THE PERSONAL EQUATION
Provincetown Playhouse, 133 MacDougal St., through Aug. 19. Monday through Saturday, 8 p.m. Free, unreserved seats. For more information, call (212) 998-5801.
EUGENE O’Neill, the greatest of American playwrights is receiving a complete production of his works by the Playwrights Theater.
This is the third summer of the projected staging of his plays. The first summers are covering the debut and self-finding years of the playwright and this year they’re doing “The Personal Equation.”
It’s a play O’Neill wrote in the spring of 1915, while he was a student at Harvard.
This is its premiere. Stephen Kennedy Murphy, the director of the project, brings an idealistic spirit and a cunning theatricality – he has a belief in the passions of O’Neill that make the writer’s early works throb with life.
“The Personal Equation” is a play that at first seems about a workers’ movement, the International Workers Union, in the first days of World War 1.
Their ideological dynamo is Olga, who preaches the solidarity of workers and opposes wartime patriotism. Her lover is a young American, Tom Perkins, who at first urges her to marry him, but is convinced by her refusal to conform to a bourgeois norm.
Tom’s radical agitating has cost him a job on a ship and he’s going to tell his father, old Thomas, a timid and loyal engineer.
The pair face off – Tom tells his father of his politics and of his love for Olga.
Later scenes take place aboard the ship, where Thomas defends his beloved engine against the socialist seamen, led by his son, and in a hospital, where old Thomas and a pregnant Olga reconcile at the bedside of young Tom, who is now a vegetable.
This is a play that seems about a revolutionary movement but really is about family: the ties and the violence and the love that lie at that institution’s heart. It’s a crazy, conflicted work by a young writer attempting to wed the maritime politics he knew firsthand to the dreadful dynamics of family he felt without understanding.
There are two superb actors in the roles of the son and the father. Daniel McDonald brings to young Tom an arrogance complicated by love for his father, and Ralph Waite gets the affection and the weakness of the father exactly.
The two halves of the play – the nautical and the Freudian – do not really live very well together, but “The Personal Equation” is a fascinating work, full of hints of the future.
What a wonderful thing to be able to chart the always eloquent early striving of our noblest master.
