Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night: "Crumble and fade and--regrets--recriminations … 'If you'd done this, it wouldn't've cost me that!' "

The current Broadway production of Eugene O'Neill's masterpiece Long Day's Journey into Night stars Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Dennehy as Mary and James Tyrone, and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robert Sean Leonard as their sons Jamie and Edmund. I went because Vanessa Redgrave is one of the greatest English-speaking actresses of the last century, and I'd see her in just about anything. Plus, I know the play only from having read it and from having seen Sidney Lumet's 1962 movie version starring Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, and Dean Stockwell, which is one of the least-known of great American movies. It seemed that this work, an orchestration of the discordancies of family life, could only gain from the intimacy of a live performance, and that turned out to be right.

Still, you shouldn't get too excited about this production, directed by Robert Falls, which is not especially inspired but does have the negative virtue of demonstrating how indestructible the text is. It shouldn't be. It has no plot, which means that O'Neill can't get at anything indirectly, through revelatory action. It takes place in a single day, not, however, some random day but one on which the family learns two devastating facts. What we know about the characters they say directly, which is in tension with the naturalism of O'Neill's intention, as is the fact that the family exchanges are emblematic--each character reveals all his or her flaws and the conversations inform us how all their failings are causally related. The only thing left to our imaginations is how they might interact with people outside their home.

That is to say the play is made up almost entirely of playwriting no-nos--the dialogue consists mostly of exposition of past events among characters already familiar with those events, and in one bad moment Edmund thanks his father for telling him about his, Tyrone, Sr.'s, childhood (a story it's hard to believe Edmund hasn't heard before since Jamie will shortly afterwards refer to it as "the old sob act") and Edmund actually says, "I'm glad you've told me this, Papa. I know you a lot better now." (Shouldn't that be "I feel I know you a lot better now" and shouldn't it be the audience's thought?) Worse, Jamie then explains to Edmund his own duplicitous motives, just like a villain in a melodrama. It's as if O'Neill gave up trying to write dialogue that revealed motives without stating them. Maybe he was exhausted. It wouldn't surprise me seeing how much he had accomplished by that point.

The miracle of the play is that the family dynamics are so perfectly nightmarishly bad that these weaknesses become strengths. When Robert Brustein wrote that O'Neill "had to write badly in order to write well," he meant he had to write bad plays before he could write good ones, but the truth is that there's a lot of what should technically be called bad in even his best plays, and I think he had to write badly even in his best plays to write well. (You could say the same of Theodore Dreiser and his two commanding novels.) In Long Day's Journey O'Neill is in the thrall of an immense, primal subject and if he can do no better than "stammer," as Edmund, the character based on O'Neill, puts it, then he'll stammer, and the subject is so awesome it's worth it. There's even value in the stammering itself because you feel at last the artist is no longer ashamed to be what he is, American, among other things, and to say all that he knows without leaving anything out or trying too hard to pre-determine our experience for us. (That's what makes bad writers like John Steinbeck and Arthur Miller simply bad.) O'Neill isn't afraid to let the play open and open and open until it swallows us.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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