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 6

Brian Dennehy fits this negative description of James Tyrone, anyway, and he also seems like the kind of self-made dapper gent who would spend more time in bars buying drinks for cronies than in the hotel room where his wife is waiting with the children. But he doesn't seem like a stage actor who threw away the opportunity to develop his talent by touring in a popular melodrama. Hasn't his career been more nearly the reverse? In any case, he blusters so much at the beginning I feared it was going to be a very long day's journey indeed, though in fact he tones it down in the last part of the play. But he doesn't have enough resources--he juts his jaw, and flashes his big white upper teeth as if he were going to bite his sons' heads off, literally, and uses those leathery lungs at hurricane force. When Dennehy as Tyrone tells his son that Edwin Booth once said he was a better Othello than Booth was himself, I didn't for a second wish I could see Dennehy in the role.

Like Hepburn, Ralph Richardson had expert comic timing, though far more understated than hers. What's important to know about Tyrone is the Irish immigrant experience that has made him overvalue money, and the way he let it destroy his artistry. What we see in Richardson's performance in addition is a man who's always onstage. If we don't, then his sons' barbs about his hammy sententiousness don't make sense. Richardson makes you taste the cloves in the ham and also feel the nullity of Tyrone's talent (which we believe in as I don't believe in Dennehy's), the way it has protected him against nothing. Richardson makes the laughs at Tyrone's expense exquisite, especially those involving the lights, but he also has a self-created nobility (equal parts elegance and pomposity) and a large-scale sensitivity that make it painful to laugh behind the old man's back, as perhaps it should be.

Of the Broadway cast, Philip Seymour Hoffman was the most original. He alone made his lines sound as intimate as they would be in a family setting if the audience weren't there, in the first act anyway. When he started blowing hard at the end, he did, at least, seem like Dennehy's son. Robert Sean Leonard is as even as he always has been in movies but still too earnest, which plays into the self-protecting aspect of O'Neill's self-portrait as the talented baby of the family.

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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