Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Long Day's Journey Into Night

2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.37.2.297

2161-4318

Alexander Pettit,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

Although the twenty-first century finds the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex richer in high-quality theater than your average Yankee might suppose, most of the better companies favor Shakespeare, Shakespeare, and Shakespeare or gritty plays of recent vintage. This arrangement might satisfy the likes of O'Neill's James Tyrone (“we are such stuff as dreams are made on”) and his reactive son Edmund (“we are such stuff as manure is made on”), but plenty of us hereabouts would relish more frequent evidence of drama between, say, Bottom and Top Girls. Gratification has come from an unexpected source. Undermain Theatre, an edgy company named for its subterranean space on the periphery of downtown Dallas, has since 1984 promoted the usual icons of the European avant-garde as well as newer and still more discomforting playwrights, many of whom, like the company itself, have worn their punk tatters proudly into a respectable maturity. Perhaps nudged toward O'Neill by Artistic Director Katherine Owens's fondness for Strindberg, the company has finally worked its way to O'Neill, whose late masterpiece Owens herself has smartly directed.On balance, the production is a fine one, and at its best it is splendid. A boxy dark-wood set more Old West than New London jars a bit, but company member Bruce DuBose's Tyrone sweeps aside such niggling concerns upon his entrance, flattering and flirting with his suitably disengaged wife, played by Joanna Schellenberg. DuBose's relish for acting the actor is evident from the get-go, and not the least of costume designer Giva Taylor's contributions is her nod to Monte Cristo, Tyrone's “God-damned play that I bought for a song,” in the dark jacket and the flowing, amply lapeled white shirt that Tyrone wears in the histrionic fourth act. DuBose's devastating delivery of Tyrone's definitional line—“what the hell was it I wanted to buy”—reveals a man raging at a persona he cannot shed. To coin a phrase, Tyrone needs always to be “in characters.” DuBose never forgets this, and I expect henceforth to hear his velvety baritone, now pleading, now declamatory, whenever I read this play.One wonders if O'Neill's doomed stipulation that Long Day's Journey never be performed is in part an acknowledgment of the difficulty of casting Mary Tyrone, the center that won't hold and the lead who wants only to exit. Schellenberg's disconcertingly youthful Mary is thoughtful and deliberate but rarely transmits the addict's urgency; we sense a general preference for the upstairs, spare-room high over the downstairs depression, not a consuming need to shoot up now, or else. More substantively, Schellenberg cannot reclaim the stage for her character when she returns at play's end, wedding dress in tow. Perhaps DuBose, Shelby Davenport (James Tyrone Jr.), and Josh Blann (Edmund) have played the preceding scenes more well than wisely; perhaps the daunting brevity of Mary's famous curtain speech stacks the deck against all but the rarest actor. Plenty of talented actors have come up short in this demanding role, and when Schellenberg shines—for example in her twitchily comic scene with the “second girl” Cathleen (Katherine Bourne)—she shines as brightly as the eyes that betray her illness.The play's irony crystallizes in the moments prior to Mary's final entrance, when the Tyrone men drink themselves pie-eyed and fret about her addiction. The underlying calamity here concerns the destabilization of the familial quartet. Mary has cheated the men by renouncing the role of recovering addict, which had allowed her, neatly if briefly, to serve as both the foil for those subject to “the good man's failing” and the receptor of a love that O'Neill portrays as vast if not entirely wholesome. Davenport in particular excels at navigating the emotional extremes that come to dominate the men's characters: rage at Mary's betrayal and the quieter ache of unrequitedness. Confronting the likelihood that Edmund, too, will defect, Jamie is scared, pissed off, cruel, and very, very drunk. Soon, he knows, he will be stranded in the home of an aging father who will always measure his son's accomplishments against his own. Davenport manages this tangle deftly, the more so for having been blessed with a visage that conveys near-blankness as effectively as animation. If he is more credible as Edmund's pal than his nemesis, he nonetheless hints that an embrace of the darker role is as near as the next gulp of bourbon.Blann's Edmund is at times overshadowed by the other male actors. This is more or less true to O'Neill's script, but Blann sometimes suggests callowness where one might prefer a bruised determination to appear adult. He fares best—and then well indeed—in the celebrated scene where he and Tyrone punctuate a meaningless hand of cards with shared thoughts about the higher pleasures of even (as Tyrone would have it) lower literature. I can't say whether Blann or Owens deserves credit for the mocking tone that Edmund brings to his recitation of Jamie's beloved Dowson, but I appreciate the critical point: Dowson is good enough, but he's Jamie's good enough, and Edmund is bound somewhere better, as his surprised, if muted, appreciation of his father suggests. Here Edmund sneers at the sneerer, upending the family dynamics in a manner both promising and unpleasant, like much in the Tyrone household.I cannot close without returning to Kathleen Bourne, the Cathleen of the moment and for me, I suspect, many moments to come. Undermain is to be cheered for supporting this superb young actor, who recently excelled in their first-rate production of Martin McDonagh's The Night Alive. Like McDonagh's Aimee, Cathleen is something of a blank slate, a bit dim and unsure of herself or perhaps merely intent on seeming so. Both characters beg for an imaginative actor with the good sense to explore this distinction and a keen ear for the comic potentialities that doing so frees up. Enter Bourne, whose short periods on stage were among the most rewarding moments in a production hardly stingy in its apportioning of reward. I do hope that Undermain will continue to develop her.And I hope, too, that Owens and her talented colleagues will accept the thanks of an O'Neillian who had sorely needed to score, to employ a metaphor equally distasteful and inevitable.