Long Day's Journey Worth Taking

by Frank Furnari, New Rep Reviewer

Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the Tony and Pulitzer award-winning play by Eugene O’Neill is considered by many to be his masterpiece and the New Rep production certainly does the play justice. It takes place over the course of one day at the Tyrone family house in August of 1912. The play is semi-autobiographical and gives the audience a glimpse of O’Neill’s dysfunctional family.

We meet James, the father – an actor originally from Ireland who loves to drink and hates to spend money. Mary, his wife has recently came home from being treated for her morphine addition. The couple has two sons, Jamie the older son who is following in his father’s footsteps as an actor and Edmund, the younger, sickly son who works as a poet. As the title states, it is a long day with the play running almost 3.5hrs and while over all it’s a great play, it does feel long especially at points in the second half when it is just the three men drinking and talking. While the play was written 70 years ago, it still feels relevant and if one has seen the popular play August Osage County by Tracy Letts, one certainly sees how this show has influenced it – the family problems, the mother addicted to prescription medication - the similarities were more striking given Janie E. Howland’s set design, which bares a resemblance to the Broadway and touring production set of August.

In my opinion, the best part of this production was Karen MacDonald’s wonderful, layered, and compelling portrayal of Mary. Whenever MacDonald is on stage, she captivates you– it is a joy to watch such a performance. In addition to her, Will Lyman’s James is another stellar performance, especially in his scenes with MacDonald. With Scott Edminston’s direction, it feels as if they have been together for many years, especially when MacDonald is talking about the other opportunities of her youth, Lyman’s reaction is a tired one, one that has heard this many times over the years. Both Lewis D. Wheeler as Jamie and Nicholas Dillenburg as Edmund give good performance, however they do not deliver the same caliber as MacDonald and Lyman. Melissa Baroni rounds out the cast as Cathleen, the cheery, inexperienced Irish summer maid who comes in and out of the kitchen to deal with the off-stage cook as well as providing Mary company while the men are away.

Sometimes classics can start to show their age, but this was not the case with A Long Day’s Journey Into Night. The struggles seen by this family are as familiar today as they were when O’Neill wrote it and in the hands of a talented team, it makes for a great (long) night of theater.

No Light at the End of the Day

by Jack Craib, New Rep Reviewer

As befits the son of a famous stage actor, Eugene O’Neill may not have been born in a trunk, but he was born in a hotel room (and died in one, too). The story of his family became the basis for his most celebrated play about the Tyrone family, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”, which he wisely chose to have published posthumously. He had given it as a gift to his wife on their twelfth anniversary, in which he faced his “dead at last…..with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the haunted Tyrones”. A searing treatment of a dysfunctional family plagued by addictions, the ages of his characters were all as they were in real life in August 1912, when this work takes place. Generally considered his greatest masterpiece, it went on to earn the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for best play 55 years ago and is currently being performed in a very worthy production by New Rep under the competent direction of Scott Edmiston, who has stated that this is one of the four great American plays of all time.

The play is set in a seaside Connecticut home much like the O’Neill’s actual home, exactly a century ago, over the course of a single day. The scion of the family, James Tyrone, (exquisitely played by Will Lyman) is described as 65, looking 55, a matinee idol. His wife Mary, ten years younger, played here by American Repertory Theater alumna Karen MacDonald, is denoted as nervous, sensitive, and humiliated. Their sons are Jamie, 33 (Lewis D. Wheeler) and Edmund, 23 (Nicholas Dillenburg, representing Eugene O’Neill himself), very much like his mother. As the playwright notes, it is in “the quality of extreme nervous sensitivity that the likeness of Edmund to his mother is most marked”. Even Melissa Baroni in the relatively minor role of Cathleen, the “second girl” (the servant for lighter housework), adds to the unsettling mix, although some of her dialogue is missing, such as her commentary on drinking as “a good man’s failing".

But it is in the pivotal role of the wife and mother that O’Neill invests his most memorable writing, and upon whose shoulders rests the ultimate impact of any attempt to perform the work. Happily (if that’s a word one can use in reference to this play), MacDonald doesn’t disappoint. Her towering performance grounds the story. Over the course of four lengthy acts, this tortured tale of blame, guilt and denial reveals the agony of the entire Tyrone dynasty. Mary accuses Edmund of unfounded suspicion (“Are you afraid to trust me alone?”) and shared guilt (“I’m not blaming you, dear. How can you help it? How can any of us forget…that’s what makes it so hard for all of us. We can’t forget…It makes it so much harder, living in this atmosphere of suspicion”). As James puts it, “Yes, forget. Forget everything and face nothing. It’s a convenient philosophy, if you’ve no ambition in life”. But it’s Edmund who finally says that in the fog, “everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted to be, alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself.” In one particularly revealing line, Mary states that she too loves the fog (in which one can escape reality) but hates the foghorn, the intrusion of reality.

The technical credits are, as typical of New Rep, superior. The Scenic Design by Janie E. Howland ignores O‘Neill’s very specific lengthy stage directions, such as his description of volumes in the library that all “have the look of having been read and reread”. The result is a rather monochrome effect which is an interesting approach mirrored by the Costume Design by Charles Schoonmaker. Whether they enhance or undermine the pervading gloom of the story is debatable. Lighting Design by Karen Perlow is fine, as is most of the Sound Design by Dewey Dellay, apart from a few odd choices near the end of the play.

This great American tragedy is relentlessly hopeless. As Mary puts it, “None of us can help the things life has done to us…The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too”. For the Tyrones, as for the real life playwright, there is no solution, only resignation, and happiness is fleeting and fragile. Toward the end of the play, Mary states that their house was “never a home”, that “only the past when you were happy is real”. The very last line, one of the saddest in literature, falls to her: “I fell in love…and was so happy for a time”. With the magnificence of “Long Day’s Journey”, we fall in love with language and are transported, for a time.

A Journey Worth Taking

By Jana Pollack, New Rep Reviewer

Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is an exquisitely intricate piece of theater. In New Rep’s production, these intricacies are sharply realized in a superbly acted and overall excellent production that is well worth the three-hour time investment it requires.

Over the course of one long day, O’Neill shows us his family: a mother with a destructive addiction, a father who carries his closely-guarded disappointments everywhere, and an older brother who channels his anger and resentment into a drinking problem. And then there is Edmund, O’Neill’s version of himself, who suffers as quietly as he can while doing his best to keep the peace.

This play is largely about blame. Each member of the family talks vindictively about the past, describing in detail the ways in which others failed them, recounting the steps that led to the sad reality of the present. What’s miraculous is the discovery, as a viewer, that no one is really to blame: this is just life, a stunning picture of the loneliness and hurt that we impose on each other and life imposes on us.

Will Lyman and Karen MacDonald, familiar to seasoned Boston theatergoers, are perfect in the parts of James and Mary Tyrone. As he did in “Exits and Entrances,” Lyman fully embodies the aging actor he is portraying, and all of James’ issues, revealed over the course of the play, are infused into every line he speaks. In the role of Mary, MacDonald shines – she makes Mary’s tragedies beautiful at times, and thus all the more scary and devastating.

In the roles of Jamie and Edmund, Lewis D. Wheeler and Nicholas Dillenburg are also ideally cast. Both of these performances have an element of a slow burn – at first, it’s not clear how entrenched these boys will be in the family crises, but with each scene more and more is stripped away as the performances deepen. It is fascinating.

Director Scott Edmiston deserves great praise for this production. He recognizes that this play doesn’t need much more than excellent actors clearly speaking these carefully constructed words, and he doesn’t get in their way. The action unfolds in waves as the day goes on and on. By nightfall, much is revealed, but it is still just a slow churning towards an end without real resolution. This is a picture of a family’s life just as it is: hard, confusing, and continuing.

Well Worth the Long Night

Don’t miss Long Day’s Journey Into Night now playing at New Rep; it’s one of the high moments of this year’s theater season in Boston. 

The performances of the four principals, and even silly Kathleen, were nuanced and powerful, mesmerizing the audience as we are pulled deeper and deeper into the family’s pain. We have never heard a quieter audience – there was utter stillness for long stretches, broken only by the occasional sharply indrawn breath as another unspeakable thing is said, another thrust of the sword reaches home.  The set perfectly evoke the turn of the century summer house, and the lighting brings the light of the ocean outside into the stage – until night closes in.  This is theatre as it was meant to be.

The play is about a family gathered at their summer house at the beach. Father is famous actor James Tyrone (Will Lyman), a handsome man in his sixties whose rounded Shakespearean tones give weight to his every utterance. We are startled when, in moments of passion, he slips into his just-off-the –boat Irish brogue.  As the play begins we see his wife, Mary (Karen MacDonald), pretty, a little plump, a little disordered, talking with him about their younger son who she insists rather too emphatically is suffering from a lingering summer cold. She seems to be carefully controlling her concern. She dithers about her hair and her weight and her inability to sleep while the fog horn blows.  Her hands quiver and shake. She plays with her rings, pats her hair which seems about to come unpinned.

The sons come in from the breakfast table, Jamie the elder (Lewis Wheeler) and Edmund the younger (Nicholas Dillenburg), coughing. Their father scolds them for their indolence, their drinking, and their professional failures. On the surface it’s a normal family squabble. But from the very beginning we sense that something is “off,” that each person is wary, tense.  Only gradually do we understand that mother has just come home from a prolonged stay in a sanatorium where she went to fight an addiction to morphine (a word not uttered until well into the second act). The three men are relieved and grateful to have her home, but clearly terrified that she may relapse, something that has clearly happened repeatedly in the past. The men are all on pins and needles, waiting for a call from the doctor who has been examining Edmund and trying to determine if his “cold” is actually consumption.

Nothing much happens. They wait, they have lunch or work in the yard.  The Irish servant girl, Kathleen (Melissa Baroni), bustles in and out, mediating between the family and the irritable cook who remains unseen in the kitchen.  Inexorably, the tension builds as the family waits for Edmund’s diagnosis (and for mother’s relapse). Mary, in terrified denial of her son’s illness, deteriorates before our eyes, periodically climbing the stairs for another dose of the poison she is craving. One by one her husband and sons beg her to pull back, to stop before she is too far in. Yet, as we somehow knew would happen, both Edmund and Mary continue to fall victim to their physical struggles.

Mesmerized, we watch as the tension tears at each character in turn, as each reaches back into the past to worry at the roots of their pain, each feeling pity and resentment for the others, each feeling wrenching guilt for their complicity.  The acting is a true treat; people were literally frozen in their seats, sometimes not even breathing, for a very long time.

~ Johanna Ettin & Shauna Shames, New Rep Reviewers

O'Neill at New Rep

Victoria Petrosino, New Rep Reviewer

New Rep’s production of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (for which he posthumously received a Pulitzer prize for drama) is immersive and conflict-ridden, showing (yet again) New Rep’s ability to assemble talented actors in dialogue-driven dramas.

The 3+ hour play revolves around James Tyrone (Will Lyman), an aging alcoholic actor with a refined Irish brogue who alternately plays the loving husband, the disappointed father, and the remorseful man, angry at himself for selling-out his love of acting.  His wife Mary (Karen MacDonald) is both euphemistically evasive (calling Edmund’s hacking cough a “summer cold”) and bitingly honest (telling James of her disdain for their house’s impermanence).  She flits between reality and memory, causing family-wide fear of an imminent relapse into her morphine addiction.  Their sons Edmund (Nicholas Dillenburg), the poet, and Jamie (Lewis D. Wheeler), the profligate, provoke their parents to admit the truth of their current situation.

Scenic designer Janie Howland creates the perfect canvas for the tense, monologue-driven play with her idea of the family’s dilapidated seaside Connecticut “home.”  While the characters repeatedly remark on the dense fog that refuses to dissipate outside, the audience sees that same struggle to hide within the home.  The floors and furniture are bleached white; insubstantial white wicker chairs and lace curtains add to the feeling of fleetingness, to the family’s dismissal of the present in favor of the past, however distressing and hurtful that past may be.  

Costume designer Charles Schoonmaker dresses the characters in neutral colors as well.  Pale pinks and creams help the characters blend into their whitewashed surroundings, reinforcing the idea that the characters hide behind their respective delusions.  The blank canvas of the stage belies the unhidden tensions between the family members, a lifetime of regrets perpetually darkening each interaction.  The pale color scheme aids the ghost-like, ephemeral theme of the production: each character lives a sliver of his or her life in the present, and spends the rest looking back at a lifetime of regrets.

While the monologues are excellent, the fascinating part of watching New Rep’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is watching the other characters react to those monologues.  They each show emotion rawly, terrified that the next remark may strike too closely to the truth.  They are vigilant, and fearful, and steeped in sadness, ready to react and deflect blame.  Watching these reactions underscores the multitude of regrets that have taken their toll on this family.  Lyman, in particular, looks aged and sullen and utterly beaten as he listens to Mary speaking of Eugene and of her love of the piano, as she gazes woefully at her arthritic hands.

“Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is another compelling example of New Rep's Legacy season.  The acting is exceptional: the actors are expressive and the accents are spot-on.  Even in the midst of watching the cast dredge up a  lifetime of regrets, the audience couldn’t help but laugh along with “Jamie’s trick” or Edmund’s pig story.  The production allows a new audience to experience one of the classic plays of the 20th century.