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New York Times,
May 7, 2003
A Mother's Haunting
Presence
By BEN BRANTLEY
Even when she's not
around, you can't help thinking about her, any more than the three
angry, anxious men onstage can. Where is she? What is she doing now?
What do you think she's thinking? When will she strike out at them
next?
The questions ring in your head with the fretful persistence of a
distant fire alarm as you watch the fine, soul-piercing new
production of "Long Day's Journey Into Night," directed by Robert
Falls and starring Vanessa Redgrave in a performance that will never
leave the memory of anyone who sees it.
For whether or not she is actually visible, Ms. Redgrave is always
devastatingly present in the revival that opened last night at the
Plymouth Theater. As Mary Tyrone, the morphine-addicted mother in a
family at war with itself, this astonishing actress seems to inhabit
every pore of the production, as if she were the fever in the blood
of Eugene O'Neill's anguished masterpiece.
Good old pity and terror, the responses that Aristotle deemed
appropriate to tragedy, are seldom stirred on Broadway these days.
But Ms. Redgrave elicits them again and
again as Mary wanders restlessly through the long day of the play's
title, dispensing blame and love, cold lies and scalding truths. You
understand on a gut level why O'Neill, when writing this
autobiographical play six decades ago, was said by his wife Carlotta
to emerge from his study gaunt and red-eyed, looking 10 years older
than he had in the morning.
Mind you, the men whom Mary rules are embodied in Mr. Falls's
production by an estimable crew: Brian Dennehy as James Tyrone, the
penny-pinching, grandstanding actor who is Mary's husband, and
Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robert Sean Leonard as their sons, Jamie,
the cynical ne'er-do-well, and Edmund, the tubercular poet and
O'Neill's alter ego.
But one of the marvels of "Long Day's Journey" — and one reason it
so often seems newly born with every revival — is that it can
accommodate shifts in its center of emotional gravity. It is Tyrone
Sr. who has most often dominated accounts of the play, from the
original, in 1956, with Fredric March in the role, to the Jack
Lemmon version of 17 years ago.
Here, however, it is Mary who emerges as the show's defining spirit,
a woman who is at once the source, the victim and the clarifying and
distorting mirror of the violent contradictions that animate the
Tyrones. She also sets the compulsive rhythms — the seesawing
between affection and retribution, between the urges to heal and to
hurt — that is the family dynamic.
At least for the first two-thirds of the production, Mary's
frightening supremacy makes inspired good sense, both
psychologically and theatrically. Only in the final act, in which
the men remember the Mama who has retreated into a distant,
medicated haze offstage, do you realize completely the extent to
which the rest of the cast has yet to approach Ms. Redgrave's level
of insight and intensity.
All three men in the ensemble, which is rounded out by Fiana Toibin
as Cathleen the maid, give the impression that they are still in the
process of fully discovering their characters, especially Mr.
Hoffman, a brilliant actor who is oddly tentative here. I suspect
that before the play's run ends on Aug. 31, however, they will all
have come substantially into their own.
Were the other cast members to become as searingly vivid as the
spectral, statuesque Mary of Ms. Redgrave, who has seldom looked
more beautiful or more ravaged, I'm not sure that audiences could
bear it. This is Ms. Redgrave's best work in years and among her
best ever.
The director Peter Hall, after seeing Ms. Redgrave in Ibsen's "Lady
From the Sea" in the 1970's, wrote, "You could see right through the
skin to the emotions, the thoughts, the hopes, the fears
underneath." This transparency is especially remarkable in "Journey"
because Mary never seems to experience only one feeling at a time.
From the moment Mary and Tyrone first appear, emerging cozily from
breakfast into the living room of the family's summer home in
Connecticut (a monumental wooden tomb as designed by Santo Loquasto),
you are conscious of the state of heightened emotional flux in which
Ms. Redgrave's performance is cast. Her girlish smile slides askew
for one startling second, as if she had suddenly been ambushed by
unspeakable thoughts.
Once the boys join their parents, Mary's manner of dealing with her
men becomes increasingly divided, as do her allegiances. The
spotlight of response she turns on the others keeps changing its
colors, from fretful solicitude to harsh reproach, from the sly
self-concealing lies of a confirmed drug addict to raw
self-revelation. What's most remarkable is the fluidity with which
these shifts occur and how surprising they remain throughout the
evening.
Watch carefully, for example, when Tyrone comes in late for lunch,
and Mary rushes toward her husband with what you take at first for
flirtatious chiding. Then without warning, she has become a fierce
harpy, screaming out the grievances of a lifetime, which she will
enumerate throughout the play as if they were rosary beads.
Or observe later, as Mary sits in the twilight with Cathleen (nicely
played by Ms. Toibin), as the older woman recounts memories in which
she genuinely becomes the girl she was when her husband, then a
golden matinee idol, courted her. Then her voice sinks, her eyes go
cold, and she dismisses Cathleen with the peremptoriness of someone
for whom any kind of companionship is a burden.
These radical swings in sensibility, for which ambivalence is too
weak a word, are only an extreme version of the behavior of all the
Tyrones. Mary's behavior is an X-ray, of sorts, of the patterns
within O'Neill's family portrait.
The separate encounters among the men, which might pass for ordinary
domestic chafing in another context, are illuminated by the subtext
Mary has so fiercely dragged to the surface. Everyone is caught in
the same cyclical dance of love and war, propitiating and solacing
one instant and attacking with a vengeance the next.
Mr. Falls has given these conflicting elements strongly physical
life, as his performers move from hungry embraces to abrupt,
strong-armed stiffness, as they push one another away. Mr. Dennehy,
who collaborated to dazzling effect with Mr. Falls on "Death of a
Salesman," is especially good at evoking the memory of the erotic
ties that bind Tyrone to Mary.
You can tell that he still sees his bride within her. And he has his
character's Irish gallantry and defensive loquacity down cold. What
he hasn't captured is the grand old ham in Tyrone, the man who ruled
the stage for decades as a swashbuckler. Even reciting Shakespeare,
he retains his brogue.
On the heels of impressive appearances in "The Invention of Love"
and "Fifth of July," Mr. Leonard delivers another affecting, cleanly
drawn character study. He doesn't overdo Edmund's lyrical side, and
with Ms. Redgrave, he is heartbreaking, conveying the abject
woundedness of a son who wants so badly to reclaim the mother who
keeps receding from him.
Mr. Hoffman has yet to settle comfortably into his role of the older
brother, though he has promisingly astute moments, especially when
Jamie crumples from bravado into shame. There's often a blankness,
though, that suggests that he is treading water in the early scenes.
And he plays the climactic, whiskey-fueled confrontation with Edmund
with a flamboyant drunkenness that panders to the audience while
blunting the pain of the scene.
Even given these lapses, however, this remains the most lucid and
unsettling account of "Journey" that I have ever seen. Ultimately
Ms. Redgrave's Mary does not run away with the show, which would
terminally upset its balance. Instead, she radiates a searching,
flickering light that reveals not only the battling selves beneath
her skin but those of the others as well.
"The past is the present, isn't it?" Mary asks famously. "It's the
future, too. We all try to lie out of that, but life won't let us."
Ms. Redgrave's Mary reminds you that O'Neill's "Journey" is a ghost
story, in which the phantoms are not things of ectoplasm but blood
relations. This Mary is a living specter who haunts her own life as
she does the lives of her husband and sons. No one who sees Ms.
Redgrave's performance will ever again be able to say there are no
such things as ghosts. |
