This hyper-Freudian, post-Strindbergian descent into the familial maelstrom is not one of O'Neill's most frequently produced plays, and it's easy to see why. The archaic New England language makes Hawthorne's prose seem conversational and the Oedipal goop can be like quicksand if the actors and director lose their way.
Janos Szasz's intense, relentless production is forever dancing around that quicksand without falling in. The front yard of the slanted house in Riccardo Hernandez's eye-popping set is all gravel and rocks. As Eben (Mickey Solis) and his two half-brothers start moving the rocks from one end of the stage, yelling and moaning as they go, there's a fear that the play isn't going to get under way until every last one of them is moved. And some of the actors are so wound up that their performances occasionally border on the laughable.
Take Raymond J. Barry as the patriarch Ephraim. The overpronounced ''h" in ''hain't" and his flexing and posing suggest an avant-garde actor overdoing a country bumpkin. (Barry has worked with the Wooster Group and Living Theatre.) By the same token, the strong, hard figure he cuts comes closest to bringing out the mythology and poetry that Szasz underlines in the script.
If your one memory of ''Desire Under the Elms" is the movie starring Sophia Loren, you're in for a shock. Amelia Campbell as Abbie comes out more like Tonya Harding, wearing roller-derby knee pads under her minidress and crouching like a boxer, ready to kiss whomever she desires or to hurt anyone who gets in her way. Her shrieks are enough to break the rocks.
But the actress and director make it work, partly through the sexiness of her performance and partly through the expressionism of the production, wherein everything -- the rocks, the clothes, the sex, the sound, the changes in the script (most of that archaic language is gone and the ending is more ambiguous) -- contributes to a sense of hardness, desolation, and desire.
