The Hairy Ape

Yank, a stoker on a luxury liner, has absolute faith in the new era – he believes in technology, progress, and his own abilities. In the gaze of a millionaire’s daughter, who has been driven by a yearning for social kitsch and a craving for sensation to descend from the sun deck to the boiler room, he suddenly recognizes what she sees him as: a circus attraction, a hairy ape, certainly not a human. His ridiculously desperate quest for revenge takes him to the noble Fifth Avenue and ends in a monkey cage at the New York Zoo.

O’Neill’s play, which premiered in 1922, is the expressionistic rampage of a person who comes to the painful realisation that all the seats on life’s sun deck are taken and that the glittering promises of progress and prosperity were never meant for him and his kind. King Kong meets Miss America – perfect material for Frank Castorf.