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.