The house sits on the Connecticut shore, its large windows overlooking the water. Comfortable if well-worn furnishings clutter the living room, bookcases and framed prints line the walls, and the wicker shades covering the windows hang askew; it has the look of a much-loved family residence. Yet this house, as Mary Tyrone likes to remind her husband, is not a home.
The Plymouth Theatre's extraordinary revival of Eugene O'Neill's masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night, is full of such contradictions--beneath his protective attentions, Jamie, the elder brother, harbors consuming resentment of his younger sibling Edmund; the male members of the Tyrone clan condemn Mary for her morphine dependence even as they drink themselves into oblivion; and patriarch James Tyrone buys one dubious piece of real estate after another even as he refuses to turn on more than one electric light in the evening.
These conflicts are perhaps not particularly exceptional conflicts within a family, especially a family battling fatal illness and crippling addiction, and one need not pay the price of a Broadway theater ticket to encounter or even understand sibling rivalry or marital bitterness. Indeed, the Tyrone clan is not purely a product of O'Neill's imagination, for its members and their flaws owe much to the playwright's own alcohol-plagued, extraordinarily dysfunctional family. That connection lends Long Day's Journey a distinctly American quality, for despite the play's obvious debts to Strindberg and Ibsen, cathartic exploration of familial traumas has become one of the central themes of American artistic output.
Familial traumas come fast and furious over the course of the single day chronicled in Long Day's Journey. Fisticuffs, both verbal and physical, break out with a regularity common to daytime television; meals devolve into drinking binges; and family members seem unable to rouse themselves out of their preferred methods of intoxication.
Under the pen of an ordinary playwright, or even a very good one, these themes can devolve into bargain-bin psychobabble. Yet no one could mistake the finely wrought, soul-wrenching drama that is Long Day's Journey for an ordinary play, and the artful four-hour grip O'Neill's play keeps on the audience makes it one of the paramount achievements of American theater.
Not surprisingly, Long Day's Journey consistently attracts the best American actors to fill its monumental roles. Fredric March, Jason Robards, Stacy Keach, Kevin Spacey, and Colleen Dewhurst have all walked the boards on Broadway as members of the Tyrone family, and Katharine Hepburn and Sir Ralph Richardson's performances in Sidney Lumet's film version rank among the greatest of American cinema. This production is no different.
James Tyrone (Brian Dennehy) is an ill-tempered alcoholic who considers few goods or services cheap enough for his family, even when it comes to proper medical care. Dennehy brings his characteristic bluster to the role of Tyrone, who seems to have absorbed every negative trait that could ever be ascribed to a father: he is stingy, emotionally removed from his children, and more at home at his club than at his own house. Nevertheless, Tyrone is determined to believe he is a good father, and that the problems his children experience are self-inflicted. He has no sympathy for Jamie and pays little attention to Edmund, whose devotion to the works of Nietzsche and other "morbid" philosophers Tyrone finds a pretentious affectation. Yet Dennehy's versatility makes Tyrone as convincing when expressing his love for Mary as when belittling his sons. His painful chronicle of his own childhood, delivered as an explanation of his parsimony, is among the most moving of the play; one can almost leave the theater hoping that Tyrone will change.
As the play opens, his 24-year-old son Edmund (Robert Sean Leonard) is suffering from the hacking cough symptomatic of consumption, yet Tyrone sees no reason to take Edmund to a specialist, relying instead on the advice of Dr. Hardy, whose dollar-a-visit charge is qualification enough to the stingy patriarch. Tyrone's paranoid delusions that medical professionals were attempting to drive him into bankruptcy led him to seek the least expensive doctor to help Mary (Vanessa Redgrave) deliver Edmund; that doctor's careless prescription of morphine to ease her post-natal pain cursed her with a consuming addiction.
Philip Seymour Hoffman, who seems to have made a career out of playing emotional losers, brings a surprising intensity to the stage as Jamie Tyrone. Hands perpetually thrust in his pockets, he strides about the stage and sprawls across a chair with equal boldness, in contrast to the quieter, solemn Edmund. Hoffman's Jamie is much like Dennehy's Tyrone in his ability to move with ease from tender expressions of affection to angry confrontation with only a few gulps of whiskey in between.
At 34, elder brother Jamie is a mediocre actor who finds his only pleasure in alcohol and prostitutes. Aside from those two vices, cultivating his resentment of Tyrone and Edmund is Jamie's consuming passion. Jamie blames Tyrone's frugality for Mary and Edmund's poor health, and also resents his father's successful acting career for consigning Jamie to life in the elder man's shadow. Jamie's relationship with Edmund is more complicated. To Jamie, his younger brother is the manifestation of everything he himself is not, a truth which alternately, and occasionally simultaneously, provokes loving and destructive feelings within him--a conflict which, despite the claims made in the melodramatic in vino veritas scene at the end of the play, is never fully resolved.
Robert Sean Leonard, although 10 years older than the character he plays, gives a strong performance as Edmund. The foil for the dissolute Jamie, Edmund spends much time at his desk in the corner of the room hunched over the works of philosophers and socialists, although his obsession with what Jamie calls "morbid poetry" conceals a passionate spirit revealed in his arguments with his father and brother. Occasionally, Leonard seems to get caught up in the drama of the moment, stumbling over lines as if the thoughts tumbling around in his head are all fighting for the opportunity to get out first. But this is a minor flaw that only minimally detracts from the production; it is perhaps appropriate that the most intellectual of the four family members has a difficult time conveying his thoughts to them.
The driving force of the play, of course, is Mary Tyrone. She is the subject of conversation when she is away and the leader of it when she is present; she uses her passive-aggressive tendencies to manipulate her husband and sons; she belittles and praises them as she sees fit.
Vanessa Redgrave's Mary is a consummate realization of the possibilities of the actor's craft. Both angrily vulnerable and serenely powerful, she dominates the stage whenever she is on it and frequently when she is not. Redgrave adopts the emaciated frailty of a woman beleaguered by health problems, shuffling distractedly around the set, fiddling with the sleeves of her dress, swaying weakly in a nonexistent breeze. Her hands, awkwardly clenched as if withered and useless, capture the eye whether restlessly lying in her lap or nervously poking at her hair; the rheumatism crippling them becomes a palpable force that only morphine can propitiate.
Yet Redgrave renders these infirmities so deftly that the striking beauty and vivacious charm that attracted Tyrone to Mary decades before are still evident. Even the manifestations of Mary's illnesses are graceful--never has a tug on a wisp of hair been so elegant as when Redgrave adjusts her braids.
And so Mary, radiant despite the ravages of illness, becomes another of Long Day's Journey's brilliant contradictions, another example of O'Neill's prowess as a playwright. She encapsulates the world of the play, where past, present, and future collide and combust, in its final line: "I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy, for a time."
Long Day's Journey into Night plays at the Plymouth Theatre, 236 West 45th Street, just west of Broadway. Performances are Tuesday through Saturday at 7 p.m., Saturday at 1 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Closes August 31.