Long Day's Journey Into Night

If we were to gauge the opinion of the collective American theater as to our best play, the answer would almost certainly be Long Day's Journey into Night, Eugene O'Neill's overpowering portrait of his family -- parents, brother, and self -- on the day they were told he had tuberculosis. One of the few modern plays that can be classed with classical tragedy, it expresses oceanic pain with impossible honesty. O'Neill nearly dispensed with plot, and dramatized ananke (fate) in every moment of the play. This summer, Broadway was graced with a first-magnitude production of the play.

Director Robert Falls, the artistic director of Chicago's Goodman Theater, veils expressionism just beneath the surface of realism. With the script's verbal domestic violence, we're reminded of Strindberg's Dance of Death. The lighting is dark, with long shadows, and the set is big, dark and dominating. James (Papa) tells Mary (Mama) "This is no prison" -- but it is.

Falls succeeds in showing us, in this endless round of accusation, mythical moments, revealing tragedy in the very nature of life, with O'Neill point to what words cannot express (to use Samuel Beckett's phrase). There's not a minute in the four hours of performance that seems long. We're utterly engrossed.

Falls has wisely, skillfully mined every laugh he can find in the script. But there was something more in the laughter at The Plymouth Theater. I don't believe that this nervous laughter is what O'Neill intended for this play -- and it's certainly nothing to do with a weakness in the production. Audiences laugh to keep from crying -- but should they? They're avoiding catharsis.

Vanessa Redgrave's performance as Mary Tyrone is as monumental as the script. Her emotional life is incredibly fluid, and it springs from her body in a gushing flow, as if she were a medium channeling a demanding spirit. She shows us a woman immersed in denial, out of control even of her accusations, which Redgrave delivers as vicious barbs. She never holds back, but acts with the merciless abandon that Artaud called cruelty. Her Mary Tyrone is frantic all the time. The problem is that she starts at such a high level of intensity that she has nowhere to go. Her excruciating final speech should overwhelm us, but it doesn't -- we've seen this for four hours and, like her family, we've accepted it.

Brian Dennehy, as Papa Tyrone, and Robert Sean Leonard, as Edmund (read Eugene), cannot be faulted. But only Philip Seymour Hoffman, as brother Jamie, matches the depth of Redgrave's analysis. Each line he delivers reveals the whole of his character. These guys agonize over Mary's morphine addiction, but they swill down enough booze to stock a fair-sized distillery, and neither they nor the playwright finds anything remarkable about the habit. With our clinical expertise, 62 years after the play was written, we can only find their casualness extraordinary.