Phillyist reviews... Long Day's Journey Into Night

Phillyist has been reading and reading about Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece for years, and so we watched Simpatico Theatre Project’s production of Long Day’s Journey into Night in a state of rapture. The play’s run ends on Sunday: you should see this.

O’Neill based Long Day’s Journey on his family’s history, and the troubled Tyrones are alter-egos for his mother, father, brother and O’Neill himself. The story begins after breakfast, with the Tyrone family waiting for the doctor’s report on Edmund’s (Eugene O’Neill) health. Edmund’s mother, Mary, insists that Edmund merely has a “summer cold,” and not the consumption that killed her father, but as her behavior becomes more and more erratic during the day, her husband and sons realize that she has begun taking morphine again, an addiction that has ruined the family’s life ever since Edmund’s birth. The men are horrified by her helplessness and dishonesty, and yet the three of them are all compulsive drinkers, and as the play progresses towards night, the family becomes consumed by alcohol, morphine and guilt.

Reading the text of Long Day’s Journey is quite a different experience from reading, say, Shakespeare: O’Neill provides exact stage directions and physical descriptions of the characters, and very little is left open for the reader’s interpretation. Therefore, Carol Laratonda’s direction should be praised for preserving the original sense of the play very well, and the Adrienne Theatre’s tiny Second Stage gives the feeling of being close up to the family’s disintegration. My only complaints were small ones: the Irishness and stage charisma of James Tyrone (Edmund’s father) are central to the character, and Steve Gleich, although a talented actor, seemed neither Irish nor vast enough. In certain moments where James stands and rages at his sons, Gleich’s performance seemed more nervy and weak than grand and blustering. And while I liked the way Kevin Meehan (playing Edmund) established himself as the youngest of the family, and how he portrayed the character’s anguish and bitterness, some of his physical choices were strange enough to break my suspension of disbelief: at various times he leaned out of chairs or hunched forward with a very artificial awkwardness.

These are small points, and Peggy Smith, playing Mary Tyrone, was fantastic, as was Allen Radway (playing Edmund’s brother, Jamie). Other reviewers noted the production’s changes to the ending: as the play ends, the spotlight falls on Edmund, who takes a pen from his pocket and begins to write. The change didn’t especially bother this reviewer, although it does give the production a more optimistic conclusion than the script calls for, suggesting that Edmund will escape his family and become the famous Eugene O’Neill, and write all this trauma down as catharsis. The danger of adding this final, hopeful image is that Long Day’s Journey already hints at Edmund’s future success as a writer, and both older brother and father give him their blessings once night falls, and so the script already flirts with a certain level of authorial self-indulgence. Perhaps the production should have trusted in the script’s original bleakness.

Kevin Meehan and Allen Radway appear in Sympatico Theatre Project's production of Long Day's Journey into Night, at the Second Stage at the Adrienne Theatre through March 29. Photo by Jennifer Pratt.