Last night a hushed, frequently stunned audience
witnessed Dramaworks’ long anticipated production of Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill. It takes America’s
greatest playwright to reach the inner depths of his tortured soul, creating a virtual
verisimilitude of his own family life (it is as autobiographical as any play
ever written; he viewed writing it as an act of forgiveness). And it takes a great production company to nurture
this spiraling inward play, sustaining the drama for more than three intense
hours. All four of the actors portraying
the Tyrone family deliver electrifying and physically exhausting performances. Although this was the company’s very first
performance of the play in front of an audience (a “preview”), it was flawless to
my eye, a master class of staging, directing and acting.
Long Day’s Journey
is but a day’s journey although it encapsulates a lifetime. It unfolds one late
summer’s day in 1912 at the family’s home by the Connecticut seashore, a place
not unlike O’Neill’s summer childhood in New London. The action unremittingly reveals well worn
emotional paths to the present. Love transitions to hate and hate to anger and then
to contrition and guilt and thus back to love. The Tyrone family knows how to love, but does
not know how to be loving. It is a study
of emotional ups and downs, the audience rising with the few crests and falling
with the numerous troughs.
The play revolves around the life of James Tyrone, the
family patriarch, an actor whose “good bad luck” was to “find the big
money-maker,” a romantic part in Monte
Cristo, a play that became a box office success and had the Tyrone family
on the road for most of their formative lives. It brought money, a considerable
amount in those days. But Tyrone sold
his soul, knowing he could have been a great Shakespearian actor. That shame shadows him and corrodes his
family. He is obsessed with money, the
wastefulness of leaving lights on, the imprudence of hiring expensive doctors
for his wife, and his son, Edmund, and is continually derided by his family for
being a tightwad.
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| Maureen Anderman, Dennis Creaghan |
The role of James Tyrone is among the most challenging in
American Drama and veteran Dramaworks actor Dennis Creaghan makes it his own,
embracing the alternating sadness, anger, regret, and even love. Alcohol is his refuge, its tentacles reaching
out to his sons. It is a wrenching
performance by Creaghan and although much of the family’s pain can be traced to
him, James had his own hardships as a child and one’s heart goes out to him
thanks to Creaghan’s sensitive portrayal.
Mary, his wife, is played by Maureen Anderman, a last
minute replacement for the original actress who had to leave the production for
personal reasons. It is a difficult part
to play with adequate preparation, but to perform this demanding role on short
notice (although the opening was delayed six days) is simply remarkable, and
Anderman being such a pro, a Broadway actress who we’ve seen before at Dramaworks,
at the Maltz Theatre, and most recently at the Westport Country Playhouse this
past summer, delivers a performance which theatre lovers will always remember and
associate her with. She is achingly heartbreaking
as Tyrone’s wife. O’Neill has given us a
window into Mary’s subconscious with her suspicion of not being trusted, deep
shame, and eventual disappearance into drugged somnambulism. Along with the believable gnarled hands and
regal bearing, Anderman gives us a fully fleshed and real character that astounds
with its perfection. She has complete command of every aspect of Mary’s
persona.
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| Michael Stewart Allen, John Leonard Thompson, Dennis
Creaghan, Maureen Anderman |
Mary had her dreams too.
Before meeting her husband, she was in a convent school and had thoughts
of being a concert pianist or even a nun.
She was swept off her feet by James but increasingly her life became one
of a secondary player to James, accompanying him while he was on the road which
was most of the time. The only “home”
she has known is their summer residence on the sea. And it is a permanent “home” she has longed
for. “In a real home one is never lonely,”
she says to James, reminding him that she gave up such a home – her father’s –
to marry him. “I knew from experience by then that children should have homes
to be born in, if they are to be good children, and women need homes.” Also in the context of “home,” she acknowledges
that the men in her family have “barrooms where they feel at home.”
Her life as an appendage to James is bad enough. But O’Neill drills down further into her heartache
where the rarely mentioned sorrow of their deceased child, notably named Eugene,
resides. Eugene would have been the
middle son had he not died when he was two, exposed to the disease by the older
son, Jamie, before the youngest son, Edmund, was born. Thus Mary’s accusation:
“Oh, I know Jamie was only seven, but he was never stupid. He’d been warned it
might kill the baby. He knew. I’ve never been able to forgive him for
that.”
Following Edmund’s birth (which she perceived as a duty
to her husband, following the death of Eugene) and Mary’s increasing feeling of
isolation and blame, she turns to morphine as her chosen remorse-killer to
which she becomes addicted for the rest of her life.
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| John Leonard Thompson, Michael Stewart Allen |
She worries about the health of her younger son, Edmund, and
although she is in constant denial about the seriousness of his condition, he is
finally diagnosed with tuberculosis.
Edmund is played by a new Dramaworks face, Michael Stewart Allen, an
experienced Shakespearian actor. Edmund
is O’Neill’s alter ego and much of the playwright’s tortured and poetic
observations are expressed through him.
Allen’s portrayal of Edmund’s drunken conversation with his father in
Act IV is passionate and his final confrontation with his brother reveals a
physical side which takes the audience by surprise. He is there to be pitied by the family,
always a source of their guilt, and, yet, if anyone is “the sanest” in the
family, Allen brings that out.
Jamie or James Jr. is played by another Dramaworks pro, John
Leonard Thompson. Here is yet an
additional dynamic for the family’s dysfunctional gristmill: the failed older
son who holds on to his “infinite sorrow of life.” He is his father’s greatest
disappointment. Jamie’s cynicism is his
protection from the truth but when drunk (which is most of the time) his
love-hate relationship with Edmund comes to the surface, jealous of his younger
brother on the one hand and loving on the other. "You're all I've got left"
he drunkenly confesses. Nonetheless he has introduced his younger brother to
the same debauchery in which he has indulged; bars and prostitutes. Thompson’s
portrayal of Jamie’s antagonism gathers momentum to the final drunken
confrontation with his brother in the last scenes. It is a physically exhausting performance
and, as I think O’Neill intended, one does feel pity and fear for the tragedy
of being the first born in the Tyrone family.
John Leonard Thompson, who has excelled in so many Dramaworks
productions, will be remembered for this extraordinary portrayal of so many
conflicting emotions.
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Maureen Anderman, Carey Urban
|
Carey Urban, making her debut at Dramaworks, is Cathleen,
a household servant, the only non-family member in the play. Although a minor character, she plays an
important role, briefly imbibing with Mary, waiting for the men to return home,
expressing rage at the druggist in filling Mary’s morphine prescription (which
Mary insists is for “rheumatism”). Urban
provides what little comic relief there is in the play with aplomb.
And as the home is by the sea, there are numerous
references to the fog. It is both a
source of comfort and of sadness. It is a porous curtain into the past. Mary wonders “why is it fog makes everything
sound so sad and lost?” Edmund, the
younger son laments “Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it?” It
is a symbolic reminder of the kind of fog hanging in their lives, alcohol for
the Tyrone men and the opiate for Mary to diminish the pain of their past
histories. The fog actually enters the
home in the last act, seemingly seeking out Mary in her final Ophelia-like
scene.
Accusations and regret make up the “action.” The Tyrones
have to exhume the past to deal with the present and lie (to themselves as well
as to each other) to exculpate their guilt.
It is simply a masterpiece of painful writing and brilliant performances.
The dark and personal content challenges the directors and the actors every step
in the development and its execution. Performing
Long Day’s Journey has to take its
toll day in and day out. It is
emotionally exhausting.
We were fortunate to be able to briefly attend one of the
rehearsals a couple of weeks before the opening. It was the “tech week” where Dramaworks
blends all the technical elements, lighting and sound while choreographing the
blocking and movement of the actors. We
saw two brief scenes from Act I and Act IV, one between James Sr. (Dennis Creaghan)
and James Jr. (John Leonard Thompson) and the other between James Sr. and Edmund
(Michael Stewart Allen).
At times Director Bill Hayes and Assistant Director Paul
Stancato (they worked as a team on this production) stopped the action,
discussing their concerns with the actors and the actors making some counter
arguments. There must be hundreds of such
tiny tweaking moments, the invisible hands of the director to help make the
scenes authentic and dramatic. It is a
process of trust, starting with casting, the director having to trust the
actors for such a collaboratory effort, this trust ultimately extending to the
audience. Bill Hayes felt the Dramaworks’ audience -- as well as the theatre’s
production team -- was ready for such a journey. Both Hayes and Stancato (who will direct a
future Dramaworks production, solo, next season) successfully merge the
symbolic and literary elements of the play.
And the play does read like a novel, O’Neill providing extensive,
descriptive stage directions which must be interpreted by the director.
The technicians behind the actors and the director are
top notch. Scenic design is by K. April
Soroko, and lighting design is by Donald Edmund Thomas. The lighting evolves as morning passes into
the afternoon, to twilight and finally to midnight connoting the dark denouement.
Even the lighting of John Singer Sargent’s paintings was studied to capture the
time period and mood. At the conclusion
of Act II, a dramatic bright white spotlight shines on Mary, dressed in white,
as “she gives a little despairing laugh” [stage directions] saying, “Then
Mother of God, why do I feel so lonely?”
The spotlight fades and cuts to darkness. Intermission.
The relatively shallow stage of Dramaworks’ theater is
compensated by its breadth. There is an upstairs and an outside where the fog comes
and goes. It is a sea-side home of some
substance by 1912 standards, wood-paneled, a book case, framed pictures of
Shakespeare, and another of a Monte
Cristo 19th century playbill, the play which made O’Neill’s
father rich playing the role more than 6,000 times. Costume design is by Brian O'Keefe with his
usual careful attention to period dress.
Sound design is by Matt Corey and along with the fog, there is the obligatory
fog horn, timed to sound at some of the most dramatic moments.
A final tip of the hat to James Danford, the Stage
Manager, a tireless role, the man who attends to the scores and scores of
details on stage, right down to the levels of the liquid in the liquor bottles
(many of which are gone through during the production). Danford is in his fourth season at
Dramaworks, an enthusiastic pro in every way.
In short, if you are ready to see the greatest American
play, and perhaps one of its best productions, take a journey with the Tyrone
family and strap on your seat belt at Dramaworks.
