Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Long Day's Journey Into Night

2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.37.1.119

2161-4318

Eric J. Levin,

Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) in Ashland, Oregon, is not well known for its O'Neill productions. In fact, this year's Long Day's Journey Into Night is the first O'Neill production at OSF this millennium. Prior to this, they have only taken on O'Neill a handful of times, most recently in 1998 with A Touch of the Poet.1 But in the 2015 season the festival organizers presented O'Neill's most distinguished play, Long Day's Journey, concurrently with his father's alleged bane (“That God-damned play”), The Count of Monte Cristo, as it was adapted by Charles Fechter, James O'Neill and others. It is an interesting and audacious contrasting pair for those familiar with the O'Neill history.According to Christopher Liam Moore, director of Long Day's Journey, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival planners often create seasons in which productions comment on each other.2 For example, the same year that OSF commissioned the Tony Award–winning All the Way, about LBJ's first year as president in 1963–64, they also commissioned Party People, a play about former members of militant civil rights groups whose ranks were infiltrated by the FBI, in order to present two different perspectives from the same era of American history. This season's Long Day's Journey and Monte Cristo bookend O'Neill's theatrical career, providing insight into the shift of American theater from trivial popular forms of theatrical entertainment to the more thoughtful and varied dramas seen today.O'Neill's earliest plays show him moving as far as possible from “that hated theatre of my father.” In place of the superficial thrills and romantic fantasy of melodrama, O'Neill pursued “the impelling, inscrutable forces behind life.”3 Melodrama arose as a popular derivative of an aesthetic anchored in Romanticism. Romantic theater differed from traditional theater in its looser structure, its focus on characters whose circumstances and conscience forced them outside of “civilized” society. The Romantic hero's preference for wildness and freedom often led to death. These works of art glorified Rousseau's “natural man” and often included scenes of nature unleashed as a powerful metaphor of unnamable supernatural power in all its uncertainty. Romantic playwrights preferred Shakespeare to the neoclassical models that had been in favor, leading to plays that sprawled in time and space.As the themes and ideas introduced by the Romantics gained popular acceptance, mainstream playwrights looked for ways to imitate the form while maintaining a more socially conservative world vision. The result was melodrama, initially a drama with music, in which poetic justice replaced individualism as the primary force controlling the world of the play, and so plot, rather than theme or character, became the controlling element of the drama. The flood of melodramas that followed from this impulse had a predictable plot in which good overcame evil and the characters became two-dimensional exponents of these forces. Audiences came to see these plays to escape reality and participate in an organized, easily understood world where justice always prevailed. They also came to see the thrilling special effects and realistic swordplay that risked the lives of the characters as well as the safety of the actors. This form became especially popular in America, where theater depended on the box office, and for the same reason its predominance endured much longer. And so, while O'Neill had many literary models in his career, such as Ibsen, Strindberg, and Conrad, perhaps the strongest impulse he followed was to veer away from the kind of superficial theater represented by Monte Cristo.Serious treatment of melodrama in production is rare, but OSF artistic director Bill Rauch served as Peter Sellars's assistant during Sellars's stint as director of the American National Theater at Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, when Sellars, assisted by William Davies King, produced an adaptation of the Fechter/O'Neill version of The Count of Monte Cristo. (A few elements of that adaptation have been incorporated into the OSF script.) The Sellars production had a mixed reaction from reviewers and audiences, but Elinor Fuchs saw it as a significant production and included her critical examination of this work as a piece of postmodern theater in The Death of Character.4 Sellars treated this melodrama as an experiment in contemporary performance rather than a period piece, unlike the OSF production, which reverted to a nineteenth-century aesthetic in its presentation.If Monte Cristo typified the most superficial and popular theater of its time, Long Day's Journey Into Night aimed for the opposite. O'Neill spent his career trying to express his vision of the tragic dimension of life using any and all dramatic structures and theatrical means at his disposal. But behind his effort was a struggle to reveal “truth.” In Long Day's Journey, O'Neill exposes his own fears and failures and those of his family to address the universal fear of failure, including the most devastating fear of all, that we are insignificant. O'Neill's play also brings comfort, easing our fear and showing us the path to forgiveness, providing catharsis for a modern audience.Of the two plays, O'Neill's masterpiece is the more well-known to contemporary audiences. But the reputation of this play is not necessarily a boon for a professional company whose audience is made up of experienced but casual patrons, student groups from around the west, and more than a few theater pilgrims paying homage to the largest repertory theater in the country and the sacrosanct figure of Shakespeare. Those who have only read Long Day's Journey or know it through reputation alone might approach a four-hour production of this play, which has no discernible plot, anxiously rather than eagerly. Patrons waiting for the curtain of the first preview at OSF could be heard discussing the production's length rather than the play's merits. On the other hand, The Count of Monte Cristo was welcomed by many because “melodrama” is synonymous with “sensational” and “crowd-pleasing,” as many contemporary entertainments, such as soap operas, much of popular music and popular movies, have retained elements of melodrama.As director of a graduate program for high school drama teachers, I had the opportunity to discuss both of these productions with them. Their expectations and reactions seem to represent those of a typical well-informed theater patron. They are firm advocates of the arts who generally have a long history of theatrical patronage and who routinely create or sponsor productions in their schools. Of the forty-three teachers attending both productions, none had ever seen a production of Long Day's Journey, although one had played Mary decades earlier in college. The majority of these students expected to enjoy seeing The Count of Monte Cristo, assuming it would resemble other recent literary adaptions in the OSF repertory, such as Fingersmith and A Wrinkle in Time. Some were curious to see if melodrama might be a theatrical form they could incorporate in their high school programs. In contrast, many expressed fears about seeing Long Day's Journey. One reason for this trepidation was that our two-week program is intensive and O'Neill's play was our last scheduled production. They were due to write papers analyzing the production elements and discussing how these elements contributed to the overall experience of the production. Many were afraid that, based on the reputation of the play as a masterpiece of great proportions, they would not be able to focus adequately on all of the elements of the play.So, it was with palpable trepidation that we entered the intimate Thomas Theatre. We were met by a living room setting, in a thrust configuration centered on a large stairway leading to an upper level of the house. On either side of the stairway, on the upstage wall, were rooms, darkly scrimmed and accessed by smaller stairways. Most curious was a large tree within the room stage left of the main staircase. High over the downstage area hung a tree branch.By the end of the first half, the teachers seemed exhausted but no longer tired. The uncut production script allows O'Neill to give a grueling introduction to the many troubles of the Tyrone family, and the repetition of their complaints makes one feel, after a couple of hours, as if one has spent the last forty years sharing their difficult and often disappointing lives. But as the production progressed the teachers seemed rejuvenated. Although no conditions change in the latter half of the play, connections are made between family members, so that grief, fear and even joy are shared. This is the payoff for a well-constructed production that leaves its audience uplifted and spiritually satisfied in a true realization of catharsis.Much of the overwhelming success of this production can be attributed to a stellar cast: Michael Winters as Tyrone, Judith-Marie Bergan as Mary, Danforth Comins as Edmund, and Jonathan Haugen as Jamie. Rounding out the cast is Autumn Buck as Cathleen. All but Buck, who is an acting trainee, are veteran actors in full command of their artistic sensibilities. And all have played numerous leading roles previously with OSF. Most important for a play such as Long Day's Journey, each member of the cast has been performing in this company for at least a decade (with the exception of Winters, whose tenure is only seven years). Director Christopher Liam Moore approaches this complicated material giving significant voice to the older Tyrone reliving the past as he recounts his memories. Moore, as far as I can tell, has left the script intact, trusting the company to find the throughline of action and maintain sufficient dramatic tension to fill every moment of the production. And this proves to be the result. The relationship among the actors, as well as the other artists behind this production—their long experience of working together over a period of years—helped give a sense that the scene on stage reflected the work of a sort of family, a complex and multifaceted entity that is also somehow a unit.Like so many of O'Neill's works, Long Day's Journey reveals its full power on stage. According to dramaturgical notes in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival playbill, the play had been percolating in director Christopher Liam Moore's mind since he was a teenager. While recent productions in Europe and Australia have dramatically cut the text (see the reviews by Schödel and Harris in EOR 36.2), Moore's use of the entire text brings out the play's full complexity. Dialogue that seems to be repetitious on reading can be heard as Tyrone conversational tropes, often repeated to scathing effect but part of the communicative pathology of this family. These tropes are at first humorous, then unnerving, and finally exhausting. The individual characters coming into a greater awareness of their common history becomes the experience shared by audiences.Following the ordeal of the first half, each character is redefined, not just as a part of the family, but as an individual. In each case—Edmund's moment on shipboard, James's moment on stage with Booth, and Mary's moment of faith in the Virgin Mary—the individuals become whole and complete as they relive these pivotal moments of their lives. For the moment, Jamie is left without respite from his guilt, a condition that O'Neill resolves imaginatively in his last play, A Moon for the Misbegotten. The desire to once again be alone and healed in that cell of the past fuels the angst and tragedy of the Tyrones' existence.In this staging, Moore utilized a memory frame that occasionally took Edmund outside the action into his older artistic self, reforming the events of his life into an articulate dramatic statement. The added structure worked but significantly focused the action on Edmund, adding irony and double entendre to James's reoccurring query to Edmund during their act 4 casino game, “Whose play is it?” This framing also slightly altered meaning since, in this production, O'Neill's fictional family exits, leaving a final image of Edmund weeping and alone rather than the family together at the table.While Moore's directing is excellent in its moment-to-moment telling of this story, his affinity for stamping a play as his own by actualizing traditionally unseen action is occasionally ineffective (he did the same sort of thing in OFS's 2013 production of A Streetcar Named Desire). In this case, he places Mary on a visible landing in act 4 as she starts to descend the staircase, before returning to her second-floor reverie. While this deviation from O'Neill's stage directions is effective, Moore's subsequent choice to reveal Mary wandering through the unused stage manager's booths that surround the audience in the Thomas Theatre, as if this were part of the cottage, was intrusive, as more important action was occurring on stage. Mary's unseen presence upstairs was clearly never far from the attention of either the characters onstage or the audience.The lighting by James F. Ingalls and costumes by Meg Neville were extremely effective. Ingalls contrasted stark realism with a murky dreamlike quality as the play progressed. Neville's costumes nicely contrasted the Tyrone men's roles as vacationing gentlemen during the day with their evening “on the town” drinking wear. But more important, Neville reflected Mary's affinity with the Virgin Mary through the blue and white color palette used throughout the play. Unfortunately, several scenic choices by Christopher Acebo seemed downright confusing. The presence of that upstage center tree is never explained, referenced, or used. While several teachers reached for interpretations of this image, such as a “family tree,” ultimately it is an empty symbol and superfluous to the action. Moreover, Acebo's design is too grand to meet the needs of the play. An expensive-looking parquet floor and massive stairway, crafted to give Mary a grand entrance in act 4, counter Mary's description of the house as “cheaply built.” The addition of the scrimmed dining room and back parlor between the main playing space and the upstairs floor give the impression of a large, three-story house, a playing space that likewise contradicts what is said in the scene description. But these few flaws do not negate the power and beauty of this production. The technical excellence of the performances, along with the actors' complete commitment to their roles and the accompanying artistic support of one of the best theaters in the United States, created one of the more powerful productions this critic has ever seen.The same cannot be said for The Count of Monte Cristo. To be clear, this play was intended to move its audiences in a different manner, in a much different culture. This melodrama, as is true with most melodramas, was intended to entertain in a manner that had popular appeal from one hundred to two hundred years ago. Many of the conventions prevalent in those years seem dated now, such as the use of short asides to indicate a character's thoughts or the use of treadmills, wind machines, or other theatrical tricks to provide movement and excitement. Such mechanisms have all been replaced by other conventions and technology or are simply no longer used. But there is something heroic about mounting a serious melodrama in contemporary theater, as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has done in this eightieth-anniversary season. Melodrama's chief traits were thrilling action, heightened emotions, special effects, and stock characters representing clear difference between good and evil, also, of course, music. James O'Neill's Monte Cristo opened in 1882, and during the next thirty years he played Edmund Dantès over four thousand times. Few stage actors have become so famous or so wealthy playing one part for so long. Despite James O'Neill's artistic dissatisfaction returning to this role over so many years, it is evident that his acting and staging style somehow engaged the imagination and desire for entertainment from the mass theater audience from the 1880s through the 1900s.Melodrama's popularity waned as film began to replace theater as the entertainment of the lower and middle classes, opening the door for serious playwrights, such as Eugene O'Neill, to create a more artistic and thoughtful dramaturgy. Given this context, producing a melodrama on today's stage is both rare and daring because on some level it is doomed to fail. The aesthetics of acting in the nineteenth century were quite different from those today. Influenced by the Delsarte technique, the art of acting relied on the beauty of vocal quality and a codified set of gestures meant to indicate the character's state of mind rather than emotional realism. Moreover, today's actors are exempt from performing the kind of action onstage that made melodrama thrilling—swordfights, dangerous climbs or falls, and the like. It is emotional acrobatics we expect of today's actors, not stunts. Marcela Lorca's attempt to stage this warhorse of a melodrama for Oregon Shakespeare Festival was risky, as the audiences must not only “willingly suspend disbelief” but also must suspend their idea of what defines excellence in theatrical values today. The choice of Lorca as director proved excellent to effect this translation from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century: Lorca is a choreographer and movement director who also studied design early in her career. She utilized both skills to create vivid and constantly moving stage pictures as the chief means of communication in this production.Her style was evident from the first scene when a floundering ship is portrayed through dance and movement. The pictorial effects used in James O'Neill's time are at best mundane and often comical for today's audiences. Not all “sensation scenes” were as effective; when Edmond Dantès is thrown from the Château d'If, the audience could see the wrapped body being carried by guards to the top level of the Allen Theatre (they believe it to be the corpse of the deceased Abbé Faria), and the waves below were suggested by blue flags. But the body is released in a sudden lighting shift (it is actually never dropped), and suddenly Dantès appears among the waves. This is a moment that demands high tension and theatrical magic, but it failed to create the sense that the character was in danger and fighting for his life, and so the moment when he pulled himself from the water and shouted, “The world is mine!,” seemed more ludicrous than triumphant.The acting in the first half of the play was uneven, as several embraced a nineteenth-century acting style while others seemed to hang on to contemporary realism. Vilma Silva, as Edmond's fianceé Mercédès, was superbly over the top. Her love for Edmond came across as unabashed passion and later perpetual longing. By contrast, Al Espinosa, as Edmond, seemed to vacillate between stylized and realistic acting, with the former prevailing when the text called for hyperbolic emotion, such as when soldiers came to arrest him at his own wedding. The mostly flat first half of the production was nonetheless delightfully punctuated by the periodic reappearance of Robin Goodrin Nordli as Noirtier, the mysterious Bonaparte sympathizer, sister of the prosecutor (a gender reversal from the text), who inadvertently sends Dantès to his doom. Also effective was Derrick Lee Weeden in the small but significant part of Faria, Dantès' mentor in prison, who provides him with the opportunity to escape and the location of the Monte Cristo fortune that finances Edmond's revenge.In the second half, following Dantès' transformation into the mysterious Count, Espinosa brought more panache to his performance. For many in the audience, however, this was too late. Moreover, Dylan Paul as Albert, son of Mercédès and Dantès, seemed to make no accommodation to the play's mood and genre. His understated performance seemed out of place and confusing. As Dantès commences to inflict his revenge on the three men who have wrongfully imprisoned him, the play takes a more entertaining turn. Dantès indicates success by turning to the audience and counting out his conquests—one, two, three! The fact that each of these moments elicited cheers and applause from the audience indicated their emotional involvement and the production's success in harnessing the material of melodrama.Within the structure of the play, Lorca developed an interesting convention to indicate the many character asides, an almost kabuki gesture, bringing a stylistic charm to the play. Moreover, several songs were included to complement the action. Much of this music was created by various musician/performers on stage, lending another dimension of style to the production. Unfortunately, the climax of the production, the swordfight between Dantès and his nemesis Danglars (Raffi Barsoumian), was partially stylized and partially presented at full speed. Sword fighting was a crucial skill to actors a hundred and fifty years ago, and it brought many a play to a stirring finish. Nowadays, artful image is preferred, but it fails to generate the same thrill, as in this production, which came to a modest conclusion.With The Count of Monte Cristo, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival attempted to reanimate a genre of theater that has passed from historical memory. While this production entertained well enough and experimented with acting style and imagery, it also seemed to prove that these effects are best left to film.For the perceptive theater patron, such as the high school teachers in my group, these two productions provided small and subtle points of continuity between the plays. Michael Winters played both James Tyrone and the father of Edmond Dantès in Monte Cristo. On the Tyrones' table in Long Day's Journey Into Night sits a script that is referred to several times. It was obviously a copy of James's star vehicle, awaiting his attention in the off-season. But there is a larger conversation connecting these two plays, one that speaks to a development in dramatic form and intention. These plays bookend Eugene O'Neill's professional life. The Count of Monte Cristo, considered fluff entertainment in its time, could be seen in 2015 as an extraordinary experience for theater patrons, providing a rare opportunity to see a long-dormant theatrical style but ultimately demonstrating the shortcomings of the form and supporting the modernist impulse to create a more vital, substantial, and relevant form of drama. One may appreciate the opportunity to sample this form of theater, but this production does not inspire a desire to explore the genre more fully.Long Day's Journey Into Night, on the other hand, connected the action on stage with the experiences and emotions of the contemporary patron. It demonstrated the power of O'Neill's art to rise beyond text and use all the languages of theater to unify his themes and produce a meaningful and cathartic effect. Staging these productions side by side provides a rare opportunity to witness the evolution of theatrical methods and to engage the social and cultural development of which we are the product.