at the Phoenix Theater: Long Day's Journey Into Night

For years I didn't think much of Eugene O'Neill. He towers over the history, such as it is, of the American theater, but I found his works ponderous & overly earnest in a way that seemed to guarantee their limits. What was I basing this opinion on? I can't remember seeing any of his plays live besides A Moon for the Misbegotten, which I saw at ART when I lived in Boston (so, decades ago). I saw Ah, Wilderness! on PBS back in the 1970s, when they used to show such things. I did not like it. I saw the films of Anna Christie with Garbo & The Emperor Jones with Paul Robeson, but Garbo & Robeson can carry most things on their own, regardless of whatever interest the material has. I had seen, also long ago, the film of Long Day's Journey Into Night, directed by Sidney Lumet, with Hepburn & Richardson. I didn't much like any of these, & I thought all that was enough. But O'Neill kept recurring in books about the 1920s & 1930s, I kept wondering about his reputation (did he just do things I didn't care for? there must be something behind the high esteem in which he is held). Sometimes artists nag at us like this, squirreled away in the back of our minds, & that's a signal we need to revisit their work. I don't need to cling to opinions I formed 40 years ago. So when I heard that Long Day's Journey Into Night would be staged at  the Phoenix Theater, I went.

As you can probably guess, I have recanted my heresy. The production, directed by Jeffrey Hoffman, if fluid & forceful; the play has been trimmed but still runs over three hours (with one 15-minute intermission) & it does not lag or drag, & I ended up re-examining my opinions about more things than the plays of Eugene O'Neill.

The mother, Mary Tyrone, embodied here by Angela Dant, was the fulcrum of the story: after a short period of sobriety, she reverted to her morphine addiction, an addiction that works not only physiologically but psychologically to alleviate her depression, her regrets, her loneliness. Dant has a wonderful voice for the role, combining a girl's fluty tones with the querulous ones of an aging woman. So here's my first switch: I have said for years that the problem with dramas about addiction is that they are essentially undramatic, in that the addiction will always win out: that's pretty much the definition of addiction. My mistake was in thinking that the drama would be about the addiction itself, rather than in the way those around the addict (even more than the addict herself) view & react to the addiction.

Her family has fooled itself, more or less, into thinking that maybe this time Mary really has conquered her dependence. The revelation of her addiction (which I thought was one of those things everyone knew, but apparently not; I overheard two women in the audience at intermission trying to figure out what exactly she was on – by intermission it's become clear that it's some sort of medically prescribed painkiller) is made slowly: There are references, when she is absent, about "the last time" & actions that resemble her addicted behavior (what is she doing alone at night in the upstairs room?). The emphasis is on the family's reactions & thoughts & suspicions, & on Mary's reactions. She feels under constant surveillance. Sometimes it seems the main connection this lonely woman has with her family is her resentment at their monitoring. Though she clearly sees herself as a peacemaker, trying to smooth things over with her husband & their two sons, particularly the elder, Jamie, who is already an alcoholic, she will also jab at the others, sometimes with a one-two punch of "understanding" & criticism. (It reminded me of a time years ago when I went with a friend to the house of her parents, who were very quarrelsome with each other; they started arguing about something & though I was listening carefully there was a moment when they switched the positions they had taken, he taking hers & she taking his, without missing a beat & without lessening the tension of the argument; it was like watching two amazing aerial acrobats: a blur of spangles & presto! they have exchanged their swings & are now facing each other high above the ring.)

And she's not wrong (or "wrong") about either the compassionate remarks or the critical ones. None of them are. That's another thing: I had always thought dismissively of this play, & other such family dramas, as plays in which Truths Are Told. And I think I'm not wrong in finding that unrealistic; most truths (or "truths") are told indirectly, inadvertently, not in big confrontations in which X tells Y some home truth, & Nothing Is Ever the Same Again. But what we see here, & what is very true to life, is seeing people weaponize the idea of truth, as revelations to undercut or jab at someone else, or even themselves. (It's not just Mary but also the self-lacerating Jamie who is an example of this tendency.) The very notion of "truth" evaporates; what we are given are more in the nature of different points of view; a twist of the prism shining new colors from old lights. It's all part of the archeology of the family, the resurrection of partly buried incidents or, more to the point, emotions surrounding those incidents, & I was impressed by how skillfully O'Neill paced the revelations.

And that brings me to another objection, which actually experiencing this play led me to set aside: the idea that what we're seeing on stage is the one singular turning point. Nothing Is Ever the Same Again is, by & large, not how most lives happen; even if something appears that way, time moves on & emotions keep shifting. There is change, but incidental & incremental, & linked not only to whatever big revelation has formed the climax of the first act but to the passing of time, the aging of our bodies, the forward current of the culture around us. What is most powerful about this play, though O'Neill has perceptively set it at a time when the family thinks things are changing, is the certainty that nothing has changed, or will change; it is not just this one significant night on which Mary Tyrone will appear like a ghost, clutching her wedding gown, lost in the flowered field of her past; it is night after night after night.

Is escape possible? I used to be convinced, in my blithely & naively American way, that it was: you simply leave. You cut ties. You move on. You put certain people in your past. But it turns out they don't stay there, at least mentally, & that's the mistake I made there: even if you have removed yourself from certain situations or people, they still inhabit your mind. You can make efforts to redirect the steam of your thoughts, but it will keep flowing back to certain people & times. (I have a friend whose memory is going; she has one sister, whom she has not spoken to for years. She claims not to know why her sister doesn't speak to her. We both have our suspicions, but as always in such cases there's a whole iceberg submerged below that tip. But even though the sister is, for all practical purposes, out of her life, & has been for many years, & even though she remembers less & less of her life & the world she lives in, she keeps recurring to the situation, announcing regularly that she doesn't know why her sister refuses to speak to her. . . )

I do get frustrated with plays in which the main character reaches some level of understanding, which leads towards compassion/forgiveness/ &, to use the current inevitable buzzword, "connection". I think that moment is there to give us fake reassurance at the end of whatever traumas the play has been processing, as if we've had a rough voyage & now we're going to be pushed in a comfy chair we can sink obliviously into. My experience is that you work towards understanding & forgiveness & then you cycle back towards anger & just go through the cycle over & over, until time sweeps you away too.  I give O'Neill credit for insisting on the hardness & repetitiveness of what we face in life.

The Phoenix is an intimate theater, which works well for this play, brining us into a fairly cramped cottage in which it's difficult for the quartet not to get in each other's way. The furnishings are few but suitably both genteel & shabby (the Sunday afternoon I was there a table broke & the cast admirably incorporated the incident & stayed in character; at least, I assume it was an accident). I've mentioned Dant as Mary but I don't want to stint the men. Kevin Copps as James Tyrone brings considerable dignity & empathy to a part that could be a caricature of a penny-pinching ham actor. Peter Malmquist as Jamie brings simmering sarcasm & anger to his role from the start, building up to the self-destructive explosions of this burdened son (again, you feel that his drunken attacks will be enacted over & over, a terrible mirror of his father's destruction as an artist by playing the same money-making role over & over until he lost both the ability to play anything else & a public interested in anything else). The exploration of alcohol & the role it plays among the Tyrones is another rich exploration of the behaviors that surround addiction. Miles Milliken as Edmund (the stand-in for O'Neill) brings the sort of sweet decency to his character that gives you a feeling that, damaged though he is, & precarious though his health is, he alone of the quartet might be able, to the extent that it is possible, to step out of this cycle of anguish & destruction, at least to some degree. 

Theater can do a lot of things, of course. One of those things is making us aware of how time has passed with us, & how our perceptions & conceptions have changed, when confronted by the same work in different periods of our lives. When a production makes you rethink the playwright, the play, your dramatic assumptions, & your family / life assumptions, then that production has given you more than most visits to the theater do give you. I had to go for a long walk after the show. And I've been pondering the drama since. The play & the performances have riches I've barely touched on. So, yes, I'm recommending this production, which runs until 10 May. Click here for more information.