Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Long Day's Journey Into Night

2019; Penn State University Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.40.1.2019.0103

2161-4318

David Palmer,

The playbill for the Stratford Festival's production of Long Day's Journey Into Night depicts Mary, James, and a ghost light—the light that stands on an empty stage to appease ghosts when actors are not performing. Many commentators have noted O'Neill's confrontation with his own ghosts while he lived at Tao House (1937–44), especially in The Iceman Cometh (1939), Long Day's Journey Into Night (1941), and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1941–43). This outstanding production takes confrontation with ghosts as the play's theme and thus provides an insightful interpretation of what those ghosts are and how these three plays are related.At Stratford, Long Day's Journey is not primarily about a family struggling to maintain mutual love despite their inability to forgive each other. Here, underlying that failure is each character's inability to forgive himself or herself. The four main characters confront the self-serving delusions by which they protect themselves from disappointment and shame. This elaborates on Mary's often-quoted line in act 2: None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they are done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever. As O'Neill entered his fifties in a remote hillside mansion on the edge of the wilderness outside Danville, California, he compulsively explored the role of pipe dreams in a human life, the comforting delusions we use to protect ourselves from potentially crippling realities. The collapse of delusion informs O'Neill's vision of tragedy in his Tao House plays. At the end of this production, all four Tyrones seem in a state like Larry Slade's at the end of Iceman: bereft of the self-serving delusions they had used to give direction and significance to their lives. The Tyrone men recognize that they are like Mary. Like the residents of Harry Hope's flophouse in Iceman, the Tyrones embrace Baudelaire's dictum to “be drunk continually,” which Edmund quotes in act 4.Only after seeing this production did I understand how the first three acts, for all their action and discourse, merely set up the situations and relationships that provide the background for act 4—essentially a sequence of four tragic soliloquies culminating in the play's last lines, Mary's devastating statement of lost dreams: “Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.”The Studio Theatre at Stratford is perfect for this play. A thrust stage with 260 seats on its steep three sides, it enhanced the claustrophobic intimacy of the Tyrones' relationships. Set designer Peter Hartwell made a table with four chairs the focus of the scene, as O'Neill specifies in his stage directions. Other productions have highlighted the stairway that gives Mary access to the privacy of the second floor, but Hartwell's set shifts the play's focus to the full family. The table and four chairs become emphatic: somehow the Tyrones must sit at that table with each other and engage. This setting complements the focus on each Tyrone's confrontation with his or her personal failures and ghosts. Indeed, the production opens with the servant Cathleen coming on stage to remove the ghost light.Scott Wentworth, with the festival as actor and director for twenty-four seasons, was impressive as James. In the first three acts he seemed self-centered, gruff, and bullying, evidently the source of his family's frustration. This shifts in his soliloquies in act 4, where he describes his mother's struggle with the family's poverty and the collapse of his own dreams for a distinguished theatre career after yoking himself to “that God-damned play I bought for a song.” In some performances, this line seems like another fraudulent attempt to evoke Edmund's pity. But for Wentworth these lines were a genuine confession, an exposition of the fears and disappointments that have shaped him. Wentworth achieved his effect through timing. At the end of his speech on the financial success of Monte Cristo, he was near tears: “What the hell was it I wanted to buy, I wonder, that was worth—[Here the pause is indicated in O'Neill's text.] Well, no matter. [Here Wentworth took a few extra beats.] It's a late day for regrets.” It was that second pause, before the explicit expression of regret, that brought the audience to tears in communion with Wentworth.Mary often is portrayed as struggling primarily with her addiction. Here, Seana McKenna, another Stratford veteran, made it clear that Mary's struggle is first with loneliness and her sense that she has failed to create the home that she believes is requisite for a woman of her class. Morphine is not her problem but her escape from loneliness and failure. This Mary is clearest in her personal confession to Edmund in act 2: How could you believe me—when I can't believe myself. I've become such a liar. I never lied about anything once upon a time. Now I have to lie, especially to myself. But how can you understand, when I don't understand myself. I've never understood anything about it, except that one day long ago I found I could no longer call my soul my own. This could have been said by any of the Tyrones. The inability to maintain the pipe dreams that enable them to shed responsibility and cope with disappointments and shame is the essence of each of their tragedies.The character who depicts this theme most vividly in the Stratford production is Jamie. As portrayed by Gordon S. Miller, Jamie's cynicism and bravado barely conceal his fear of his own fraudulence. In many productions, Jamie's rambling speeches in act 4 become nearly incoherent as he swings among contrasting moods and conflicting statements, but Miller made sense of it all. He warns Edmund against his own corrosive influence not with anger but fear, here as elsewhere conveying doubt that he is capable of overcoming the inauthenticity of his professed attitudes, the innate viciousness of his character, and his fundamental weakness before the challenges of reality. The key to this Jamie is his speech to Edmund in act 4 about his disappointment over his mother's relapse: “I'd begun to hope, if she'd beaten the game, I could, too.” Perhaps better than any of the other Tyrones, Miller's Jamie understands his mother's sense of disappointment in her own life, the loneliness to which it drives her, and her desperate need to escape. He hopes Mary's turn toward truth and engagement will presage his own salvation. Her failure reanimates the fear of inauthenticity that his wise-guy cynicism barely disguises. One now sees how this Jamie becomes the Jim Tyrone who walks away from Josie Hogan at the end of A Moon for the Misbegotten because he cannot believe in his own ability to accept the love she offers him.Charlie Gallant brought a simultaneous toughness and vulnerability to the role of Edmund, the character in which O'Neill depicts himself. We could see the physical pain of Edmund's illness; his mix of bitterness, confusion, and love for his family members; and his determination to act as a peacekeeper while providing the space for others to move beyond delusion and face the difficult truths that entrap them. But Gallant's Edmund is not beyond the disappointment and fear that undermine the lives of the other family members. In his act 4 soliloquy about “fog people,” we feel his fear that his attempts to speak truth will always be stammering: as young as he is, he anticipates a life of failure like that of the other Tyrones.Amy Keating excelled in delivering comic relief in this bleak portrait of a household in collapse. Priding herself on being down-to-earth and pragmatic, this Cathleen has a solid if naive sense of self that any of the Tyrones might envy. Her hopeful self-confidence contrasts with the Tyrones' despair and accents the depth of their tragedy.This was an outstanding production, well conceived and excellently staged and acted. It delved below the surface issues of drug addiction or failures of forgiveness to explore the underlying personal disappointments and shame of each Tyrone. In confronting ghosts, each Tyrone confronted not the others but himself or herself—much as O'Neill himself did in creating the three great autobiographical plays that he wrote at Tao House. This production captured the deep sadness and fear of the Tyrones vividly. I was in tears at the end, as were my wife and the woman sitting next to us. I doubt there were many dry eyes in the house as the audience rose in unison to give the performance a standing ovation.