Long Day's Journey Into Night

Long Day's Journey Into Night is a physically painful ordeal by redemption. Four and a quarter hours of exposed emotion can burn out your brain as easily as four and a quarter hours of sitting can wear out your pants. Director Robert Ginn and his cast of five have made no effort to alleviate the brutality of O'Neill's play. They have mounted a stark, oppressive Long Day's Journey which, while it catches the agony of O'Neill's experience, fails to convey the healing forgiveness which O'Neill granted that experience.

The play is the story of O'Neill's own family, given the name of Tyrone. All the Tyrones are escapists, running from unfulfilled dreams, or from the more painful disillusion with fulfilled dreams. James Tyrone is a financially successful matinee idol who has risen from immigrant Irish poverty. His wife Mary, raised in a lace-curtain Irish home, schooled in a convent, has turned to morphine after the illness in which she bore her second son, Edmund, (representing O'Neill himself). The eldest son, Jamie, has wasted away an acting and writing talent in a Broadway life of whiskey and cynicism. Edmund, vaguely seeking to be a poet after running to sea, has returned to the family's summer home stricken with consumption.

But the agony of the play is not the individual suffering of the characters, but the suffering of the family as a whole. The play's dominant tragic figure is not any of the four, James, Mary, Jamie or Edmund, but Tyrone, the name and life which they share.

The Tyrones' empathy, their shared love and pain, must be played out as vividly as their individual torments. O'Neill has provided the lines for this, Ginn hasn't given the direction. Long Day's Journey abounds with sentences interrupted or regretted by their speaker, moments of nakedness in which Jamie's concern breaks through his mask of cynicism, or Edmund's raw anger smashes his attempts at peacemaking.

With the exception of Frances Gitter's performance of Mary, the actors did not play these moments of contrast, or at best glossed over them. Carl Nagin does Edmund as the traditional Sensitive Young Man. His bitterness is searing, but his tenderness is embarrassed and whispered. Daniel Seltzer as James has much the same problem. He vehemently attacks his lines until the effect is dulled the same way listening to a jackhammer for three hours induces deafness. It is only in the play's magnificent last act when Edmund and James are both drunk that Nagin and Seltzer managed to add warmth to the glaring brightness of their performances.

Herbert Adams as Jamie also has a monotony of tone. Ironically enough, his character--which should have the coldest mask--is played with the most warmth and sympathy. However, he gets too involved, too early. Never having worn his cynicism with detachment, his last-act confession of feeling has to border on the maudlin to have any effect. But his drunken recounting of the night at the whorehouse, along with Sheila Hart's portrayal of the servant girl, are the only moments of humor in the play which came across successfully. Nagin and Seltzer seem to feel reticent and slightly guilty when O'Neill gives them anything funny to say.

Miss Gitter alone fully brings out the momentary glimpses at the depths in her character. Her shifts between excuse and denial of re-starting her dope habit again, or between attacks on James' drinking and a quiet pride in his love are done quickly and smoothly. Her final monolog, in which her mind has floated back to her girlhood at the convent has more power than any of the masculine tirades.

Long Day's Journey is h harsh play. But it is also a play of love and understanding. The characters slip into each other's failings as often as they lash at each other. The harshness is inherent in any four-hour production, but must never drown out O'Neill's forgiveness. Ginn has let the forgiveness fend for itself. Even the lighting and makeup are too harsh.

O'Neill said the play was one of "tears and blood." The Loeb production is unquestionably powerful, but it is scarcely sympathetic. The blood is there, for the play's moments of pain are magnificent. But of the tears there is only the faint glistening on Mary Tyrone's cheek.