She's not far off the mark, either. Your first gander at the grandeur of Walt Spangler's spectacular set bodes epic-size tragedy ahead: A two-story New England house sits nestled in a massive rock quarry where "tilling the soil," in the farmer sense, here is symbolically interpreted by hauling rocks and boulders from one side of the stage to the other.

The beauty of the house is it moves up and down, like Norma Desmond's manse, so as not to obscure views of young lovers at steamy play. At one point, they even rendezvous in the parlor inside the house, which is suspended in the air by huge ropes, swaying gently from their movements. Talk about tension-making! But, for the most part, there is a lot of lust under the house in this Desire Under the Elms. The director is Robert Falls.

This being O'Neill, where nothing is simple, the young lovers are in the same family, one degree of separation from Oedipus. Having driven two good wives to early graves, Ephraim Cabot (Brian Dennehy) returns after two months away from his farm with Wife No. 3, Abbie Putnam (Carla Gugino), a land-hungry hussy of thirtysomething anxious to inspect "my house." The two eldest of Cabot's wannabe heirs — Simeon (David Stewart Sherman) and Peter (Boris McGiver) — see the writing on the wall and opt to pan for gold in California rather than roll any more boulders.

Eben Cabot (Pablo Schreiber), their young stepbrother, stays on, hoping to get his rightful inheritance from the evil (or at least ambitious) stepmother. Their arm-wrestling over the property turns amorous, then adulterous, finally murderously dark while teetering tensely high over their heads is the farm they are fighting over.

Nor is he remotely phased by the scene inside the house floating in air — the erotic parlor scene. "Nervousness is good," he advanced. "I think putting the audience on edge would be good. The biggest thing we wanted to get, I think, in putting it 17 feet above the ground and putting it in the house up there is that that scene — of all the scenes in the play — needs to be heightened. There needs to be a spiritual aspect to that scene. You need to have a sense of the ghost of the mom, and I think by pulling it up into the air, having it suspended, having a little bit of a wave of the house — I think it throws it into an other-worldly, ethereal thing. That's what we're hoping."

Earlier on opening day, Schreiber got the news that he was up for Drama Desk honors for a performance he gave last year Off-Broadway in Neil LaBute's reasons to be pretty. (The part is currently being played two Broadway blocks away at the Lyceum by Stephen Pasquale.) "It's a little bizarre," Schreiber admitted. "That was about a year ago, and I'm doing this now, but it's always nice to be singled out."

Switching from LaBute to O'Neill, he said, "was a no-brainer for me. I really love this show. I really love the challenge of doing it, and I had already done that show Off-Broadway. For me, as an artist, I always want to try and experience as much as I can.

"I really like the challenge of playing Eben Cabot, which is to say that to play this character is to play a guy who goes from zero to one hundred in about half a second. He goes from hate to love, or from love to hate, in the time that you can snap your fingers, and to find access to those two competing desires is an epic challenge."

When his stepbrothers leave home, they leave for good, but the two actors playing those roles reappear in assorted disguises and wordless roles. McGiver was slated to return at the end [to play a lawman], "but there was too little time between the sheriff's scene and the curtain call for me to get back into the costume that people were supposed to recognize me by so they used one of the understudies [Michael Laurence]."

View the Entire Photo Gallery Brian Dennehy Photo by Aubrey Reuben

But McGiver and Sherman make their stage time count (and pay dividends) in the play's prologue, which, invented wholly for this production, was plainly inspired by the spartan set and hammered home by Richard Woodbury's hard-driving original music and sound design. You see these two bruisers using every ounce of their energy lugging gigantic stones across the stage. Then they string up a slaughtered hog and disembowel him. Farm life, you quickly gather, is a primitive, mean existence.

"Walt Spangler, the set designer, had this epiphany and just thought, 'Why not?'" said McGiver. "It works, and I cannot tell you why or how other than, as an actor, being on stage on this set really informs me what I am supposed to do and to be."

So where are the elms? Such vegetation gives no green. McGiver said, "I plead the fifth on that."

Sherman had no answer for it either. "You have to let your imagination go," he said.

This is Sherman's second O'Neill play — he poured drinks at Studio 54 for Gabriel Byrne in A Touch of the Poet — but the excruciatingly presented curtain-raiser here "is the hardest work I've ever done in my life as an actor. I can tell you right now that opening process — doing that prologue — was some of the most exciting and exhausting work ever. We found it, created it. 'What works here?' ‘What doesn't?'"

Aside from cramps and cardiacs, is there a fear of swine flu? "You know what? The pig that we gut on stage protects us. I just have a feeling that it's protecting us." Continued...