Photo: Carol Rosegg
Review by Brad Balfour, Arts Editor
Play: “The Hairy Ape”
Director: Ciarán O’Reilly
Playwright: Eugene O’Neill
Cast: Jon Beaver, Jonathan Crimeni, Nayib Felix, Joanna Glushak Long, Ariyan Kassam, John Keating, Hassiem Muhammad, Adam Petherbridge, Elizabeth Teeter, Harrison Tipping
When: September 25, 2026, opening night — October 4, for a limited run to November 15th
Where: Irish Repertory Theatre
Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage
132 West 22nd Street
With the United States mid-term elections now a referendum on Donald Trump’s second term as President, the focus has lately been on his expressions of toxic masculinity. That makes the current Irish Repertory Theatre production of legendary playwright Eugene O’Neill’s darkly troubled play, “The Hairy Ape,” relevant in unexpected ways. With its focus on brutish laborer Yank (Jon Beaver), the play addresses his place in the world — as an accomplished coal stoker on an ocean liner or as a hulking male who is unacceptable in polite society.
Bob “Yank” Smith debates with aged ship worker Paddy (John Keating) about being a roughhewn worker and his place in society. As head stoker on the ship, Yank is in his element — he powers the ship, so he belongs. Secure as a leader of his fellow workers in the ship’s belly, he becomes undone when he encounters Mildred (Elizabeth Teeter) the rich and beautiful daughter of the ship’s owner. She thinks she wants to help the downtrodden which her equally rich aunt poo-poos. All prim in her white flimsy dress, Mildred wants to see what the workers are like. So as she visits the engine room for a thrill, she’s repelled and refers to Yank as a “filthy beast.”
Framing a series of eight set pieces, director O’Reilly uses various clever staging techniques to open up the space and create a more expansive environment. Given the specificity of its context — a steamship — and New York during the 1920s Jazz Age, audiences must understand the underlying turmoil of the worker’s revolt against a world dominated by mega capitalist tycoons who have little sympathy for the working class, mostly Irish immigrants who provided the backbone to their accumulated wealth.
Yank undergoes a crisis of identity, beginning mental and physical decay. He leaves the ship and wanders into Manhattan, only to find that he doesn’t belong there and ending up jailed after punching someone on the street.
A month later, after his release, Yank visits the local Industrial Workers of the World office and joins the group. Local members welcome him into their ranks because few ship’s firemen have joined. But when he expresses a desire to blow up the Steel Trust, they suspect him of being a government agent and throw him out to the streets, Yank comes in contact with a policeman, who shows no interest in arresting him and tells him to move along.
Yank feels he doesn’t belong anywhere — neither with the Fifth Avenue socialites nor with the labor organizers on the waterfront. In a fight for social belonging, his mental state disintegrates into something animalistic. The next evening, he visits the zoo, sympathizing with the gorilla and thinking they are one. He releases the animal and introduces himself as if they were friends. But the beast attacks, demonstrating who the real animal is. With his ribs fatally crushed, Yank is thrown into the cage where he dies. In the end, he is defeated by an ape in which Yank’s character has been connected to. But in the end he dies a man.
“The Hairy Ape” portrays the impact of technological advances on social classes as viewed through the dynamic character of Yank. The cast does its job of conveying the bombast and sweat expressed through their labor and how the world is seen through their eyes. It takes the audience from a gritty realism to a hallucinatory ending as Yank fights the ape to death. Even if he is destroyed, we see his humanity no matter how oppressed he feels.