Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Long Day's Journey Into Night

2014; Penn State University Press; Volume: 35; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.35.2.0278

2161-4318

J. Chris Westgate,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

Nestled in a small industrial park across from the train station in Fullerton, California, the Maverick Theater Company seems an unlikely place for insights into Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. The theater company is better known for struggles with insolvency than performances of American classics, having lost two previous locations in Orange, California. Now in its third incarnation, the company inhabits a small space with a long, narrow stage reminiscent of the Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal Street, and it uses non-Equity actors. Nevertheless, the Maverick's Long Day's Journey was a compelling evening of theater under the insightful directing of Joe Parrish, which produced some intriguing resonances for the play and its stage history.The production began with the entrance of Mary, played by Rose London, who walked to a Victrola against the upstage wall and played “Memories of Home” by the Neapolitan Trio, a recording which the Library of Congress dates to June 1911. A hauntingly beautiful song, which combines flute, harp, and violin, “Memories of Home” conveyed with its tranquil and wistful rhythms Mary's yearning for what she had lost by marrying James Tyrone. The song played for nearly a minute with Mary facing upstage, swaying gently and lost in a private reverie, which was punctured by the entrance of Tyrone, played by Joe Parrish, interrupting the music. This interpolation nicely established Mary's isolation and functioned as a complement to her later, opium-induced delusions. This music became a motif, with Mary returning to the Victrola at difficult moments, including after she reproached Edmund for spying on her and when Tyrone, Jamie, and Edmund left for their appointments in town. Intriguingly, the third act opened with the music playing but the needle slipping, implying that the song could provide solace no longer, significantly, after she has abandoned sobriety for opium.The Victrola music was just the first instance of the director's compelling use of stage properties to convey the themes of Long Day's Journey. During the crucial moment when Mary rebuked Edmund and delivered her devastating lines about the past becoming the present and the future, too, she held a black-and-white photograph of a child, surely Eugene. This photograph had been sitting on a shelf, stage right, an objective correlative of how the past becomes the present. Moreover, the photograph was next to the mirror into which Mary looked during the opening acts whenever she asked if her hair was coming down. Although it did not become evident until Mary held the photograph and described Eugene's death, her glances into the mirror brought her close to the ghostly image in the photograph, reminding her of her sense of responsibility for his death. There was even the suggestion that the propinquity of photograph and mirror reflected Mary's drive to punish herself, something conveyed in London's performance elsewhere, as when she slapped herself when she cannot pray to the Virgin Mary. Photographs haunt Mary elsewhere, including one of Tyrone as a matinee idol, which she shared with Cathleen, and one of her father, which she revealed to Edmund when he confronted her with his illness. The photographs acted as compelling extensions of the family's privileging of such objects as Mary's wedding dress and the note Booth gave Tyrone praising his Othello.These interpolations privileged Mary's struggles with the family's tragedy, an ambition rewarded by a strong performance by London, which emphasized Mary's isolation and vulnerability. Much of the time, London delivered her lines softly and with a hint of exhaustion in her voice, frequently while looking offstage or at an empty chair rather than at members of her family, which conveyed Mary's sense of disconnection from this house that is not a home and this family scarred by absence. You could feel how this detachment contrasted with the contented swaying to “Memories of Home.” Her delusions, too, lulled her into the certainty that only the past when they were happy is real—however temporarily. Yet when Mary must confront the truth, London lashed out furiously, sometimes at herself and sometimes at others, as when she slapped Edmund when he tried to make her face his illness. This privileging of Mary came at the expense of other characters, like Edmund, who was rather bland in Jeff Lowe's performance, which left Edmund sitting at the edge of the stage and writing in his notebook, more an observer than participant. Even more disappointing was Parrish's Tyrone, who was understated, even flat, without any of the style that seems necessary for a noted actor with a penchant for quoting Shakespeare.The most intriguing performance was from Eric Todd Baesel, who rendered Jamie with surprising vulnerability and sympathy, in contrast to the tradition of emphasizing Jamie's cynicism and self-destructiveness, which is traceable to Jason Robards's originating of the role in the United States. Unlike others, Baesel's Jamie has not yet given up on his family or himself, something that was conveyed by changes in the script made by Parrish, namely, having Jamie tell the story of Shaughnessy's pigs instead of Edmund. However much this altered O'Neill's text, having Jamie tell the story put him at the center of this solitary happy moment for the family, with Jamie getting big laughs for his animated recounting of the story with funny gestures and an Irish brogue. Moreover, Baesel emphasized Jamie's struggle to hold onto his family by downplaying his recrimination of Tyrone during the scene in which they argue about Edmund's illness. Even more compelling was the scene between Jamie and Edmund, with Baesel displaying remarkable vulnerability when Jamie instructed Edmund to tell everyone that his brother is dead but not to forget him, a moment when Baesel had tears in his eyes, conveying the awful truth of his apprehensions of abandonment.As represented in the Maverick production, the Tyrones were less the tragic family of American theater history (Una Chaudhuri dubbed them “America's First Family”) and more of one family struggling with tragedy, at times with kindness and laughter and at other times with resentment and tears, much like O'Neill described them, “scorning, loving, pitying each other, understanding yet not understanding at all, forgiving but still doomed never to be able to forget,” in his letter to George Jean Nathan. Although some might find this representation troubling and even insulting to the near-mythic quality of O'Neill's tragedy, I have to say that I found Long Day's Journey Into Night all the more poignant because of how Maverick Theater Company reimagined the Tyrones.