This American Masterpiece is the dark side of O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness!. Long Day's Journey needs no commentary, but this new production - staged by Robert Falls - is Magisterial! Vanessa Redgrave is heart-breaking as the tragically addicted Mary Tyrone. [This did not prevent a Jewish critic sitting next to me from observing that "Redgrave supports the Arabs!"] Brian Dennehy is wonderfully self-pitying-Irish as the miserly husband & father - and ruined actor - James Tyrone, for whom drink is a Good Man's Failing. Philip Seymour Hoffman's Jamie Tyrone is the most powerful and affecting portrayal I've ever seen of this difficult role. (And I have seen a number of outstanding productions of Long Day's Journey in a long, long life as a reviewer. This drama is the American Acting-Everest equivalent of England's Hamlet.)
The more subdued agonies of Eugene O'Neill's alter-ego, younger brother Edmund Tyrone, are very sensitively, yet passionately, lived by Robert Sean Leonard. His Edmund is not as showy as Hoffman's Jamie but seems more deeply felt. Nonetheless, O'Neill, like the great Richard Wagner, could have used an editor. While it is a very good thing that O'Neill did not seek to put his audience through an entire 24 hours with the Tyrone Family, one soon gets the message of their agony, James' miserly rants, and Mary's all-too-oft repeated plaints about cheap hotel-rooms and never having had a real home or any friends. But O'Neill was writing in another age, one in which an admired playwright could ask audiences to sit still - with a dinner-break - for a dramatic epic like Mourning Becomes Electra that reprised the effect of the day-long tragedy-trilogies in the Ancient Greek Theater.
Santo Loquasto's immense brown-plank setting of the O'Neill cottage in Waterford - even with board-walls running way up into the flies - does manage to suggest the claustrophobia of that cramped little house. When you visit it, you will surely be amazed as how tiny the upstairs bedrooms are. Mary Tyrone couldn't have done much pacing to and fro in such confining spaces, but they could have driven anyone crazy!
