have been in 1850s New England.
Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.
Updated On: 4/28/09 at 10:58 AM
