By Kevin Hylton
May 7, 2003
Finding Our Future in the Past:
A Review of the Plymouth Theatre’s revival of Eugene O’Neill’s LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT
The other night, at some ungodly hour, a small cable access station fed my insomnia an interview with an unnamed, respected theater critic. The critic complained that Broadway’s selection of plays today is anemic. Our critic suggested that the Great White Way is nearly devoid of fresh new talent and most of the American plays out there were composed by the bards of yore with a sprinkling of new and old material from British playwrights. My own unrequited career as a playwright tempts me to echo that critic’s late night words from the balcony of the Empire State building. There are few plays by new playwrights getting produced on Broadway and the route to produce a play is so difficult, due to lack of financing and theater audiences, that a budding playwright finds him or herself frequently walking through a Kafkaesque maze of Manhattan’s streets blindly bumping into walls until he or she gives up. Of late, I’ve been looking further and further away from 42nd Street to find productions with some soul. But last night Broadway slapped me in the face and showed me that it could still land a solid punch when it follows through. Yesterday I visited the Plymouth Theatre to see the revival of Eugene O’Neill’s LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT and made a trip into the past of one of America’s most important playwrights.
LONG DAY’S JOURNEY was the final play written by Eugene O’Neill. The playwright presented the play as a gift to his wife Carlotta on their 12th Wedding Anniversary in 1941. The play was never produced during O’Neill’s lifetime and perhaps this is comforting since the play is largely autobiographical. It looks at the relationships he had with his Broadway actor father, brothers, mother and the role that addiction played in their lives. Based on the story told in the play it seems that O’Neill led a difficult life full of pain, resentment, and regret.
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LONG DAY’S JOURNEY was first produced on Broadway in 1956 at the original Helen Hayes Theatre starring Jason Robards and directed by Jose Quintero. It earned O’Neill his fourth Pulitzer Prize. It has been revived multiple times across the globe with a host of memorable names including Jason Robards (several times), Laurence Oliver, Kevin Spacey, Jack Lemmon, and Jessica Lang. The play is considered to be the best of O’Neill’s works and perhaps one of the finest plays by any American playwright. To be honest, I always preferred other plays by O’Neill to the very lengthy LONG DAY’S JOURNEY. In my prior readings the play never really resonated for me. But in the course of one evening this play went from being just a very good play to one of the finest I have ever seen or read.
The current production boasts the acting of four of today’s finest film and stage actors. Brian Dennehy plays the role of JAMES TYRONE (O’Neill’s father). Vanessa Redgrave plays MARY TYRONE (mother of O’Neill). Robert Sean Leonard plays EDMUND TYRONE (largely based on O’Neill himself) and Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as JAMES TYRONE (the older brother of O’Neill). I mentioned that this play is long. It runs over four hours with two intermissions. This fact is not to be forgotten when considering the high price of the tickets. With this said, I have to say that I would go and see the play again. While I could spend paragraphs looking solely at the set and costume design by Santo Loquasto and Brian MacDevitt’s lighting of this aptly staged production, I would ruin some of the play’s surprises and waste your time. There are multiple reasons to see this play. Perhaps the greatest has to do with the direction by Robert Falls and the performances by what may be one of the best ensemble casts I have seen to date.
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Brian Dennehy plays the role of the alcoholic father in O’Neill’s story with great precision. On stage Dennehy was justly rewarded over and again for his appearances (most recently with a Tony for best actor in a Broadway revival of DEATH OF A SALESMAN). When seen on stage, the actor is a hulking figure. His size can easily lead one to assume that the man is a very jolly fellow or an angry brute. Dennehy is both at once in his portrayal of Tyrone. Tyrone is both kind and loving at moments, showering his wife, Mary, with adoring pet names and flattering comments, and brooding, stingy, and resentful at other times. The character is very complex and the emotions present in any one-scene run the gamut. Yet somehow Dennehy comes through in showing all of the facets of this falsely stone cold person. At times Dennehy’s portrayal of the character is so realistic that I began to feel as though I was sitting in the Tyrone home, listening to conversations that I did not want to hear.
Arguments come fast and furious amongst this passionate and troubled family. All but one of the four actors in the play were recently nominated for their performances for the prestigious Drama Desk Awards. Robert Sean Leonard, who plays the sickly, Edmund is by far the most unassuming character in the cast. His performance is on its surface, like his physical appearance, thin and understated. Leonard, who won a Tony for his work in Tom Stoppard’s THE INVENTION OF LOVE and recently starred in the Signature Theatre’s production of Lanford Wilson’s FIFTH OF JULY, has both the least and the most emotion to work with in this play. It seems that although there are parts of the playwright in all of his characters, the character of Edmund is the closest to himself. He is intelligent, unwell, a fighter, and yet a concerned man who looks to try and keep the family as even keel as possible. Leonard’s performance follows the path of a very slow crescendo that begins with the character hardly being on stage to a final moment when he virtually explodes setting the stage ablaze.
The foil for Edmund is his older brother James, played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman. I first encountered Hoffman in the films of P.T. Anderson and was lucky enough to catch the Circle in the Square production of Sam Shepard’s TRUE WEST where Hoffman starred opposite John C. Reilly (Tony Award nominations). In TRUE WEST, Reilly and Hoffman traded rolls day after day. Both True West and LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT allow the actor to play rather visceral, angry parts. Unlike Ed Norton, who seems to work best in these situations, LONG DAY’S JOURNEY shows that Hoffman does not need an angry, heated scene to display his acting chops. He is successful in fight scenes as always. But for myself it’s James’ subtle, sad moments that clearly show the actor’s ability to transfer a character from the page to a living, breathing human being.
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There are not enough good words that I can use to describe the performance of Vanessa Redgrave as O’Neill’s mother, Mary. This is the first stage performance in which I have seen her appear. To a large extent Mary is the protagonist in the play. She is loving, neurotic, obsessed, and firmly entrenched in her own denial. And yet, somehow, she is able to come up with maximums and truths about her family, her existence, and life itself that stand out at the end of the play. She is the core of a family that has no center. Mary utters, what may be, the most profound and important line in the play when she responds to her husband’s statement, “Mary! For God’s sake, forget the past!” Her reply is, “The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us.” Mary is haunted by her past and the choices she made in life. It seems that all human beings ask “What if?” Many of us look back at years past with rose-colored glasses. For O’Neill the past was both a road covered with landmines and happier days where he could look back and sigh or smile. Redgrave’s Mary is, perhaps more than any of her other family members, haunted by the past and what could have been. Watching Redgrave lose herself in the character’s insanity and seeing Hoffman, Dennehy, and Leonard suffer through this process may be one of the most moving ways you can spend four hours in a New York City theatre.
While I wish Broadway could see it fit to invest in the work of young playwrights’ work, I think O’Neill was right. “The past is the present.” And if you look at the ways that Shepard and Albee emulate O’Neill, it appears to be the future too.
LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT runs at the Plymouth Theatre till August 31st in a limited engagement. Tickets can be obtained through Tele Charge (212-239-6200), through the Web site for the show, or through the box office itself. Although any seat is worthwhile, a personal recommendation for this show would be to purchase tickets for the front Box on either the left or right side of the stage (Box A). The seats are as close as the first two rows of the orchestra, are half the price, and give the greatest amount of legroom in the theatre. This is a distinct advantage for a four-hour play. The boxes can only be purchased at the theatre itself and are treated as obstructed view (although almost all of the action takes place dead center or left center of the stage). I would not suggest seats in second and third (rear) boxes as the obstruction becomes more problematic.
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