A Long Days Journey into Night

A Long Days Journey into Night – I saw this play performed at the Guthrie Theater at a matinee on Saturday, February 15, 2013. Eugene O’Neil’s domestic tragedy is grandfather of all dysfunctional family plays and sets the gold standard for this kind of theater. It is a matter of taste, I suppose, as to whether this sort of thing appeals to you. Personally, I find this kind of play, starting at a level of alcohol-soaked hysteria, and, then, progressing relentlessly into increasingly febrile stages of delirium and emotional calamity a bit too labor intensive, too smugly confident that we really care, or should care, about the self-inflicted miseries of the psychically devastated drug addicts and alcoholics bellowing at one another on stage. O’Neil was not a poet and his language is steadfastly rooted in the way that people might actually speak if vast and disabling quantities of booze actually produced self-disclosure and rhetorically inflected arguments, as opposed to staggering, stumbling, uncommunicative vomiting, and falling down. There’s nothing about how these people speak that is interesting – it’s East Coast demotic with phrases like “you make me want to puke” – and so, your interest in this will rise and fall depending upon the degree in which you are interested in the sordid backstory presented by each character in his or her aria of desperate self-indulgent self-justification. It takes a while for the bland, only slightly stylized character of the language to take hold and I found myself enduring, rather than enjoying, the first half of this long production. The second part achieves some traction through sheer and sound and fury and the last half hour of the play is extremely powerful if, ultimately, irritating. O’Neil wants to transmute the violent Sturm und Drang of something like the House of Atreus to this modern family and alcohol (together with morphine for Mama) plays the part that the Furies and the vengeful Gods played in Greek tragedy. Mom is a “dope fiend” as her son calls her, Dad a bombastic failed actor and vicious miser. Both sons are dissolute failures and one is dying of consumption to boot. The sassy Irish maid steals booze and, complicit with the morphine-addicted mother, waters the whiskey, but there is always more to guzzle down. (The play reminded me of the last Guthrie production that I saw Cat on a Hot Tin Roof which featured family secrets and similarly heroic consumption of whiskey – probably bourbon in that case – with the added frisson of homosexuality and nymphomania.) The play is very acute on alcoholism and substance abuse and catches effectively the notion that many drunks seem to have that everyone but themselves is responsible for their dilemma. O’Neil posits a huge number of traumas and catastrophes as a basis for the family’s spectacular problems. No one seems willing to accept the fact that these people are Irishmen and that they like drinking better than they like anything else in life – it doesn’t take lacerating misery and trauma to turn you into a boozer; rather, it takes an inclination toward booze that finds alcohol more pleasurable than sex or anything else to make you into a drunk. Whether O’Neil understood this is unclear – and, depending on your perspective, this is a weakness or interesting ambiguity in the play: either these people are self-dramatizing fools desperately inventing justification for their substance abuse or they are legitimate victims of vast and inscrutable forces that have made them into desperate and miserable alcoholics. If you think that the play simply shows a bunch of people with a serious, possibly terminal illness, fantasizing about the cause of their sickness, then, A Long Days Journey into Night will make you angry. If you think that external forces can drive a man to drink, then, you will see this play as a family tragedy in which love turns into bitter hatred and regret turns into vicious recrimination and life is only bearable with a bottle at hand. O’Neil uses alcohol as a device for heightening the language, justifying long speeches that explore the reason for the malaise that haunts this family. This is an extreme stylization of reality: in fact, real drunks speak repetitively, slur their words, and don’t engage in Proustian reconstructions of the past to justify their boozing. O’Neil uses booze for high drama and operatic revelation – a pernicious approach, I think, since it imparts a gloomy Byronic glamour to the proceedings that is specious and even pernicious. In real life, there’s nothing revelatory about the drunken rantings of a booze-hound. Chekhov does this stuff better and without using gallons of alcohol to induce his characters to explicate their miserable lives – but, of course, Chekhov’s got Russians and Russians are supposedly soulful and poor O’Neil is stuck with a bunch of shanty-Irish to make his points. The Guthrie show was ridiculously over-produced – you can do this show with a table and a couple of light bulbs and, notwithstanding O’Neil’s Broadway-style stage directions, you don’t need a complete working house on stage full of hardware and furniture. (Take a look at Louis Malle’s incandescent Vanya on 42nd Avenue where a production of Uncle Vanya, Chekhov’s great play, is done in a crumbling theater with a couple of folding chairs, a table, and maybe a sofa.) Peter Michael Goetz, who plays James Tyrone, was sick on the day I saw the play and his role was played by an understudy. The New York critics who had flown into Minneapolis to see the show told me that the understudy did a much better job than Goetz who was, apparently, judged to be weak in the role of the patriarch. You can pretty much sum up this play with the famous opening lines of Philip Larkin’s This be the Verse: “They fuck you up your mum and dad/ They may not mean to but they do/ They you up with the faults they had/ And add some extra just for you.”