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New York
Daily News,
May 7, 2003
This O'Neill is
a 'Night' to
Remember
With its superb cast, 'Long Day's
Journey' is as good as its regrets
By
HOWARD KISSEL
"American" and "tragedy" seem like antithetic
terms. As a people, we are by nature boundless optimists. Tragedy,
by definition, is about human limitations and the inevitability of
sorrow.
The triumph of Eugene O'Neill's masterpiece, "Long Day's Journey
Into Night," is that he centered the battle between optimistic
illusions and inevitability within a family.
The love they bear each other even at their most acrimonious gives
their struggle a tragic aura rather than merely a sense of futile
energy. The triumph of the production Robert Falls has directed is
that he has taken four stars and made that love believable and
profoundly moving.
When O'Neill's play first appeared on Broadway, on Nov. 7, 1956, the
fact that three members of the Tyrone family were alcoholics, the
fourth a morphine addict seemed highly bizarre. But, hey, they were
in show business. Nowadays an addictive family seems oddly
mainstream.
What was universal about the Tyrones, even when their addictions
seemed untypical, was the ritual of their family life - a longing to
escape the endless cycle of remorse, recrimination and
reconciliation.
Like O'Neill's own father, James Tyrone was an actor who could have
been great but settled for being successful.
Mary Tyrone fell in love with James when she was preparing to be a
nun. O'Neill himself said the play was about a world in which God
was absent. The crippled life she lives is the most potent symbol of
that absence.
Jamie, the older son, is, like his father, an actor and a drinker.
(Is that redundant?) Edmund, the younger boy, has lived an
adventurous life and loves poetry as well as the bottle.
He has tuberculosis, and one of the concerns of the play is whether
his tightwad father will allow him to go to a decent sanatorium or
consign him to a cheap state institution.
The incandescent Vanessa Redgrave has devised brilliant gestures to
convey all the nuances of Mary's complex character. At her first
entrance, she has a wraithlike smile that makes her desperation
immediately clear. But you also sense her eagerness to vanquish her
demons.
Often she licks her lips to push back her hair, like the insecure
convent girl she was when she met James. At one point she sits on
the arm of the chair of her favored son, Edmund, caressing his hair,
conveying all her unfulfilled longings.
Unlike some Marys, who keep their distance from the men in the
family, she shows them great physical tenderness, but at the
slightest provocation she crumbles, as if her bones were too brittle
to sustain contact.
Her final scene, in which she loses her will to fight and retreats
to what she imagines is the Eden of the convent, is devastating.
Brian Dennehy, as James, is not physically right for a 19th-century
heroic actor. He does not have The Voice they mention, nor the
heroic profile. But he has the bluff energy of an actor, and he
makes painfully clear the intense anger he represses toward Mary.
His stature grows as the evening progresses and we sense his own
chagrin at his failures.
Philip Seymour Hoffman, as Jamie, mirrors him in his actor's
bravado. One of the great things about the whole production is the
sense of Irish humor the family share. Hoffman's is the keenest, and
it makes his disintegration even more unnerving.
As the tubercular Edmund, Robert Sean Leonard is the only member of
the family who moves as if touched by grace, though we know he is
doomed. He manages to be the poet without ever succumbing to the
cliches of being "poetic."
Fiana Toibin brings rich humor to the role of the maid.
Santo Loquasto's set conveys the grandeur and forlornness of this
family's distorted sense of "home." His costumes have their own
drama, especially the enveloping red robe Dennehy wears. Brian
MacDevitt's lighting adds immensely to the drama.
This is a great production of one of the world's great plays. |
