In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Eugene O’Neill faced his death at last, writing Long Day’s Journey Into Night, his greatest, most intimate play, a loving and bitter cenotaph to his mother, father, and brother.
Having rechristened the O’Neills as the Tyrones and substituted Edmund, the name of a brother who had died in infancy, for his own, O’Neill set the action on one ghastly summer’s day in 1912, a time when his diagnosis of tuberculosis threatened to collapse his mother back into a heroin addiction and fortify the self-pitying alcoholism of his father, elder brother, and himself.
These long-dead Tyrones have returned to the stage again, with Jessica Lange as Mary, Gabriel Byrne as her husband James, and Michael Shannon and John Gallagher Jr as their sons, Jamie and Edmund. If Jonathan Kent’s production sometimes suffers from low spirits and the script – with its repeated exclamations, recriminations and long quotations – can sound confoundingly circular, it remains a visceral and poetic evocation of familial tenderness and injury.
The close of the play has always belonged to Mary, but Lange gets hold of much of the rest of it, too. Her Mary, a part she first played in the West End in 2000, can seem sweet, flighty, frail, but there’s an adamantine spine beneath that softness, one that’s been built on need and hurt. When provoked, she can turn as vicious as any of the men and she knows how to make her words cut more cruelly and deeply.
Byrne brings great sympathy to James, a domestic tyrant who can’t help but see himself as a victim, which he is also. The scene in which he describes to Edmund the mistake he made by making a fortune in cheap melodrama rather than pursuing true artistry is deeply affecting.
Shannon, always a welcome and idiosyncratic stage presence, shows how Jamie’s cynicism and cruel bonhomie barely disguises a raw and aching self-hatred. In a late-night confession to Edmund, he says, “The dead part of me hopes you won’t get well.” Shannon is also disturbingly expert at playing drunk.
Gallagher, while an emotionally persuasive and likable actor, hasn’t yet captured the divided self that the rest of the cast portrays so finely. This is partly a consequence of the script, which endows Edmund with weakness rather than the monstrousness the other characters sometimes display, but also owes to a hesitation on Gallagher’s part to give over to the character’s selfishness and cloying weakness.
But even his performance offers a sense of the drama as both a profoundly realistic work and as one that operates on a symbolic level, as in late-period Ibsen. Perhaps O’Neill felt that he needed this very slight distance, just as Kent feels he needs small adornments, like a diaphanous curtain that wafts across the stage and the distant sounds of the sea.
As Edmund says, with pain and wonder: “Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it?” But at its best moments – and there are many – this Long Day’s Journey Into Night shows us life as it is and also the clarity and fog, the darkness and light, that surround it.
