Backstage @ New Rep

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