Eugene O'Neill's fascination with Asia was not unlike Walt Whitman's, Coleridge's or even Puccini's: a place where limitless time and vast wisdom combined to produce an exotic world; cruel, colorful, extravagant and mysterious--but above all human, delicate and harmonious. O'Neill's twist, whereby the Polos become the symbols of Western materialism, was a stroke of genius. It has always intrigued me that, as inaccurate and often fantastic as his vision of Asia was, there is no question that he sensed what materialism, Western-style, would do to age-old Asian traditions. As far as I know, he never traveled in Asia nor was he intimate with Asians; yet he saw Asians as individuals, not as the unfeeling masses, which seemed to mark much of the Western conception of the East in his day, and indeed still persists today.

The play, with its enormous cast and extravagant sets, would be impossible to do today. In reading both the play and the various biographical studies of O'Neill's writing of it, I suspected that he got caught up with the "Dramatic imagination" of Robert Edmond Jones and Max Reinhardt and the ideas of Gordon Craig. This plus the plush musicals of Ziegfeld and his contemporaries would certainly motivate a writer of O'Neill's imagination to attempt to overwhelm an audience with the teeming exotic Asia of his vision. In the sense that the Polos themselves described "Cathay" in wondrous terms to their contemporaries in medieval Italy, O'Neill has an authentic reason to create a spectacle. What a blow to an American audience, that ending of the play, when, after an evening in the exotic East--where at last Kukachin's fate would force Westerners to see her as a living, wonderful person--Marco Polo would drive off with the audience as if nothing had happened! I can almost hear O'Neill's exuberant comment as he seized on this motif! In such motivations lies the life of the play!

A MARCO FOR THE MILLIONS!
SHARON PLAYHOUSE, CONN.
AUGUST, 1978.

Production concept, adaptation and direction by Walter A. Fairservis
Set design by Jan Fairservis. Music and additional lyrics composed and directed by Eric E. Pourchot. Costume design by Elizabeth Landis.

Flowers in a porcelain vase, a calligraphic scroll, some colored ribbons, a few instruments and as many passions: no more was needed. The props may have been of plywood and cardboard; the actors may not all have been of professional caliber; but the production captured more of the Orient than O'Neill himself had in his overblown, blockbuster extravaganza.

Photographs by Martha B. Porter Sharon, Conn. 06069

It struck me that if one could eliminate the extravagance, pare down the overwrought and overlong speeches, sharpen the subplots by clarifying the dialogue, and make reasonably authentic the Asian background so that there was more of a documentary realism than a spectacle's "show" quality, the point of the play would emerge and O'Neill's real intention would come forth. An intention which is even more relevant today than in the 1920's.

The method I devised was based on the idea: supposing an Asian theatre troupe were to do the play. Such a troupe would minimize scenery and play instead on the imagination. The key figure here was the stage manager (a role that Dr. Fairservis devised and built into the production). He is an actor's actor who describes the scenes partially in terms of the motivations for them and partially because he insists that the audience use their imaginations in all circumstances. He helps them; he claps his hands and a cardboard tree appears, borne by a suitably costumed stage hand; he claps again and, at this signal, off-stage voices are heard--as wind, as rain, as lamentation. Kukachin is discerned, and with a few ribbons moved in large geometric figures, symbolizes the leitmotifs of her fate. She stops and all the stage manager has to say is "the great desert of Persia" and we are there.

The stage manager moves throughout the play; he prepares us for Venice with a short poem about a city of boats, and then he and Marco Polo pantomime sailing on a gondola while a little orchestra of four pieces, Chinese style, imitates the sound of gondolas and Venetian guitars. (In the second picture, Marco (Charles Dietz) stands shakily in a skittish gondola as he bids farewell to his beloved Donata (Adrienne Krug).) Thus the stage manager moves the Polos across Asia from Acre to Xanadu via Persia, India, and Mongolia, and return. Cardboard camel and elephant cutouts, carried variously on the shoulders of the Polos, carry one from place to place. (The third picture shows Nicolo (Chester Morss), Maffeo (Stuart Zagnit) and Marco; Maffeo is reading his notes on the quaint customs and unpleasant traditions of the East they are traversing.)

Meanwhile the stage manager plays a dozen roles accompanied by six assistants, all of whom carry out their tasks with military precision. They are Persian rug dealers, dancing prostitutes, moving Hindu idols, Mongolian shamans. The great wall of China is a cloth which is unraveled by two assistants while the Polos are intrigued by a Mongolian acrobatic dance centered on the stage manager, who is anything he wants to be, from boatman, to Kublai's executioner, to the boatswain on a seagoing junk, to the Cathayan Chronicler. (In the fourth picture, the protean stage manager (R. C. Lawson) offers to behead Marco for the Emperor to determine whether Marco has an immortal soul.)

Even the cannon scene is arranged by the stage manager, whose assistant brings out a large cannon cutout in the Chinese style. When the cannon is fired--a drum beat; powder flies into the air from a bellows placed in back of the cannon's mouth; the stage manager carries a ball on a stick from the cannon's mouth to a paper wall held up by two assistants who promptly fall into picturesque, exaggerated positions as the wall is pierced by the cannon ball.