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!' " - Page 3

Neil Simon's crowd-pleasing "serious" plays work in the opposite way: they tell you all families are crazy but you gotta love 'em. He slaps cosmetics on the warts and wrinkles at the very instant of pointing them out to us. Long Day's Journey tells you not only more about the craziness but about the composite nature of family love as well. The play is so close to the miseries of family existence that it can be sickeningly powerful. If you recognize yourself in the Tyrones you can come out of the play loathing yourself for what they've said and done. And the play offers no solace because what makes you feel so bad is what you've said and done in the past, which can't be altered, interpreted more flatteringly, or forgotten. As Mary says, "The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won't let us."

The play attains this universal power although it's quite specific about the Irish-American immigrant roots of the story--Tyrone, Sr.'s hard childhood and resultant fear of poverty; Mary's fantasies of her girlhood at home and in the convent school she attended; the parents' vestigial religiosity and James's piety about the old sod; the men's heavy drinking, their gift of gab and love of poetry, as well as their self-pity, and their polarized feeling about "good" and "bad" women.

And it attains this power also despite the quite particular, autobiographical fact that Mary, based on O'Neill's mother, is a morphine addict, and the play covers the day the men realize she's using again. I don't know of a better portrayal of what it's like to try to deal openly with an addict. The great quality of Mary as a character is her fiendish elusiveness. Her ability to shift ground, as her husband and sons try to reach her, maddeningly combines flirtation, repression, matriarchal authority, biting humor, reproach, self-pity, theatrics, and con artistry. You can see her as representing the fundamental human slyness that refuses to enter into negotiations, that refuses to be anything but what it's going to be whether you like it or not. She's revealed to us by the very variety of tricks she employs to deflect attention, and she'll use them one after the other, in a series of breaths. Most upsetting perhaps is the addict's cunning with which she complains that she needs to be trusted in order to stay clean, knowing that her family's guilt and hope will get them out of the house, so she can shoot up. Trying to get the truth out of her is like wrestling underwater with a gigantic, wriggling eel, only less corporeal--the ghost of a giant eel. There's a spooky quality to the revulsion you feel, as you keep struggling, hopelessly. And yet among her evasions she does tell the truth (for instance, this to herself, "You expect the Blessed Virgin to be fooled by a lying dope fiend reciting words! You can't hide from her!") but in a form so saturated with despair that her lying by comparison can seem like a blessing, though one it's impossible to live with comfortably.

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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