Long Day’s Journey Into Night
For years I’ve been hoping the American critical establishment would break its infatuation with Eugene O’Neill, who is supposed to have single-handedly transformed superficial, derivative American theater into a serious art form, detailing the American social and psychic landscape more accurately than any other playwright before or since. All this about a writer who has to his name more clumsy, forced, second-rate scripts than masterpieces. All this about a man who, in Mary McCarthy’s telling phrase, wrote with “the wooden verisimilitude, the flat dead echoless sound of stale slang.” Yet if you’ve got ten hours to spare to watch two of O’Neill’s Pulitzer-winning works–three and a half hours for the Goodman’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night and six and a half for Strange Interlude–you might be convinced the American critical establishment has understated its case. Whether eschewing melodrama or accepting it wholeheartedly, these productions bring O’Neill to life and prove his greatness once again.
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But the moment former matinee idol James Tyrone and his wife, Mary, enter in a moment of pedestrian domestic bliss, the play shrinks instantly to life-size, drawing us in. Thanks to the nuanced, gentle touch Brian Dennehy and Pamela Payton-Wright give their opening moments, the Tyrones turn from looming literary figures into likable, seemingly unremarkable next-door neighbors with a true and abiding affection for each other. In a few deft minutes, director Robert Falls makes us want to spend a long evening with the Tyrones.
These complications are the stuff of melodrama–and they’re all culled from O’Neill’s life. It’s even slightly sanitized: Edmund, O’Neill’s surrogate, hasn’t experienced the divorce and suicide attempt the playwright did. O’Neill’s achievement is his ability to distance himself from the mire of his past and orchestrate its elements with precision and artistry, especially difficult given the absence of a traditional plot. This is not so much a play as a kinetic portrait of paralysis, “a lacerating round-robin of recrimination, self-dramatization, lies that deceive no one, confessions that never expiate the crime,” in Walter Kerr’s description of the original production. With hardly a rhetorical flourish–there are only a handful of lines with much overt literary merit–O’Neill conveys, perhaps more powerfully than any other American playwright, the emotional truth of a family in the midst of collapse.
The show’s lightness is an especially apt choice considering that it’s being performed in an old mansion on the lake, where the audience is led from room to room for various acts, thereby exposing every bit of fakery. We can’t help but feel a little silly sitting in a clump while actors carry on a few feet away, but silliness is part of the plan. Certainly we’re not as silly as the characters who tell us what they’re thinking or the actors who pretend they don’t overhear. And the cast never seem to lose their delight in this grisly mess. When it was over, I was ready for another six hours.
