‘LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT’
★★★★
When: 7 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 1 and 7 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, through March 18.
Where: Gil Cates Theater at Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Los Angeles.
Tickets: $32-$90. Rush tickets for each day’s performance are made available to the public 30 minutes before showtime at the box office: $35 general, $10 student.
Length: 3 hrs., 30 mins., including intermission.
Suitability: Adults, mature teens.
Information: 310-208-5454, www.geffenplayhouse.com.
★★★★
When: 7 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 1 and 7 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, through March 18.
Where: Gil Cates Theater at Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Los Angeles.
Tickets: $32-$90. Rush tickets for each day’s performance are made available to the public 30 minutes before showtime at the box office: $35 general, $10 student.
Length: 3 hrs., 30 mins., including intermission.
Suitability: Adults, mature teens.
Information: 310-208-5454, www.geffenplayhouse.com.
“I was so healthy before Edmund was born,” says matriarch Mary Tyrone in playwright Eugene O’Neill’s epic “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” considered a masterpiece of American theater of any era.
Set in 1912, written in the 1940s, but at O’Neill’s request unpublished during his lifetime, the play remains timeless. So do the alternative facts wielded by the Tyrone family.
It’s probably not the first time Mary has heaped this blame and guilt on her son, who did nothing to deserve it. But whereas the sticky web of delusion they live in is of their own making, the various addictions each suffers are genetic. And in those days, professional help wasn’t readily and affordably available.
This semiautobiographical play explores a day in the life of James and Mary Tyrone, in their Connecticut seaside home, with their two adult sons. Jamie is the elder child, trying a career as an actor primarily because his father had been one. Edmund is the younger, who caught tuberculosis as a merchant sailor.
If it’s not immediately apparent, the audience learns each character has an addiction. For James, it’s bourbon. For Mary, it’s morphine. For James, it’s prostitutes. For Edmund, it seems to be returning home and trying to help.
They talk. On this day they talk morning, noon, evening and midnight, through four acts and three and a half hours of theatergoing time.
O’Neill gives the audience everything, no more and no less, needed to understand and feel for these characters. So, in its current production at Geffen Playhouse, what imprint would its director, Jeanie Hackett, lay on it? The humor is in the lines; Hackett neither imposes nor allows clowning to encourage the laughs. The tragedy is in the characters; Hackett brooks no bodice-ripping.
Instead, she kneads the painful relationships, revealing them through byplay and undercurrents, as alliances form and break, egos flare and fade. There’s love within and for this family, but it can’t rise above the neediness.
Among Hackett’s directorial choices, Redwin the less-successful are the scene-break divertissements, in which O’Neill’s recorded voice plays over projections of photographs and a wash of purple-and-turquoise fogs. Some of us would rather stay in the Tyrone house, quietly assessing our thoughts and feelings. On the other hand, those tired of watching actors move furniture and props during plays have something to distract them.
The most-successful choice might be the casting of Colin Woodell as Edmund, the stand-in for the playwright. (To be clear, the “Eugene” mentioned in the play is the deceased son born before Edmund.) Woodell plays the consumptive, soulful Edmund with layers of colors, yet the portrayal looks luminous and simple and includes a realistic consumptive cough.
Stephen Louis Grush plays the underachieving Jamie, a disappointment to his father and likely to himself, seeming to fade into the already worn background, at least until his night of carousing gives him courage, which he uses to lash out.
Alfred Molina plays patriarch James, regretful over his misguided acting career, in love with Mary but completely lacking the tools to help her. Molina’s moments of James’ theatricality entertainingly liven the dark conversations.
Jane Kaczmarek plays Mary, very much a product of her time but very much suffering in contemporary ways. This Mary is strong but shackled, so she escapes through painkillers. Kaczmarek turns into a joyful girl when Mary recounts meeting James for the first time.
Angela Goethals plays housemaid Cathleen, weighted by her own need for alcohol but blessed with a sense of humor.
Tom Buderwitz designed the windswept, sun-bleached, spectral house, perfect for setting the mood, as well as for peeking into various rooms and up the staircase that plays a role, lit by lighting designer Elizabeth Harper’s subtle artistry.
Other directorial choices include framing devices. Just before the action begins, Eugene wanders up and gazes at the house, like Tom in “The Glass Menagerie,” setting this up as a memory play. At the play’s end, lights shine into the audience, as if to say, “Et tu?”
Dany Margolies is a Los Angeles-based writer.
‘Long Day’s Journey into Night’
Rating: 4 stars.
When: 7 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 1 and 7 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, through March 18.
Where: Gil Cates Theater at Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Los Angeles.
Tickets: $32-$90. Rush tickets for each day’s performance are made available to the public 30 minutes before showtime at the box office: $35 general, $10 student.
Length: 3 hrs., 30 mins., including intermission.
Suitability: Adults, mature teens.
Information: 310-208-5454, www.geffenplayhouse.com.
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