Dublin’s Pan Pan and Brooklyn’s Big Dance Theater combine creatives to produce an entirely fresh take on a classic.
Shoes off, pacing lightly, director Gavin Quinn watched rehearsal as the ensemble experimented with the physicality of act four in Pan Pan’s upcoming production, A Long Day’s Journey. And that’s exactly what Quinn called the production—an experimentation.
In partnership with Big Dance Theater, Pan Pan’s latest production is a magnified distillation of legendary American playwright Eugene O’Neill’s most-praised play, A Long Day’s Journey Into Night. However, Quinn and the ensemble are not letting the prestige of the source material hold them back from trying new things.
Pan Pan’s interpretation synthesizes the original work, a famous play focused on the dysfunction of the Tyrone family. Themes of addiction, family, and human truth are laid bare in a controlled day of the family’s lives.
Set 100,000 years ahead of the source material, Pan Pan’s production builds on the play’s original characters, who are modeled after O’Neill’s family. The fictional Tyrone family struggles through addiction, alcoholism, and illness, their dysfunction depicted in one long, summer day. The play runs from dusk to dawn, as the day wears on, the characters slip deeper and deeper into their cups and their despair. James Tyrone is a vain actor with intensely frugal tendencies, as was O’Neill’s father. Mary Tyrone has a morphine addiction, similar to O’Neill’s mother, and the son Jamie Tyrone is an alcoholic, as was O’Neill’s brother. O’Neill’s depiction of himself manifests in Edmund, the younger son who is deathly ill with tuberculosis.
The story pulls at the fragility of family bonds, exploring the relationships between fathers and sons. The work earned O’Neill a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Pan Pan and the Big Dance Theater are collaborating to reenergize the performance.
Director Gavin Quinn describes Pan Pan’s rendition on the play as a distillation cutting to the marrow of the play, taking on the challenge of telling a four-hour long play in seventy minutes. O’Neill, known for introducing American audiences to realism—the idea that theatre should look and sound as much as possible like real life—was tired of vaudevilles and melodramas, and worked to sharpen his characters rather than build on overacting and theatrics. Quinn said the work is to take away the story but keep the world.
The four ensemble artists performing in the show includes Obie Award-winning American actor and theatre director, Paul Lazar. Best known for appearing in The Silence of the Lambs, Lazar co-founded Brooklyn’s Big Dance Theater with his wife Annie-B Parson, who is also in this production. Parson is a world renowned choreographer, dancer, and director, making choreography for everything from rock shows to museums. Parsons has notably worked with musician and co-founder of the American rock band Talking Heads, David Byrne and choreographed David Bowie & Enda Walsh’s Lazarus. The ensemble also includes Pan Pan’s Faith Jones and Irish actor Andrew Bennett, whose career spans for three decades of appearances in critically acclaimed films, including Savage, The Cellar, and the Academy Award nominated film The Quiet Girl.
If rehearsals are an indicator of anything, this production will ooze authenticity and freshness. A humble rehearsal space – folding tables, wooden chairs, street noise floating up into what can only be described as a small dance studio – left goosebumps, a spine-tingling sensation, and an immediate need to keep watching. This was all, it should be noted, observed with minimal dialogue. In the second week of rehearsals, the actors were working on physical language, a main theme in the piece. Using movement and the body, Quinn is aiming to convey what words cannot, exploring how a character’s physicality can reveal internal truths.
“Movement is a language. Silence is a language. Colour is a language,” Quinn said. “But how would you get the audience to imagine more than you’re giving?”
This is part of the fun when making a show, Gavin says, and the tendency to over-explain must be resisted. Trusting the audience to fill in the shape of a performance is a risk, he admits, but the great part is letting the audience imagine as well as watch.
A look behind the curtain
As all good duos do, Pan Pan and Big Dance Theater have an origin story. Lazar and Parson went to see Pan Pan’s First Bad Men at Lincoln Center and loved the production. The piece, a performative book club based on a novel by Miranda July, was put on at the Under the Radar Festival. The couple hung around afterward to chat with the company, leading to a conversation, leading to a residency, leading to a creative partnership. The residency operated like a workshop, allowing the two companies to find a common aesthetic, develop the groundwork for a future of creating together.
A Long Day’s Journey will combine the experience of Pan Pan and the experience of Big Dance Theater, Quinn said, merging the two companies’ knowledge and tastes into one production. Founded in 1993, Pan Pan is known for thought-provoking performances that push artistic boundaries. Created just two years prior, Big Dance Theater has carved a name for itself in creating multidimensional performances, weaving in strands of dance, music, text, and visual design to tell stories.
“It’s always about pushing the art form forward,” Quinn says.
Pan Pan’s last production, Comedians in Search of a Comedy, was loosely based on the plays of Aristophanes, “The Father of Comedy.” Now, the company turns its head toward O’Neill, “The Father of American Theatre.”
The work began by passing scripts back and forth, running through different ideas, Lazar said. All companies have a list of works they dream to mess with, Lazar said, and he knew O’Neill was high up on the list for Pan Pan.
The group was intrigued with the challenge of compressing a play with a typically three to four hour run time into a precise, roughly hour long piece. Quinn said they were looking for a strong text that would survive this treatment, and A Long Night’s Journey Into Darkness endures because of its strong characters. Even if the piece is spliced and slashed, boiled down, it remains O’Neill’s play.
This, Lazar said, leaves the DNA of the piece.
“My understanding of DNA is all the molecular components of your entire system are in every molecule of DNA. I find that, like in Shakespeare plays, that you can take any line, and in a real way the whole play is contained in each line,” he said. “So we’re very involved in the DNA of this play.”
Work to distill the play from its original form, including almost eighty pages of stage directions, took Quinn and associate director and co-creator Emma Coen several revisions. Different drafts were strewn together with the goal of configuring the most dynamic version of the text. This was not a linear process, Quinn said, and required looking at the text of the play compositionally, as though it were music.
The three week residency the companies did together allowed them to get down to “real nuts and bolts” of performance, Quinn said, building research, acting, and forging an aesthetic. Lazar said to prepare he read the play and watched the films, and dug into an essay by critic Harold Bloom on the original play.
The challenge of the production lies in its experimentation, Lazar said. A Long Night’s Journey defies unspoken understandings of acting, he said, and requires the actors to learn in the moment of rehearsal rather than relying on these guidelines.
“There’s a lot of common understanding going into a traditional play, it’s why they can do big, ambitious plays in a short amount of time because we know what game we’re playing, but with this, we’re inventing the game as we play it,” he said.
The themes of family, love, hate, addiction, and O’Neill’s desire for theater to tell the truth were attractive to the companies. There is also a cross cultural aspect to the play that drew both parties in.
“It’s a quintessential American play, but it’s a very Irish play, too,” Lazar said.
The connections to Ireland are there, glinting just on the surface. The family’s last name, Tyrone, comes from a county in Northern Ireland. The piece is rooted in Irish American identity, the weight of the immigrant experience, and the generational trauma it often sows. Quinn said the Tyrone family is a second generation Irish American family, and this background impacts the family’s actions and dispositions.
What audiences can expect
Audiences should bring their imagination. The setting itself, the Tyrone family’s home 100,000 years in the future, is open for interpretation. The purpose was not to set the production in a futuristic landscape, but to provide the concept that this is not a set the audience will be familiar with. The space may be a hotel, a hospital, a community hall, a living room, the answer is up to the audience.
Setting the piece this far in the future will also allow the audience to forget about the material world, Quinn said, as all things the audience cares about will no longer exist. It strips the piece down to its bare bones, he said, allowing the company to show the essence of the piece.
Often, experimental work such as this arrives at an interesting place because the source material was a jumping off point, Lazar said, but that’s not how this production will run.
“What’s happening is we’re doing a very definite experimental approach, and yet we’re going into the material, we’re going into the guts of and the DNA and the marrow of O’Neill,” Lazar said.
The way the story is told in Pan Pan’s take is more direct than a traditional version of the play, Lazar said, cutting to the heart of the piece.
Words: Roxy Ekberg
The production runs at the Project Arts Centre from 13th to the 21st of November. Tickets from projectartscentre.ie
