Review Roundup: Hair-Raising THE HAIRY APE Opens Off-Broadway - All the Reviews!

Park Avenue Armory presents a bold staging of Eugene O'Neill's iconic American drama The Hairy Ape, directed by Oliver Award-winner Richard Jones and starring Tony nominee Bobby Cannavale. The show opened last night, March 31st.

Written in 1922 by Nobel Prize-winner Eugene O'Neill, The Hairy Ape is a searing social commentary on the divide and friction between the rich and poor in the Gilded Age. The story follows the journey of Yank, played by Bobby Cannavale, a laborer who revels in his status as the strongest stoker on a transatlantic ocean liner. When Yank is deemed a "filthy beast" by the daughter of a rich steel merchant, he experiences an awakening of consciousness that leads him on a journey through the worlds of both the disenfranchised working class and wealthy society of New York.

Let's see what the critics had to say...

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Ben Brantley, The New York Times: Mr. Cannavale's emphatically flesh-and-blood presence makes him the perfect odd man out in a dehumanizing world of machines, literal and otherwise....While this production may work most effectively as a visual feast (just wait until you see how the closed set opens to embrace the Armory's walls), it also gives full due to the patterns of O'Neill's language and their resonant repeated words, including stinging variations on the notion of hell and the verb "to belong."

Peter Marks, The Washington Post: With an eye that reminds you more of a cinematographer than a theater director, Jones stages the eight scenes of O'Neill's 1922 play on a conveyor belt centered on a grand blank canvas: the cavernous confines of the Park Avenue Armory. It's such an epic vision of the piece, the role of the "ape" could have gone to King Kong. In this case, it actually went to someone who manages to seem almost as big: the ferocious Bobby Cannavale, who breathes fire into the drama's central heap-of-clay character

Jesse Green, Vulture: What I'm not sure it matches is O'Neill. You don't have the sense, reading the script, with its earnestly described effects and fulsome stage directions, that something this chic could ever have been what he sought. The production's international gloss - it is adapted from a 2015 production Jones directed for the Old Vic - identifies it more with the outlandish Fifth Avenue boutiques of the scenario than with the coal-dust miseries of the stokehole. That is part of its strength, considering the audience it is addressing, on Park Avenue if not Fifth. And strength, O'Neill shows us, is largely a matter of context, no matter how much muscle you have. It can be taken away in a minute.

Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter: Environmental theater doesn't come any more powerful than the staging of The Hairy Ape being performed at the Park Avenue Armory. Eugene O'Neill's 1922 expressionist drama is rarely seen these days, but director Richard Jones' production brings it to magnificent life with a visually stunning, stylized rendition that gains resonance from its overwhelming setting. You may have previously seen the play, but you've definitely never seen it like this.

David Freedlander, The Daily Beast: If it is possible for a play to succeed with the sound off, then surely The Hairy Ape counts.This remake of Eugene O'Neill's 1922 classic sprawls across the Park Avenue Armory, that 55,000 square foot 19th century drill hall, the action on the stage playing out as oversized shadows against a paint-crumbling back wall.This isn't a play; it's a piece of art, played out over a crisp ninety minutes. It's a painting, or a puppet show. You don't see it, so much as sink into it.

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