Irish Rep Co-founder Ciarán O’Reilly
Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape—subtitled “A Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life in Eight Scenes”—spins a tale that hardly seems comedic. It depicts the undoing of a burly fireman named “Yank,” who shovels coal in the stokehole of an ocean liner: work that’s unrelentingly exhausting, soul-sapping, and grimy.
The play debuted in 1922 at the Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal Street and eventually moved to Broadway. Revivals have appeared on many occasions over the decades, including multiple stagings in New York City. Willem Dafoe portrayed Yank in a Wooster Group version in 1996. An iteration starring Bobby Cannavale turned up at the Park Avenue Armory in 2017.
The Hairy Ape also played at the Irish Repertory Theatre in 2006, in a production that Neil Genzlinger of The New York Times called “gorgeously grim-looking….” Irish Rep Co-founder Ciarán O’Reilly directed that rendition.
Now, 20 years later, O’Reilly is preparing a new version for Irish Rep. This time, it will play to an audience of New Yorkers who have a Democratic Socialist as mayor and a felony-convicted multi-billionaire as president. They will certainly also have a much different perspective on the play’s deep-sea dive into the American class system than they would have had in 2006.
Researching for this article, I found a TheatreMania review of O’Reilly’s earlier version of Ape, which noted: “Watching O’Neill’s outcry on behalf of the common man in 2006 is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. The socialist undercurrents and the portrayal of the upper class are as far away as a headline on the front page of that long-defunct newspaper [The World].”
Yes, indeed. What a difference two decades can make….
The real-world Yank
O’Neill wrote The Hairy Ape to be presented largely (though not entirely) as “expressionistic” (i.e., stylized in an exaggerated, sometimes even surreal way). Non-realistic movement and the use of masks made the production experimental and somewhat unsettling.
The play traces the relatively quick destruction of Yank, who, when he’s first seen, is a proud and confident laborer who boasts of his prowess down in the stokehole. But when Mildred, a young woman from the upper rungs of society, ventures down into the sweltering pit to observe the men who work there, she is alarmed by Yank’s coal-soiled appearance and hyper-masculine behavior. She calls him a “filthy beast,” then—like Olive Oyl frightened by Bluto—promptly faints.
Immediately, the insulted, enraged Yank begins to deflate, unable to recognize where, if anywhere, he belongs in the world. The scenes that follow include stops at a fashionable Fifth Avenue neighborhood, a prison on what is now Roosevelt Island, a local office of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and, finally, a city zoo’s gorilla enclosure. (A smidgen of dramatic license was taken by O’Neill here: Neither the Bronx Zoo nor the Central Park Zoo exhibited gorillas in the 1920s.)
O’Neill, who spent part of his youth working aboard ocean vessels, based the character of Yank on a stoker named Driscoll, whom he had befriended at a Fulton Street dive bar and rooming house called “Jimmy the Priest’s.” (This establishment later served as the model for the low-rent barroom in O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh).
Quoted in Arthur and Barbara Gelb’s exhaustive biography, O’Neill (1973 edition), the playwright describes Driscoll’s outsized work ethic: “It seemed to give him mental poise to be able to dominate the stokehole, do more work than any of his mates.”
Driscoll, however, eventually committed suicide by throwing himself off a ship in mid-ocean. This greatly disturbed O’Neill, who, in 1912, would himself attempt suicide at Jimmy-the Priest’s.
If you have any doubts about the relevance of this play in 2026, think of Driscoll and then consider the 19-year-old American sailor who hurled himself off the beleaguered USS Abraham Lincoln last month and who, as of this writing, faces disciplinary charges for doing so.
Ape 2.0
The upcoming production at the Irish Rep was about one week into rehearsals when I spoke with Ciarán O’Reilly via a Zoom call.
He talked about his first exposure to The Hairy Ape, back in the 1980s when he watched a low-budget production of it in NYC:
“It was like a pure punch in the face,” he recalled. ‘It was so visceral and strong that it never left me.”
Later, in 2005, he acted on Broadway in a small role in Roundabout Theatre Company’s staging of O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet. He spent much of his considerable off-stage time reading works by the playwright, including Ape. Within a year, he found himself prepping to direct the piece for Irish Rep.
One element he explored then that he is revisiting now is “a sense of the play’s characters being compressed down….” The 2006 production employed a system that raised and lowered the scenic elements to depict various levels of the ship: the open-air upper deck where Mildred and her aunt take some sun and air, the cramped forecastle where the crew is housed, and the miserable pit where the stokers work. In some scenes, actors playing the stokers were stooped over because of low ceilings.
Between 2014 and 2016, the Rep’s facility on West 22nd Street underwent a major renovation (including the creation of balcony seating) that opened up new staging possibilities for the upcoming Ape. “This time, we have such luxury,” O’Reilly noted. “We can actually wheel things off stage right.”
Formerly the stage was flanked by audience on two sides. Now, O’Reilly explained, the configuration has changed: “The people who now live in the balcony used to live stage right.”
He stressed that this is not a re-creation of the 2006 show but, instead, a brand-new production.
The decision to mount the play a second time emerged in part from an article he’d read about steel-mill workers in the Midwest who felt themselves “left out and pushed aside.” Disenchanted by the Democratic Party, they had gravitated toward Donald Trump. Their plight reminded him of Hank’s situation.
He suggested that this play is a “classic” in part because it’s durable enough to apply to feelings of “not belonging” that arise in any era. When I asked him about that subtitle—“A Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life”—he quipped: “Sometimes you can be hard pressed to find the comedy part of it.”
But he then added: “It does feel like it [could be happening] at any time. It could have been [about] the Greeks setting sail. It really feels that it’s an old story.”
Ready to rumble
Although O’Reilly and his cast had been working on the play for only a few days when I spoke with him, he felt “utterly blessed” by their work on the project.\
In 2006, the role of Yank was played by Greg Derelian, whose performance O’Reilly greatly admired.
“I was really nervous about having somebody else come in,” he said. “But there’s a wonderful actor who’s doing it now—Jon Beavers. Talk about…a guy that’s come prepared! He’s been living with this [script] for the last many, many months. This guy came in…ready to rock.”
Other members of the cast have done their research as well. One actor, O’Reilly noted, made a museum visit to view sculptures. (O’Neill’s stage directions repeatedly have Yank posed like Rodin’s “The Thinker”). Actors appearing in the IWW workers sequence steeped themselves in info on the labor movement of the 1920s.
“I’m supposed to be the one who’s there telling them everything,” O’Reilly said. “But they knew it all!”
The Hairy Ape previews begin September 25. The official opening night is October 4, with performances extending to November 15.
