Review: Long Day's Journey into Night by Ar Rude
by Michael Meigs

Eugene O'Neill did not want you to see this astonishing, bleak and deeply moving drama. When he died in a Boston hotel room in 1953, he had left it locked up in the vaults of his publisher Random House with instructions that it was not to be opened for 25 years after his death, and that it was never to be performed. 

Instead, his third wife Carlotta Monterrey, who had fought with him and protected him and nursed him since 1928, inherited the rights. She deeded it to Yale University with the stipulation that proceeds be used to acquire books for a drama library and to award scholarships for drama.

Long Day's Journey Into Night was first produced at the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theatre in February, 1956. The venue was apt. O'Neill's realistic, sometimes naturalistic drama shared much with the theatrical traditions of Strindberg and Ibsen. In 1936 the Nobel Committee had awarded O'Neill the Nobel Prize for literature, the only Nobel ever given to an American dramatist. The Broadway premiere at the Helen Hayes Theatre in November, 1956, received Tony awards for Best Play and Best Actor in a Play, as well as the New York Drama Critics' Circle awards for Best Play.

Long Day's Journey into Night takes exactly that setting. The characters are his parents, his brother, himself and an indolent maid. Their last name is changed to Tyrone, but not to protect any innocents. The action of this one long day in the summer of 1911 includes the moment of confirmation that the younger brother Edmund, the surrogate for O'Neill, has tuberculosis ("consumption") and shows us his mother Mary, lonely and desperate as she gives in to her addiction to morphine.

These events are true to his life. The New London house was one of many property investments made by O'Neill's father, who had risen from poverty, making his money by touring widely as The Count of Monte Cristo.
O'Neill, like Edmund in the play, was born in a hotel room and his mother was given morphine, which led to her addiction. His older brother James, like James Tyrone in the play, was a dissolute actor who introduced the younger boy to vice and eventually drank himself to death. Like Edmund in the play, O'Neill had returned from the sea after many sufferings, was scribbling stories and poems for a local newspaper, had developed consumption, and would be sent for six months to a sanatorium.

To attend this production and to watch this cast at work in the carefully tatty Victorian set designed by Scott Guthrie is to enter deep in the troubled psyche of one of America's most successful and most haunted writers. This has elements of autobiography and elements of psychotherapy, but above all it is a dramatist's startlingly effective conversion of trauma and deep grief into an energetic, confrontational, meditative and ultimately highly rewarding catharsis for characters and audience.

The piece is produced by Ar Rud (Gaelic for "our thing"), an ad hoc company formed by Actor's Equity members under special rules facilitating self-production.  Three Equity members and an Equity candidate are involved, but they've been so focussed on the acting and technical aspects that they've devoted scant attention to promotion and publicity. 

It's a long evening -- four acts, beginning at 7:30 p.m., with two intermissions and a curtain call just after 11.  Long Day's Journey into Night did not drag for a moment, a fact that surprised me, for I had read the lengthy play ahead of time.  O'Neill maintains the unity, presses the action forward, and gives each of these actors speeches full of unexpected turns, images and incident.

For example: on the written page the fourth act, which takes place after midnight, had seemed to be a meandering, maudlin session over a whiskey bottle and cards. Director Lucien Douglas and the cast pace the action with a see-saw, gradually gathering upward tension, making the most of the series of duo scenes. Father and younger son play cards and slowly reach beyond confrontation; as the elder son stumbles up the walk, drunk, the father leaves the two brothers alone. Their conversation, fueled by whiskey, is angry, then affectionate, wandering and scandalously anecdotal, then deeply desperate.

The elder brother's collapse onto the sofa brings the father in from back porch. Shortly afterward, the mother comes downstairs with the distracted, otherworldly demeanor of a sleep walker and a seer. Her final speeches are an aria of love and regret, paying no attention to interruptions and little attention to those whom she loves. She rises, almost visibly, toward the mystic obliteration of her drug.

Nigel O'Hearn as Edmund the consumptive plays the afflicted O'Neill with more energy than one might expect from a patient about to get a sentence to a sanitorium, and he is surprisingly resistant to the quantities of whiskey sloshing about. O'Hearn bears a gratifying resemblance to the author, a detail more appreciated in hindsight as one comes to understand the alert, disappointed watchfulness of this character.

Rachel Dendy plays the pertly cunning, garrulous second servant Cathleen. In her brash simplicity, in Act II she serves as a telling foil to her employer Mary Tyrone, who is slipping into neurasthenia and addiction.

O'Neill puts several recitations into this piece. Edmund quotes a translation of Baudelaire; he and Jamie quote lines from 19th century English poets Ernest Christopher Dowson, Oscar Wilde, Kipling, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, and, to underline the climax of the final scene, Algernon Swinburn's "Leave Taking" ("Let us go hence, my songs; she will not hear.") To relatively less literary 21st century ears, these passages seem less apposite than they might have been at the play's date of 1911 or when O'Neill wrote it in 1941. The Dowson verses, in particular, seem to have survived principally in lyrics in mid-century popular songs ("the days of wine and roses" and " . . . I have always been faithful to thee . . . in my fashion. . . .").

In contrast, many of the monologues for his characters are gripping. Again, examples from the fourth act: stung by Edmund's reproach for his miserliness, Lunning as James Tyrone in his drink recounts his origins and his acting career with a frankness and eloquence that belies the alcohol. Edmund responds with "high spots" from his memories of the sea. O'Hearn's delivery of these is curiously detached, perhaps intentionally, since Edmund responds derisively to his father's comment, "There's the makings of a poet in you, all right."

David Gallagher in the role of the debauched elder brother Jamie is fire and bitterness. One understands that he is not primarily an alcoholic; rather,caught between his anger at his well-meaning father and his contempt for himself, he is addicted to self-destruction. Gallagher is in precise control of a character who otherwise could easily slip into maudlin self-pity. He gives Jamie a snarling frankness, touched intermittently with ineffectual attempts at expressing affection for his younger brother. These deeply conflicted attitudes rise to a climax in their duo scene in Act IV. Jamie, swilling whiskey in an effort to shut himself down, fiercely warns Edmund, "I'd like to see you become the greatest success in the world. But you'd better be on your guard. Because I'll do my damnedest to make you fail. Can't help it. I hate myself. Got to take revenge. On everyone else. Especially you."

That's a scene written 30 years later by a deeply unhappy, enormously gifted dramatist. A man in failing health who had been writing all his life to escape that ugly house in New London and the torment of memory. 

This production of Long Day's Journey into Night is a remarkable gift to anyone who loves serious drama. If you fall into that category, you have only four opportunities left to see it. 

I would have told you earlier, but this production just knocked me over. It took a while to digest it so that I could recommend it appropriately.

Review by Avimaan Syam in the Austin Chronicle, June 4

EXTRA:

Program leaflet from Long Day's Journey into Night 

Hits as of 2015 03 01: 10,177

Long Day's Journey into Night
by Eugene O'Neill
Ar Rude