Baby 'Hughie' conjures up old-time theatrics

COURTESY J.GRIGOLIA-ROSENBAUM AND J.STRONG In a high-rise town, Erie Smith sinks even lower

Within the vast imagination of theater studies students, there's probably a terra incognita where the dustbowl of stock American "character" types live, breathe, and spew forth colloquial phrases from the Jazz Age like Prohibition-era hooch from the mouth of a soused hobo. In Hughie, a one-act "work in progress" by Eugene O'Neill up now at Nick Chapel, this dubious wonderland is invoked with such romance, passion, and commitment that you almost believe it exists. Almost.

You get the feeling watching Hughie that it's meant to be one of those arch-realist "slice of life" dramas from the '20s and '30s that films like Barton Fink and Bullets Over Broadway have such fun deconstructing. "Erie" Smith (Jeremy Strong, TC '01), a professional gambler, misogynist, and all-purpose loser, engages a night clerk in the hotel where he boards in a series of reminiscences. Most of them have to do with the former clerk, now deceased, named Hughie, "a dumb, simple guy," and evidently Erie's best friend. The play proceeds as an amusing, if disjointed, monologue by Smith, with occasional interjections from Jacob Grigolia-Rosenbaum's, JE '00, sleepy night clerk.

Hughie is not a great play in the way that, say, The Iceman Cometh is. It wanders all over the place, obsessively recapitulating the same themes in the way that real people, especially when they're tired and drunk (and possibly doped), probably would. O'Neill has great fun with Smith, a character study that rings distressingly true and is captured with such dead-on accuracy by Strong that one worries he might be like that in real life. Smith coasts along on a wave of cheap optimism: he calls himself "lucky" repeatedly; he brags about how many "Ziegfield girls" he can bag in a night, exaggerating his heroic sexploits and his gambling derring-do. He talks and talks and talks—indeed, talking about life is far more important than living it for Smith—and is all but oblivious to how his audience receives him.

This flood of words, though, is continually halted by heart-rending epiphanies, which are then swallowed up in more words. Like many O'Neill plays, Hughie is more concerned with the tragic condition of man than any particular theme. Smith's narcissism has a kind of cyclical doom to it; he is continually disenchanted and then re-inspired, always "on the lam" from the real horror of life, which he only captures intermittently in darkly foreboding lines like "Hughie's lucky...being dead." In O'Neill's world, the problem is twofold: not only are we destined to talk ourselves to death, we're also fated to be unheard, or worse, to be misheard.

As the play develops, in fits and starts, Strong creates a sad and believable figure, locked in the ironic disability to see what reality is, and the inability to fathom it when he does. Grigolia-Rosenbaum, simply billed as the "Night Clerk," doesn't have much to do in the play except for acting bored. At this, he is a little too convincing; despite the abundant humor in Smith's speeches, they are repetitive, and any yawning onstage spreads to the audience like herpes in a harem.

In short, it's a fine play well acted, and if there are any real problems, they are in the conception of the work as a whole. Strong and Grigolia-Rosenbaum have trouble overcoming the heavy-handedness of O'Neill's script. The world-weary revelations that come to Smith seem like shots out of nowhere, distracting in their sudden melancholy. O'Neill also invests Hughie early on with potent symbolic value, a creaky theatrical device that demands explication. It's tough, at times, not to hear the groaning gears of the "well-made play" as it winds to its appointed conclusion.

The other real problem is in the execution. Hughie engages the issue of romantic nostalgia while also succumbing to it. The title on the poster is written in enormous stage lights, like opening night on Broadway, and the program has a copy of the famous "Playbill" logo at the top. While there are several attempts at the "gritty" realism that the play may have suggested long ago (sounds of characters on the stairwell and the El in the background), they are overcome by an overwhelming sense of the theatricality of it all.

As the lights dim at the conclusion, the production wants you to brood over the tragedy of self-delusion. I doubt if anyone will do so. Hughie succeeds in an unintentional, possibly problematic way: the true joy in the production is the amazing way that Strong, Grigolia-Rosenbaum, and perhaps O'Neill himself create a dream past that never could have existed, with period accents and morals and all the exuberant, "gee whiz" slang of the era. The fun surpasses the gloom—you can almost hear the Fugue for Tinhorns playing in the background. Hughie delights in the world of dramatic gamesmanship, the endless generative power of human language, the simple joy of hearing someone talk about his life. Its message may be confused, but its achievement is the very soul of theater.

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