Just a little over a year ago, the Geffen mounted a local production of Long Day’s Journey into Night (with Alfred Molina and Jane Kaczmarek) , but that hasn’t stopped The Wallis from importing a British production of the same play, this one starring Jeremy Irons and Lesley (“Phantom Thread”) Manville. It comes to us from the Bristol Old Vic via the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Can it be that Eugene O’Neill is suddenly a hot playwright? As all theatergoers know, Journey deals with the ur-dysfunctional Tyrone family, whose patriarch, James (Irons), is a hammy but successful actor who tours the country annually in a production of The Count of Monte Cristo. James has a drinking problem, but that’s nothing compared to his wife Mary’s (Manville) addiction to morphine. They have two ne’er-do-well sons, James Jr. (Rory Keenan) and Edmund (Matthew Beard), who are coping with their own hang-ups (alcohol and TB, respectively). Old arguments and resentments keep boiling up in the course of the play’s action, which takes place in the Tyrones’ summer house in Connecticut over a 24-hour period. Their love/hate feelings erupt in each and every scene of this exceedingly long play, which is essentially a series of confrontations, recriminations and repentances. O’Neill called the autobiographical Long Day’s Journey into Night a drama of “old sorrows, written in tears and blood.” Director Richard Eyre has put together a first-rate production of the play, starting with its stars, who work together harmoniously and powerfully, making us feel deeply for O’Neill’s doomed married couple, who grapple valiantly but futilely with their demons. Keenan and Beard are equally effective as the two hapless brothers, even though they don’t resemble each other physically, with Edmund being at least a foot taller than James Jr. The only jarring note is sounded by Rob Howell’s set. With its glass walls and ceiling, its towering book cases, the set resembles a Silicon Valley atrium, not the “cheap dump” of James Jr.’s description. The look of it also does not match up with its period costumes. John Leonard’s sound design, fog horns wailing mournfully, and Peter Mumford’s stark lighting, help create the gloomy atmosphere of the play, but without question, it is Irons and Manville’s star power that make the production work as well as it does.
