Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Into Night: A Day at Tao House

2024; Penn State University Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.45.1.0094

2161-4318

Alexander Pettit,

Japanese History and Culture

William Davies King's Into Night dramatizes the genesis, composition, and making-public of Long Day's Journey Into Night, from circa 1940 to the period between O'Neill's death in 1953 and the publication of his play three years later. The final scene darts ahead past the 1976 opening of Eugene and Carlotta O'Neill's former home, Tao House, and the Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site in Danville, California. This is a niche play, written by a scholar of O'Neill for the delight and enrichment of his fellow specialists, without pretense of broader appeal. It's also a critical interpretation of Long Day's Journey and an inquiry into relationships among families, readers, viewers, and playwrights. And it's a heavily asterisked comedy—not a dark comedy but rather a play that relishes wit while recognizing it as one compulsion among many. King sets the play at the O'Neills' home at Tao House, but a Tao House laid out and furnished like Monte Cristo Cottage, as filtered through O'Neill's memory in Long Day's Journey.Into Night played twice in 2022, script in hand both times, once in the Old Barn at Tao House and again, two weeks later, at the Eleventh International Conference on Eugene O'Neill in Boston. Titian Lish replaced Cynthia Lagodzinski as Carlotta in the later performance; otherwise the cast was unchanged. King participated both times by reading contextual passages from the script and, with director Eric Fraisher Hayes, by anchoring the talk-back session.Untangling the plot requires a sobriety at odds with the capabilities of its characters: James, Mary, and Edmund Tyrone; Eugene and Carlotta O'Neill; and the Tyrones' "second girl," Cathleen, who becomes a National Park Service ranger and Tao House tour guide in the last act. Act 1 opens with a "maid scene," conventional but fraught for showing Cathleen confronting the mess left by the Tyrone men at the end of O'Neill's play. Carlotta joins Cathleen and frets about "Mr. O'Neill's" diet, as Mary frets about Tyrone's in Long Day's Journey. The Tyrones enter, confused by their surroundings but intent on speaking their familiar opening lines, because, of course, James Tyrone has never missed a performance. Eugene enters, coughs like his prototype Edmund; grouses about the difficulty of writing, as O'Neill did; and, like Mary Tyrone, complains about the "constant suspicion" with which the others regard him. He escapes upstairs to work on Long Day's Journey, setting up the dope/writing dyad that will become central to the play.Much of act 2 is given over to Eugene and his wife/mothers. King wants us to see that Eugene and Carlotta are well matched, contrary to biographical orthodoxy. The poems he loves, she loves, too; her rich description of Mary Tyrone's lace-trimmed wedding dress resurfaces in his, or their, play, unaltered (if I may). With Mrs. O'Neill, Eugene acts like a writer and a husband, a suitor even. With Mrs. Tyrone, he plays the durably adolescent Eugene, often verbatim. Mary, recognizing that she cannot be Mary absent the complete play, declares that Eugene "must go upstairs, for all of us." Eugene eagerly takes the hint. Midway through act 2, Cathleen starts drinking.Act 3: Cathleen keeps drinking. Tyrone rehearses lines from Othello and the radio blares news from the war in Europe, while Cathleen boozily enacts King's reimagining of Long Day's Journey, act 2, scene 1, "tak[ing] two bottles of pills and plac[ing] them on the table, along with a pitcher of water—like setting up a ritual." Husband and wife take the pills, their chairs "keep[ing] them separated, but oddly attached," in a stage direction that telegraphs King's sense of their marriage. The "something like a 'dream ballet'" that follows jars, but compellingly. Cathleen performs a comic drunk scene laced with sadness and anger—a set piece with subtext. Eugene and Carlotta drift together into a world of wit, reverie, and allusion. They are joined, or interrupted, by Tyrone and Mary, the latter still yearning to be completed by Eugene's play, lines and motifs from which swirl through the quartet's dialogue, often en route to O'Neill's text. Eugene goes upstairs.King recently overhauled his third act, perhaps because dramatizing the disorder of O'Neill's draft requires an apparently disordered dramaturgy that asks too much of actors. The wise and beautiful act 4 is no "easier," but it is more cohesive. Tao House is open (i.e., O'Neill is dead); James and Mary Tyrone are visiting; and Cathleen, as the tour guide, recounts Eugene and Carlotta's later years. Eugene? Upstairs. Having heard Cathleen remark that "[Long Day's Journey] would be withheld until twenty-five years after Gene's death" (emphasis in typescript), Mary anxiously concludes that she and James are in "limbo." Carlotta prefers the term "waiting room," keyed by Cathleen's decorous revelation that O'Neill would come to regard Tao House as Carlotta's "masterpiece." Like O'Neill in Long Day's Journey, she has made art of home. James and Mary become querulous; tired and reclining, they "are like two corpses." Eugene descends in the final moments, stoned but rejuvenated, like Mary Tyrone. James recovers sufficiently to greet him with the snotty redo, "The Mad Scene. Enter Hamlet!," making of himself a version of the Jamie that Edmund slaps, much to his father's approval. But King's Tyrone is embarrassing, not, like Jamie in Long Day's Journey, appalling. The women silence him with a simple "Tssss." Eugene presents Mary the first edition of Long Day's Journey; in a gesture of grace and resignation, Mary passes it to Carlotta. The group coalesces: per the dictates of comedy, the house, the future, belongs to the younger couple, not their antecedents. The exorcistic strain is soft but unmistakable.As befits a play that weds art and scholarship, Into Night has "something like a 'thesis.'" King offered one in the prefatory headnote that he read out loud: "[Into Night] originates in and grows from the time and space in which it was written." The familiarity of this new-historicist conceit masks its ambitiousness. As should be clear from the foregoing, among the responsibilities it visits upon King is the obligation to plead for Tao House's "genius of the place," Carlotta, and thus to confront the O'Neillian wife/mother muddle head-on. King highlights but declines to judge O'Neill's Oedipalism; rather, he posits dignity in Carlotta's acceptance of it. "[Eugene] always needs his mother," says Carlotta, "but recreated and improved in me, here in the living room" (emphasis in typescript). O'Neill, the fugitive father, is a serial son. The mother figure is a coparent. King taunts us: to denigrate the relationship is to deny the conditions that fed Long Day's Journey.Indeed, character-blurring is King's signature move in this play, as it is in The Great God Brown, Days Without End, and elsewhere in O'Neill's oeuvre. King's Eugene speaks lines written for O'Neill's Mary to his own Carlotta (e.g., "Why are you so suspicious all of a sudden?"); Carlotta gets one that O'Neill assigned to Edmund ("Now don't start imagining things . . ."). The kaleidoscopic dialogue often creates comical juxtapositions, but I suspect that King is making a point: the "four haunted Tyrones" to whom O'Neill offered "deep pity and understanding and forgiveness" in the play's dedication, he suggests, are James and Mary Tyrone [O'Neill] and Eugene and Carlotta O'Neill [Tyrone]. Not Jamie. Clotted in Eugene's imagination, the playwright himself, his parents, and his wife are the tangle that must be tamed in order to create Long Day's Journey. O'Neill thought he hadn't done his brother justice in that play and, to Carlotta's dismay, tried again in A Moon for the Misbegotten. Jamie is the absent presence in King's play; in recognition of the "real" Carlotta's disdain for her dead brother-in-law, Jamie becomes an ambient threat. A radical compression of time in act 3, signaled by Mary's "Where's Jamie, James?" moments before the clock strikes eight, triggers a sequence in which King moves through four hours at warp speed before mercifully closing the scene with twelve long tolls—the signal of Jamie's horrific reentry in Long Day's Journey.In script as on stage, the compression registers as suspense and anxiety. The "new" quartet of Tyrones could not survive Jamie's presence. King suggests that Carlotta O'Neill guyed Jamie well, unburdened as she was by her husband's residual love for his brother. Did O'Neill acknowledge as much in A Moon for the Misbegotten, which ends with Jamie's expulsion, in the high tragic mode? Into Night ends comically, with the "four [de facto] Tyrones" reconciled. Eugene's last speech mashes up Jamie Tyrone and Jimmy the Priest from O'Neill's dark years—"painted face[s] on a trip down Suicide Road," to nod at a later Nobel laureate. As in comedy since antiquity, the sanctity of the home is reestablished. "A long journey to this house . . .," begins Carlotta moments before the final curtain; "where I was so happy for a time," Eugene concludes. Deft, that.King's elevation of Carlotta is essentially and at times uneasily feminist. (Brenda Murphy's fictionalized Carlotta in her 2018 novel, Becoming Carlotta, provides a rough analogue.) This Carlotta writes conspicuously and with purpose. Hayes's positioning of her desk stage right, front, gilds the lily by recalling his placement of Edmund's desk in his 2019 production of Long Day's Journey. Carlotta has read the "superior minds" and owns "most of" the books that visitors to Tao House, and viewers of Long Day's Journey, will assume were her husband's. (James mocks these claims. She pushes back.) But King's recovery effort is clearest in his address (redress?) of a core irony (hypocrisy?) in O'Neill's play: three snockered men collectively bemoaning a lone woman's addiction to morphine. Again, domestic space is at issue. To Carlotta, "upstairs is death," the antithesis of the "living room." But in Long Day's Journey, the "living" room is a site of cruelty, evasion, anger, and debauch; here, to indulge an overused word, it's liminal. Carlotta's dichotomy violates King's source knowingly: this Mrs. O'Neill will make this room—her "masterpiece"—"live." O'Neill must ascend to create his: upstairs might be death, but art lives there, too. This is the play's central irony and the source of much of its dramatic tension.As all this will suggest, Into Night is a heavy lift in performance. Its repetitions and permutations probably complicate cuing; its reliance on tonal modulations and patter-and-schtick perhaps challenges contemporary actors. Hayes managed his cast well. John Tessmer (Eugene) benefited from his resemblance to O'Neill but more so from his melding of comic befuddlement and panicky impatience. His Eugene was never sure where he ends and his characters begin; he madly transcribed their words one moment and wondered who they were the next. Tessmer knows when to lean on and when to dial down his comic chops. Titian Lish found an ordinariness in Carlotta that countered the questionable academic habit of regarding her as extravagantly viperish. This Carlotta was more pragmatic than cunning, per King's script, and flirtatious at times, in the manner of James and Mary in O'Neill's first scene. Her delivery of Carlotta's injunction to Cathleen "never [to] build a way out of the house for a man you love" emphasized both her character's possessiveness and her studied servitude, while reminding the audience of her role as creator of Tao House. Kevin Copps played James understatedly, in accord with King's relative lack of investment in that character. He wasn't hammy or stentorian because he didn't need to be, and his reticence enabled him to avoid traps that can tempt the incautious performer. Playing Mary here as she did in Hayes's Long Day's Journey, Carole Swann was in the unenviable position of trying to act far older than she is, in a role that makes much of aging. The strain showed.The star of the show was Caitlin Evenson, the perfect vehicle for animating King's endorsement of the trend toward fleshed-out comic Cathleens. King embeds Cathleen in the play, rather than giving her a shortish turn that, once upon a time, too readily declared itself a candidate for cutting. O'Neill's Cathleen gets tipsy, then exits. King's Cathleen gets smashed and lingers in the drunk scene that sprawls across two acts and, like the schtick, the puns, and banter, feels appropriately retrogressive in a play about a play about retrogression. Evenson rose to the occasion splendidly, but she knew when to stand down, too. I relished the exasperation of the "Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, luncheon is served!" that marks her exit in the second act. One act later, her barked announcement that "dinner is ruined, what there was of it, burned beyond all hope of recognition" was perfectly pitched as well. But Evenson's park ranger becomes a foil—a framing device, really—in the fourth act, as Mary and the others ponder their lives in "waiting" or "limbo." After Eugene's final descent, Evenson reentered as the ranger "to share the applause and show [the characters] the way out." We'd grown to like her by then; perky and professional as a ranger, she seemed "an emissary from the world of reality," to borrow a gem from Tennessee Williams. King found an effective way of reintroducing a "minor" character at curtain while acknowledging her importance. In Boston, Evenson's "share" of the applause was considerable.The fact that one struggles to imagine a future for this challenging and narrowly pitched play points up the author's generosity in writing it. This is a "peculiar" play, to apply Mary Tyrone's description of her husband, which, in King's play, becomes Carlotta O'Neill's description of hers. It's a "handsome" play, too, to invoke Cathleen's own appraisal of Tyrone in the source play.