Long Days Journey into Night

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Long Day's Journey into Night (1956), a play by Eugene O'Neill. [Helen Hayes Theatre, 390 perf.; Pulitzer Prize, Tony, NYDCC Awards.] On an uncomfortably hot day in their New England summer home, the Tyrones confront their pasts and each other. James Tyrone ( Fredric March) is an aging actor, famous but miserly, who wasted his talent performing in the same trashy melodrama rather than risk failure in more adventuresome plays. To save pennies he had called in a quack doctor when his wife gave birth to their third son, Edmund ( Bradford Dillman). As a result of the poor treatment, Mary Tyrone ( Florence Eldridge) has been a drug addict ever since. Their eldest son, James Jr. ( Jason Robards), is a rakish, boozing ne'er‐do‐well, who is both pro‐tective of and jealous of his younger brother. As the day turns into night, the destructively probing conversations continue, until the rattled, drugged Mary appears in her wedding gown, reliving a happier, irreclaimable time. Louis Kronenberger wrote, “This relentless chronicle of O'Neill's riven and tormented family, mingling the fierce thrust of unblushing theatre with the harsh, unsoftened truth, may very possibly come to seem O'Neill's most substantial legacy to the American stage.” Written as a sort of autobiographical catharsis, its production violated O'Neill's stipulation that it not be performed until twenty‐five years after his death. Co‐producer José Quintero directed the superior cast and the long and difficult drama is continually revived. Notable New York productions were seen in 1971 with Robert Ryan, Geraldine Fitzgerald, James Naughton, and Stacy Keach; in 1976 with Robards (now playing the father), Zoe Caldwell, Michael Moriarty, and Kevin Conway; in 1981 with Earle Hyman, Gloria Foster, Peter‐Francis‐James, and Al Freeman Jr., in 1986 with Jack Lemmon, Bethel Leslie, Peter Gallagher, and Kevin Spacey; and in 2003 with Brian Dennehy, Vanessa Redgrave, Robert Sean Leonard, and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Long Day's Journey into Night, semi‐autobiographical play by Eugene O'Neill, written in 1941, posthumously produced and published (1956).

Recently released from an institution as cured of her drug addiction, Mary Tyrone, a handsome, nervous woman, is, in August 1912, once again at her summer home with her husband James, an aging former matinee idol, and their sons, Jamie, at 33 a hard‐drinking, cynical Broadway hanger‐on, and Edmund, a sickly, morbid intellectual. Mary's appearance and detached conversations soon make clear that she is not cured, and as the men drink heavily to escape reality, she nostalgically revives past dreams of becoming a nun or a concert pianist, and seems an innocent girl again. But she also reveals her addiction began when her miserly husband chose a quack doctor who treated her with morphine after her sickness in giving birth to Edmund. Like his mother, Edmund wants to “be alone …in another world …where life can hide from itself.” Like her too, he shows both love and hate for his family as he confronts his limited future as a consumptive, realizing that his father will send him to the cheapest state sanitarium, since he is expected to die. A similar ambivalence is exhibited by the debauched Jamie, who drunkenly tells Edmund how much he loves him and yet how much he hates him as responsible for their mother's addiction. As James curses the sad spectacle, Mary appears, trailing her wedding gown, utterly immersed in the happier past. Realizing that she is forever lost to them and that their fates are intimately bound with hers, they impassively contemplate their own destruction.