The OSF production of Eugene O鈥橬eill鈥檚 autobiographical Long Day鈥檚 Journey into Night starts with a special moment. In the meticulously realistic living room of a summer house, an older couple form a picture of playful affection. A young man enters, studies them, then retreats. With this hint of a distancing frame around the action to follow, director Christopher Liam Moore moves to transform an inexorably dark drama into a cathartic memory play.
What makes the production in the Thomas Theatre so riveting is the thorough commitment of the splendid actors to this tortured world.
For the man observing his parents is their youngest son Edmund, the stand-in for O鈥橬eill himself. He will soon reappear in a dining alcove joking with his brother Jamie, and the dramatic rendering of a crucial day in the life of the Tyrone family will begin. This is the day when they receive the diagnosis of Edmund鈥檚 chronic cough, which they鈥檝e all been dismissing as a lingering cold. This day also marks two months since his mother Mary returned home from the sanatorium where she was sent, not for the first time, to recover from her morphine addiction. The air crackles with apprehension, blame, and its flip-side, shame. By the end of Act One, Mary has deflected Edmund鈥檚 clumsy attempts to avert her relapse and disappeared upstairs to take a 鈥渘ap.鈥�
As day advances into night, father and sons take up their habitual drinking, and with the drug-addled Mary, sink into the familiar quicksand of the past. Their perpetual search seems to be for the cause of their misery, an event or a person to blame it on. Edmund鈥檚 difficult birth, for example, introduced Mary to opiates, but her lack of will power caused addiction. From there, recriminations shift to the hotel doctor who first prescribed the drugs, then to the miserly Tyrone for engaging a cheap quack. In fact, Tyrone does emerge as the prime destroyer鈥攈is penny-pinching is only one instance of the self-absorption that led to his adoring neglect of his young, sheltered wife. Yet blame won鈥檛 land firmly on him, once his horrific, impoverished childhood is factored in.
The Tyrone family system lacks the component of personal responsibility, a place where bucks can stop, where a downward spiral can be reversed. Its collective resignation is perhaps best expressed by Mary: 鈥淣one of us can help the things life has done to us. They鈥檙e done before you realize it, and...make you do other things...until you鈥檝e lost your true self forever.鈥� From this belief springs Mary鈥檚 corollary, 鈥淭he past is the present.... It鈥檚 the future too.鈥�
Given the Tyrone鈥檚 persistent dysfunction, the vicious circles of their interaction, why do we invest in them? Partly because O鈥橬eill鈥檚 characters mirror the problems that plague all nuclear families to some degree. In the privacy of the home, the happy, functional public masks comes off, revealing blurred boundaries and infantile expectations. An authoritarian father still smothers his adult sons with his own sense of failure. The mother, rather than embodying the Victorian ideal of the 鈥渁ngel in the house,鈥� becomes a 鈥渄ope fiend.鈥� All the more poignant is her repeated lament for the 鈥渄ecent鈥� home her husband鈥檚 itinerant career in the theatre has denied her, a place where 鈥渙ne is never lonely.鈥�
What makes the production in the Thomas Theatre so riveting is the thorough commitment of the splendid actors to this tortured world. Judith Marie Bergan鈥檚 brilliantly nuanced Mary illuminates all corners of the emotional map as she evades the massive needs of her husband and sons who would turn her into a surrogate Virgin Mary, a wished-for font of consolation, even redemption. Her exquisite blue-and-white gown of the opening scene almost glows against their shabby browns. But the blue bodice and overskirt fall away, just as did the faith that protected her when she graduated from her convent into marriage. She鈥檚 lost to morphine now, except for the few heart-wrenching instances when Tyrone cajoles her with a compliment or an embrace: Mary emerges almost miraculously from her fog with the radiant smile of someone found.
Michael Winters鈥檚 Tyrone seems disillusioned from the start. The charisma of a dominant male who happens also to be renowned actor has already been eroded by disappointment with his wife. We can only guess at the former power that holds his sons in his orbit. Jonathan Haugen as Jamie conveys the strangled frustration of one whose attempts to help always make everything worse. He鈥檚 trapped in the double-bind of the first-born son鈥攖he one who鈥檚 expected to fill his father鈥檚 shoes but is shot down if he appears to succeed.
Danforth Comins鈥檚 Edmund is accustomed to flying under the radar, out of range of his father鈥檚 scorn, muffling his own outbursts of disgust. With his consumptive pallor, he haunts the scenes like the ghost he almost is in Moore鈥檚 production鈥攁 ghost from the future, the playwright鈥檚 alter ego, assessing the action in retrospect. Edmund鈥檚 opening moment as witness spawns later instances of watchful detachment, and Christopher Acebo鈥檚 set betrays the subtle distortion of a memory play. Looming over its realistic furniture, a tree trunk anchors a luminous staircase long enough to lead to heaven, while a detached branch of this family鈥檚 tree hangs apart.
Forgiving and forgetting aren鈥檛 really options in a house where denial rules. Although the Tyrones keep urging forgetting, they hang onto affronts and cannot manage real forgiveness. Edmund becomes the exception: as a nascent writer, he understands that 鈥渢he right way is to remember.鈥� As O鈥橬eill himself, he has returned to this painful day in his life, and seen it steadily and whole. When Edmund collapses at the end in paroxysms of grief, the effect is cathartic; he鈥檚 letting go of the wounds of a lifetime, enabling the peace of forgiveness.
Molly Tinsley taught literature and creative writing at the U. S. Naval Academy for twenty years. Her latest book is the spy thriller Broken Angels (www.fuzepublishing.com)
