Long Day's Journey Into Night (October 2, 2007)

This is one of my very favourite plays. Period. It’s a very lyric story about emotional abuse only a family can inflict, while at the same time musing on how much of one’s situation is one’s own making, and/or undoing. I read it for the first time when I was in high school (not for a class, just for my own curiosity) but had never seen it staged. It is 4 hours long.

So, I was very excited when I saw that it would be performed at the Dublin Theatre Festival. We went to a preview show a day or two before it was officially starting, as the festival was just kicking off. 4 and a half hours (including 2 intermissions) later, even my gung-ho fandoration had flagged.

Eugene O’Neill’s language is amazing, and one of my favourite parts was always the use of literary figures and quotations from different eras to speak for the different characters – Shakespeare, Baudelaire, and Oscar Wilde for the father and his two sons, respectively. This held up well, even though the bulk of it comes 3+ hours in, when my attention was already flagging a bit.

The thing is, when you read the play, you can break up the abuse. You can get some ice cream, take a walk, come back to it a few days later if it’s been too intense. When it’s flung at you for 4 hours straight, you leave the theatre feeling emotionally drained and exhausted. The last 20 minutes of the play involve wanting to go to bed but avoiding it, and you want everyone on stage to just shut the fuck up and go to bed so you can too.

Eugene O’Neill had stipulated in his will that after his death, this play was to be destroyed and never published. I imagine he thought that such direct catharsis had no place in front of an audience. Obviously, it was not destroyed, but I can understand where he was coming from – not wanting people to see his lightly fictionalized dirty little family secrets.

The staging and production were very good. The two sharpest actors were ones I had never heard of, who were obviously predominantly stage actors. James Cromwell (the farmer in Babe) was the father and more or less the featured draw. He fumbled over his lines a little too often and seemed a bit more ill at ease on the stage than anybody else there. The cast itself was half Irish and half American, which modulated everyone’s accent into a neat hybrid and was an interesting choice.

Am I glad I saw it? Absolutely, but won’t be seeing it again for a long tim