Drugs are regularly talked about as uppers or downers. According to that designation, it might be fair to report that in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Mary Tyrone is usually shown as under the influence of downers. When she returns from her frequent trips upstairs, she behaves as if she’s slightly groggy, partially distracted, not completely present.
Not so with the Bristol Old Vic’s production now at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey and directed within an inch of its febrile life by Richard Eyre. As interpreted by Lesley Manville, this Mary Tyrone is on uppers. When she descends the partially concealed stairs on Rob Howell’s high-walled set with its grids of see-through walls, she’s more charged than the Energizer bunny.
She’s not alone in her intensely on-edge spin. Through this new and transporting take on the three-hour-plus O’Neill masterpiece, it’s as if the other members of the tense Norwalk, Connecticut summer household—James Tyrone (Jeremy Irons), James Tyrone Jr. (Rory Keenan), Edmund Tyrone (Matthew Beard)—are also on hyperactive stimulants.
Since this isn’t an entirely atypical Irish family, James and Jamie are drinkers. Even Cathleen (Jessica Regan), the maid, isn’t averse to believing just one more won’t hurt. Edmund, whom Mary insists is only suffering from a summer cold, imbibes, too—despite that by the second act, the consumption with which he’s afflicted is confirmed.
But this is a household where every member of the family appears to be overtaken by consumption. Indeed, consumption turns into a metaphor. Each Tyrone is consumed by resentment and fury of a sort that no matter how frequently they indulge in conciliatory remarks and even hugs, they can commit to them for no more than a matter of seconds.
So for two not-abbreviated acts, these Tyrones carry on at the top of their temperaments. Whether or not responding to a recent injection or pouring the next drink (or watering the bottle to look as if it hasn’t been ravaged), they’re rage-aholics at each other’s throats in what looks like the highest drug-induced state. Even Edmund, overtaken from time to time with a coughing spell, appears to be taken with an oddly invigorating case of consumption.
So Eyre’s approach to this O’Neill drama—which the widow Carlotta O’Neill first allowed to be produced in 1956, despite her late husband’s wishes—is quite different in tone from many previous incarnations. It’s on such an extremely emotional plane that it allows no breathing room for the audience—or for the actors, come to that.
(It might be said that George C. Wolfe’s animated look at O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, now at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, explores the playwright’s somber worldview similarly but not as convincingly.)
Since the quintessential American play is often considered to be about the dysfunctional family, it could be said that Long Day’s Journey Into Night is the absolute quintessential American play—the greatest of all 20th-century American plays. Yet, possibly because it’s so candidly autobiographical, it isn’t structured like the standard play.
If the standard play is thought to include a dramatic arc that, as it unfolds, depicts changes in its characters, that doesn’t obtain in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. During its deliberate course, none of the Tyrones alters. The opposite: as they wrangle with each other, they only become more of who they are.
Whether bickering, forgiving each other, attacking each other repeatedly as they natter on about James Tyrone’s stinginess, unleashing changeable attitudes towards the prospects of Mary’s recovery from morphine addiction, worrying over Jamie’s wastrel existence or Edmund’s worsening condition, they never trend upward in anything but the fervor of their furious familial contentions.
Though their interaction can be repetitious—a hallmark of O’Neill’s writing, needless to say—that hardly precludes any number of memorable encounters, any number of hurled insults, any number of attempted reparations that instantly founder.
In Eyre’s version, it’s notable that of the four fighting Tyrones, James Tyrone falls just short of becoming a secondary character. Irons is on record as declaring the play to be about Mary, and that rings true here. Her miseries are prominent. In the final scene, when she’s delusional and recalling the convent years and her hopes to become a nun, designer Peter Mumford has her in full light while the men of the family are upstage in shadow.
With the torrent of spellbinding scenes, it may be, however, that the most involving doesn’t focus on either James or Mary. As written and definitely as played, this late scene where a drunken Jamie and Edmund wrangle—Jamie declaring his love and hatred for Edmund—is as shockingly riveting as anything O’Neill ever wrote. Possibly, that’s due to his understanding his actual brother and himself more immediately than he could analyze his unhappy, battling parents.
Playing the disturbing set-to that covers the stage, Keenan, who certainly knows how to be louche on stage, and the stringbean-like Beard have the look of animals whose frisky antics have gotten out of hand. Manville (Oscar-nominated this year for Phantom Thread) seizes the opportunity to turn Mary into a tour de force of unmitigated anxiety. And appreciative nods to Irons—who looks like Eugene O’Neill (!)—for giving a typically generous on-the-mark performance.
Is Eyre’s meeting with O’Neill perfect? It’s a close as anyone might want. Nothing seems missing, unless it’s the sound of foghorns that designer John Leonard was apparently not asked to supply. The foghorns meant to be heard coming from the water and beach vaguely glimpsed through Howell’s transparent windows are symbolic of the Tyrones’ gnawing woes. Those are surely on display here, and—sorrowful as they are—not to be missed.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night opened May 12, 2018, at the BAM Harvey Theater and runs through May 27. Tickets and information: bam.org
