Hughie

On a West Side street in midtown Manhattan in 1928, between 3 and 4 a.m., a man walks into a small, rundown hotel. Erie Smith, “a small fry gambler and horse player, living hand to mouth on the fringe of the rackets,” searches for meaning after the death of his friend, Hughie, the former Night Clerk. Written by Eugene O’Neill in 1941 and premiered posthumously in 1964, Hughie is a one-act play about Erie having reached a devastating moment in his life and become deeply entangled in his own illusions. In the context of O’Neill’s canon, the appeal of this play is the depiction of a man’s need for approval. Audiences witness Erie’s sentimental unraveling and the painful awareness that his luck has become worse since Hughie’s passing. The new Night Clerk, Charlie Hughes, is the only other person in the lobby. He halfheartedly listens to Erie’s stories while holding down the fort and clinging to his rituals, oblivious to the passage of time.Unique to Hughie are the dynamic and narrative stage directions, which have been described as a third voice. Laura Shea writes that O’Neill’s stage directions should ideally be followed, if not to the letter than to the spirit, as they are critical to the success in the production of his work. It is as if Hughie, Erie’s friend, is narrating through the stage directions. At City Garage this past November, director Frédérique Michel staged Hughie, using the stage directions as recorded narration performed by Nathan Dana Aldrich. This decision added depth to the experience, but the narration might have had a greater impact if it had been done with a more ethereal tone. The stark cueing and volume difference of the recording in contrast to the dialogue by onstage actors was sometimes jarring. However, the idea of having the narration be a part of the show was a strong choice. Eric Fraisher Hayes wrote in “An Argument for the Third Voice: Reimagining Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie” about the idea of the stage directions as another voice in his reimagining of the play, noting that these words are creatively exciting and mark a shift of the play’s style into something more akin to magical realism. If Michel had fully committed to this possibility, it might have elevated Hughie.The set, a dilapidated hotel with an empty, outdated lobby, reflects Erie’s inner deterioration. The small space of the City Garage Theatre has high, raked audience seating, so the set was effective and the lighting supportive of the mood. Designer and executive director of the company, Charles Duncombe has won several local awards in Los Angeles for set and lighting design, including two Drama-Logue Awards for production design. He began his partnership with Frédérique Michel in 1985, and he has designed all of her work since.Successfully portraying Erie was Troy Dunn, a veteran of City Garage and an LA Weekly Theater Award–winning actor. Dunn was lithe in his portrayal and seemingly chose an alcoholic posture while telling his raunchy and revealing stories of the good old days. He builds one of his monologues to a visceral bit about how acquaintances come, and but when he thinks of Hughie, his tone changes: “I miss Hughie, I guess. I guess I’d got to like him a lot.” Erie had probably been scamming Hughie with dice in the evening, using him as a pawn in his gambling. And now, his kind-of-a-friend, is dead. Dunn really nails that moment, and I longed for more of that narrative impact. David E. Frank and Gifford Irvine split the role of Hughes during the production. The night I was there, Irvine captured the role of the not-really-listening listener, whose imaginings are tied to the ritual sounds of late New York City, and their indications of the passage of time—a realistic portrayal of how any graveyard-shift employee might cope.O’Neill’s Hughie has tremendous potential in contemporary theater. I see it as a terrific scene study text for actors in training as well as a great exercise in listening and working with specific circumstances. One resonant theme in this classic that connects with our current culture is a false sentimentality, which in the present day is accelerated by the illusory veil of social media. Erie’s loneliness and his ultimate desire to find connection are palpable in Hughie. City Garage’s production lit a fire for us to explore this important work in the O’Neill canon.