Nope, I’m not going to resist the obvious: In preparation for its recorded version of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Audible is presenting an onstage shortened day’s journey.
You read it right. Director Robert O’Hara’s treatment of the autobiographical four-act work about O’Neill’s distressed family at Monte Cristo Cottage in New London, Connecticut (the cottage named after the role actor James O’Neill repeated played) has been trimmed to an intermissionless 110 minutes. It’s also been entirely relieved of significant maidservant Cathleen.
Apparently, the impetus behind the truncating is to show a contemporary audience that the O’Neill tragedy could use a red pencil taken to O’Neill’s too-often-criticized overwriting. More than that, O’Hara looks to demonstrate that the wonderfully titled Long Day’s Journey Into Night remains a play for our time.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★☆☆☆ review here.]
Thus, it’s not taking place in August, 1912 but in August, 2022. Designer Sarah G. Harris has CNN footage concerning Covid-19(!) projected on the upstage wall for patrons to watch as they take their seats. (Let’s hope that O’Hara isn’t suggesting today’s pandemic is the equivalent of yesteryear’s tuberculosis epidemic.)
What O’Hara in his presumptuous gesture doesn’t seem to understand is that the definition of classic works establishes that their actions and theme are relevant to all times. They don’t require updating to render them meaningful for untold later decades.
If it can be said that the quintessential American play is the dysfunctional family drama, then O’Neill’s masterpiece is its foremost representation. Perhaps the great American play of the twentieth century, it hardly calls for updated tweaking even at a time when plays and musicals running less than two hours are preferred
O’Hara thinks differently. What does he do? To begin with for audiences to note during this relatively short run before the studio recording, there’s Clint Ramos’s set. It has nothing to do with a Victorian living room or dining room but features several worn seats and other bric-a-brac cluttering the central area. Towards the wings are a small and medium pile of FedEx boxes. (Signifying what? Other set adornments yet to be unpacked?) Also, by the way, sound designer Palmer Hefferan isn’t asked to supply the foghorn sounds about which Mary Tyrone complains more than once are disrupting her sleep.
Ticket buyers having been allowed a good gander at the surroundings accomplished, Alex Jainchill’s lights brighten and Elizabeth Marvel, soon to take on the role of the morphine-addicted Mary, practically skips down a medium flight of stairs in work clothes. (Ramos doubles as the costumer.) She crosses to what’s supposed to be a television set, turns off CNN, and launches into exercises on a downstage mat.
That’s when Bill Camp, about to be the overbearing and penny-pinching James Tyrone, rushes on. In shorts and looking as if he’s returning from a picnic, he’s quaffing a beer. He tosses a porkpie hat he’s been wearing onto a chair and engages with Marvel in some coddling and kidding about weight-gaining. (How all this, much of it in silence, will register on Audible’s audio product is anyone’s guess.)
The James-Mary dialogue, however, is, at last, O’Neill’s. Marvel and Camp exchange comments having to do with James’s belief that Mary has at last survived her drug habit. They speculate about what sons James Tyrone, Jr. (Jason Bowen) and Edmund (Ato Blankson-Wood) might be laughing about in the next room.
So begins the Reader’s Digest treatment of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. There’s less, for instance, about James’s stinginess on lightbulbs, but as the 150 minutes march on, O’Hara sticks to the plot basics. Mary’s insistence that Edmund’s cough is nothing more than a summer cold is notched. So is the certainty among the others that the never-seen Dr. Hardy will report otherwise. There’s the dashed assurances James and sons have about Mary’s unsated habit. (Surprisingly, no one discusses getting her to Narcotics Anonymous.) O’Hara also holds onto the constant bickering by everybody about everything, followed by apologies instantly reduced to renewed accusations.
Giving credit where due, O’Hara leaves more than a few scenes virtually intact. That includes the overwhelming tete-a-tete in which Jamie, returning drunk from a night on the town, makes a profound admission to Edmund about his ambiguous fraternal feelings. O’Hara also sees to it that Mary’s last speech recalling the time when she was temporarily happy stays unredacted. He does (uh-oh) have her crawling across the floor while delivering it.
This brings up his approach to Mary’s morphine craving. He has Ramos carve a window in the upstage wall so that viewers get a peek at Mary’s shooting up, a repeated sight O’Neill didn’t deem a necessity. And, say, how does Mary come by her seemingly inexhaustible supply? O’Neill has the now-eliminated Cathleen obtain them at the local pharmacy. But O’Hara doesn’t seem to mind the lapse. Maybe he’s concluded that Duane Reade delivers.
Saving O’Hara’s shorter performance journey from slipping over the line into utter travesty is his direction, for the most part, of the estimable actors. While the meaty roles they’re handed have less meat on the bones than O’Neill provided, there’s enough for Marvel, Camp, Bowen and Blankson-Wood to make something notable of. To them, a grateful round of well-dones.
Otherwise, anyone wanting immediately to understand the full measure of O’Neill’s triumph better read it. Uninvaded.
Long Days Journey into Night opened January 25, 2022, at the Minetta Lane Theatre and runs through February 20. Tickets and information: audible.com
