Long Night

LONG AND MORBID, Long Day's Journey Into Night deals with a family suffering from drug addiction, tuberculosis and failed dreams. The characters struggle, tug and tear at a web of love, hate and guilt. Although the Lowell and Quincy Drama Societies and the Harvard Independent Theatre production offers a sensitive, self-conscious rendition, the players too often tend to indulge in the same tormented mannerisms and aggrieved outbursts. By the end of the play, we are numbed by and tired of them and their traumatic lives.

Long Day's Journey Into Night is one of O'Neill's greatest plays--intricate, jarring and painfully honest. The play does not delight or entertain, but rather distresses the audience with an intimate look at the self-destructive network of O'Neill's own family.

Yet at the beginning all seems very placid and sweet. On a sunny morning, James Tyrone (Kevin Walker) and his wife Mary (Deborah Carroll) are leaving the breakfast table where their sons are still chatting animatedly. He showers her with compliments, his doting voice touched with a gentle Irish lilt. She fusses coquettishly with her hair and teases him lovingly about his snoring. Soon, however, we learn that Mary is not only trying to overcome a morphine addiction, but also is fraught with worry for her frail younger son Edmund, whose "summer cold" shows signs of being consumption. The elder son Jamie, it turns out, is a ne'er-do-well actor, a disappointment to his father with whom he quarrels incessantly.

As the plot unfolds, so does the family's bitter and guilt-ridden past. The well-bred Mary regrets all she abandoned to marry the dashing actor James Tyrone--the aspirations of becoming a nun or a concert pianist, the niceties of the settled home life she has always craved. She blames herself for bringing Edmund, a sickly baby, into the world, and for disgracing her family by being a "dope fiend".

Tyrone, meanwhile, has injured every member of his family with his unrelenting stinginess, having lost his grand chance of becoming a great Shakespearean actor. When Mary was ill after giving birth to Edmund, he hired a cheap, incompetent doctor who introduced her to morphine and whose improper medical care caused Edmund's serious tuberculosis.

It is partly in rebellion against his money grubbing father that Jamie refuses to make good and flaunts his habit of frequenting bars and beds of whores. In addition, Jamie resents Edmund, always "Momma's baby, Poppa's pet", who now show budding writing talent. Edmund, meanwhile, apart from suffering consumption, blames his very existence on his mother's drug addiction. To escape from their troubles, the men spend late hours drowning themselves in alcohol, while Mary glides about smothered in morphine, dreamily praying to the Blessed Virgin as she did as a schoolgirl.

THE ACTORS PLAY their roles dutifully and perceptively, but too often they tend to wail and to repeat the same frenzied gestures. Appearing overwhelmed by their characters' anguish, they give the production a pretentious note of melodrama. As James Tyrone, Kevin Walker seems the archetypal rough-edged Irishman: loving--if slightly clumsy--towards his wife, self-righteous and defensive towards his sons. But his mannerisms and reactions are too stiff and blatant. He gapes to show he's shocked, shouts to show he's angry. He fails to convey Tyrone's appealing undercurrent of charm, or any of his amusing qualities. When he pontificates to Edmund about wasting electricity, only permitting one absurd bulb to be lit, Walker seems so serious, so genuinely frantic, the underlying humor does not come through.

Deborah Carroll creates a prim, fragile Mary Tyrone who fusses prissily when her sons swear or her husband kisses her in public. Pathetic when she rubs her rheumatic hands, once so beautiful, she explains how morphine takes her away from the gnarled reality of those hands and her family situation: "It kills the pain. You go back until at last you are beyond its reach. Only the pat when you were happy is real." But she, like Walker, has trouble with subtle mood shifts and often flattens her role by overplaying it. When under the influence of drugs, she flits about the room like a somnambulist, babbling in a sing-song voice; all of a sudden, however, she whirls around and responds lucidly to the accusations of her husband and sons with a biting, harsh tirade.

CHAD HUMMEL portrays the penniless, flippantly cynical Jamie with the appropriate swagger and charm. He is a little too confident, through, for a dissipated libertine whose aspirations have all plummeted. Throughout the play he talks loudly and eagerly and when he sits down he slings his leg over his chair and swings it. But all of a sudden in the last scene, he turns into an inebriated mass of insecurity. The quintessential drunkard, he teeters and stumbles as he walks and rolls his eyes as he declares: "'My name is Might Have Been.'"

Justin Richardson's controlled portrayal of a complex and sympathetic Edmund--the character who represents O'Neill himself--is undoubtedly the play's most powerful performance. He despairs for his parents and brother, but his tenderness for them is plain. His occasional flares of morbid poetry, betraying his artistic sensitivity, grip and startle us. He delivers his lines naturally, with an occasional stammer or peevish whine. Hunching his shoulders, dragging his feet, he even looks like a weary consumptive. His multifaceted portrayal is believable and compelling throughout.

Certainly the play's atmosphere should be gloomy and oppressive, but the production's musical effects are extraneous and downright silly. At the close of each scene, the lights dim, and the family exits with Mary creeping off in her ghostly white gown. A spooky cadence of piano notes smooths the transition to the next scene. Whatever this discordant clanging is meant to represent--Mary's crippled hands, crippled hopes?--it diverts the audience's attention from the play's fluidity and haunting themes.

Although the acting and special effects sometimes border on the maudlin, this production of Long Day's Journey Into Night is in general perceptive. We can almost hear the ominous lowing of the foghorn, almost sense the hovering fog which Mary finds so protective: "It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel everything has changed and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find you or touch you anymore." While this play offers no solutions or hopes for this family, it is thought-provoking and, for the most part, a highly depressing drama.