LONG
DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT By Eugene O’Neill; Bristol Old Vic/BAM
Harvey Theater, Brooklyn, New York. Starring Jeremy Irons as James Tyrone,
Lesley Manville as Mary Tyrone. Directed by Richard Eyre. Opening night, May 8,
2018. Performance run: May 8-27. Closed.
1
Eugene Gladstone O’Neill is, arguably, America’s
most accomplished and decorated playwright, equal in stature to redoubtable
modern dramatists such as Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Pirandello and Shaw.
O’Neill’s searing family drama, Long
Day’s Journey Into Night, is argued in commercial, academic and black-box
theater to be his signature work—a “best play”, so to speak; he is also argued
in the academy (the august Nobel committee, for example) to be commensurate with
American Nobel laureates such as Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. O’Neill
was awarded a Nobel in 1936. Accordingly—axiomatically—since O’Neill is our
foremost dramatist, and Long Day’s
Journey his foremost dramatic expression, Long Day’s Journey Into Night is coincident with (for comparison’s
sake) time-honored masterpieces such as The
Master Builder, Miss Julie, The Cherry Orchard, Six Characters in Search of an
Author, and the sublimely adapted comedy, Pygmalion. Summative to O’Neill’s place in the cosmos is that Long Day’s Journey Into Night, as seamlessly
produced and performed on the stage of the BAM Harvey Theater by the Bristol
Old Vic theater company, is the essential piece of dramatic art in the
American theater canon: the best of the best. Viewed holistically then, a
luminous production of an O’Neill magnum opus, by a credentialed theater
company such as Bristol Old Vic, at a legitimate 800-seat art house such as the
Brooklyn Academy of Music/BAM Harvey Theater, is a seminal repertory experience
that Broadway entrepreneurs and even reputable Off-Broadway venues rarely get
the opportunity to underwrite. BAM, as we know it and patronize it, is the
exception. BAM is welcoming to the exclusive, the obscure and the bleeding
edge. As such, the BAM/Bristol production of O’Neill’s definitive play is not a
“limited run” per se, but, rather, a three-week twenty-one performance
anthropological dig that will live on in newspaper and literary archives,
virtual forms, and—perhaps most importantly—oral histories and traditions. To
borrow a familiar coin from the read-guard Paris boulevard critics, this
production of Long Day’s Journey Into
Night is a téâtre
libre, a “happening”—a formative theater event that raises the watermark
for American, North American [1] and English-speaking repertory evolvement. Over
the course of this guided discussion I will prove or, perhaps, disprove, the authenticity
of this melancholic, if prevailing O’Neill masterpiece in context to the BAM
Harvey/Bristol Old Vic production.
2
“Against the wall between
the doorways is a small bookcase, with a picture of Shakespeare above it,
containing novels by Balzac, Zola, Stendhal, philosophical and sociological works
by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Engels, Kropatkin, Max Stirner, plays Ibsen,
Shaw, Strindberg, poetry by Swinburne, Rossetti, Wilde, Ernest Dowson, Kipling,
etc.” [2] (LDJ 717)
“Farther back is a large,
glassed-in bookcase with sets of Dumas, Victor Hugo, Charles Lever, three Sets
of Shakespeare, The World’s Best Literature in fifty large volumes, Hume’s
History of England, Thiers’ History of the Consulate and Empire, Smollett’s
History of England, Gibbon’s Roman Empire and miscellaneous volumes of Old
plays, poetry, and several histories of Ireland. The astonishing thing about
these sets is that all of the volumes have the look of being read and reread.” (LDJ
717)
Long
Days Journey Into Night is so well crafted as to seem formless in
this BAM/Bristol rehabilitation. The sine-wave of this convulsive “at-home” cottage
play climbs, dips and prevaricates according to purpose. For example: a
blistering father/son dispute on the gathering detritus of Nietzsche, Swinburne
and Karl Marx volumes in the family library; or a morphine-induced oration by
Mary Tyrone, the high strung family matriarch; or, perhaps, a moribund theater
anecdote by James Tyrone, a self-deluded doyen of the post-Civil War
Broadway-theater movement—a minor doyen, but a doyen nonetheless. The backdrop
and the fulcrum of these rancorous and mood-driven soliloquies and dialogues
are the personal libraries and letters of James Tyrone, the affable Irish stage
actor and family patriarch, and Edmund Tyrone, his handsome, black-haired,
bookish, tubercular younger son. The hue and tenor of their slash and burn
exchanges are histrionic to say the least, but conducted in reasonably good
faith. Malice is not necessarily their forte. Here’s a compression of Old Man
Tyrone’s bombastic and funny tirades in the early-goings of O’Neill’s drama:
“Morbid filth! Where the
hell do you get your taste in literature? Filth and despair and pessimism!
Another atheist, I suppose. […] It’s madness, yes, if you’d get on your knees
and pray. When you deny God, you deny sanity […] Where you get your taste in
authors—That damned library of yours! […]
Voltaire, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen! (LDJ 798-799).
Almost laughably, O’Neill’s
father/son dog fights are so scattered in theosophy as to seem pointless, beyond
recompense; equally, at other moments in this New London family chestnut these vituperative
“dialectics” seem uncontainable, a road to nowhere. Again, for example: the
consumptive Edmund hacking and hyperventilating in the midst of a disjointed card
game with his father; or the yapping, hectoring polluted Jamie coiled
fetus-like on a davenport couch that seems to have no other utility but to pass
out on. Understandably, the couch is Jamie’s asylum and daybed.
Dramaturgically, the first two acts of Long
Day’s Journey are a compilation of asthmatic interludes, invectives and
well-spoken non-sequiturs. They’re endless and mindless, fascinating to listen
to, but grueling and constricting to watch. And both father and son embrace and
“live-in” their well-timed, well-rehearsed poetry slams. Byron and Baudelaire
are, typically, go-to writers for Jamie and Edmund, Shakespeare, of course, is
the default writer for Old Man Tyrone. Regardless of their vitriol or
cleverness, these literary and theosophical intermezzos have a meaningful
endgame: the reclamation and recovery of tribal and filial piety.
Organizationally and dramaturgically then, incessant quoting, portentous
toasting, consumptive coughing, and artful, if begrudging literary arguments
are dramaturgical strings that O’Neill—a meticulous story-boarder and an
equally meticulous scene designer—uses to tease-out a confining, but
egalitarian literary colony. This grousing, quoting, swilling Father/Son dyad
is the central aspect of the BAM/Bristol production and is sustained with
measured understatement by Jeremy Irons (James Tyrone) and his very able stage
coefficient, Matthew Beard (Edmund Tyrone). Where it would be very easy for
Irons and Beard to shout “tour de force!” in the heat of their quotidian verse,
both performers stay at home and stay the course.
3
“From a lighthouse beyond
the harbor’s mouth, a foghorn is heard at regular intervals moaning like a
mournful whale in labor, and from the harbor itself, intermittently, comes the warning
ringing of bells on yachts at anchor.” (LDJ 772)
Incessant bickering, infernal language,
and the constant din of the Tyrone clan bitch-slapping one another conjures
earlier O’Neill prototypes such as Con Melody of Touch of the Poet, Hickey of The
Iceman Cometh, Eyre Smith of Hughie, and
the delirious, uncouth, fly-ridden Jim Tyrone of Moon for the Misbegotten—to name a few. All of the above-mentioned
alpha males are a point of departure for the five fulminating characters in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Habitually,
almost as a point of honor, no one in Monte Cristo Cottage (the elegant, if
ironic moniker for the Tyrone summer home)—not even the whiskey-imbibing Irish
maid, Cathleen, is capable of shutting down, exhaling noiselessly, putting a
damper on the backbiting, the obligatory apologizing, and the unbearable gaffs
that follow-on these family beat-downs. Here’s “stupid” Cathleen (Jessica
Regan) a well-meaning housekeeper and confidante of the maledicted Mary Tyrone
(Lesley Manville) violating the Tyrone family contract by way of a déclassé
faux pas concerning Mary Tyrone’s compulsion issues. Note the redundancy of
O’Neill’s “stupidly puzzled” parenthetical stage note for the purposes of
impressing on the reader/performer Cathleen’s doltishness:
CATHLEEN—(stupidly puzzled) You’ve taken
some of the medicine [the morphine]? It makes you act funny, Ma’am. If I didn’t
know better, I’d think you a drop taken. (LDJ 772+).
This is just the beginning of an
impenetrable, fragmented conversation between the low-born, indentured Irish
immigrant Cathleen and the pampered Mary, but is one of the few moments in the
drama where there is no grinding agenda. The word “agenda” is the operative
word because usually for Clan-O’Neill there’s always something boorish to
chime-in, something caustic or highly insulting to add to the mix, or someone
to admonish or “one-up”, but this Master/Servant intimacy is, for the moment,
not one of those moments. Throughout the first 90 minutes of the BAM/Bristol
production the dispirited, shout-out, dialogue spirals downward, never
reversing, retracting, slowing down or correcting itself; like a helical spire
on the precipice, the O’Neill mélange is always in danger of spinning out of
control—of flying off the proverbial handle. Nothing can bring equilibrium to
the Tyrone family settlement because reclamation and recovery are unthinkable
and unobtainable. Oddly, the only firewall separating the brawling Tyrone
family is the opioid-induced night-walking and occasional day-tripping of the
wasted matriarch, Mary Tyrone. Like a family with a colicky baby in the house,
the Tyrone tribe tiptoes around “Mother,” a closeted intravenous-arterial
narcotic injector, until she implodes in her bedroom or settles in for the
night with the syncopated foghorns pulsating and “moaning” off Long Island
Sound [3]:
MARY— (amused—girlishly) That foghorn!
Isn’t it awful, Cathleen?
CATHLEEN—it is indeed, Ma’am. It’s like a
banshee (LDJ 772).
The so-named banshees (mournful feminized
ghosts in Irish myth) are ceaseless and punishing for Mary. They return every
evening with the ebb and flow of the North Atlantic to remind her it’s time to
walk the walk, to fulfill her pact with the devil, to make herself “right” with
her mind-numbing pain killer of choice: unadulterated, legal, pharmaceutically
prepared World War I-era morphine. Again, here’s the contiguous conversation of
Mary and Cathleen in the opening scene of Act III. Mary is waxing philosophic
while in the throes of a morphine rush, and is attended by the tippling
housemaid, Cathleen, who is well into her cups [her liquor]. Mary’s rejoinder
to Cathleen about the side-effects of her nightly morphine fix is blunt-edged
and unapologetic:
MARY—I don’t mind it [the foghorn]
tonight. Last night it drove me crazy. I lay awake worrying until I couldn’t
stand it anymore.
CATHLEEN—Bad cess to it […]
MARY—(dreamily) It wasn’t the fog I
minded, Cathleen, I really love fog.
CATHLEEN—They say it’s good for the
complexion.
MARY—It’s the foghorn I hate. It won’t
let you alone. It keeps reminding you, and warning you, and calling you back.
CATHLEEN—(stupidly puzzled) You’ve taken
some of the medicine? It makes you act funny, Ma’am. If I didn’t know better,
I’d think you a drop taken.
MARY—It kills the pain (LDJ 772+).
Ninety-nine percent of O’Neill’s
withering dialogue, parenthetical stage-notes, and convoluted stage directions
in this elliptical imbibing scene denote foghorns. One percent denotes
morphine. A lesser writer would reverse the numbers, but the focus on mood,
sonic effects and healthy skin instead of malediction gives the scene a macabre
twist that veers straight into Mary’s shocking, but enlightening epiphany: “it
[morphine] kills the pain.” In other words, by avoiding the taboo topic of
arterial drug use, by creating the scene elliptically instead of linearly,
O’Neill sets his audience up for a wallop—a home run of sorts. And Mary, an old
hand, backstage junkie, hits it out of the park. The bemusing aspect of the
Mary/Cathleen dialogue between the conversant, if woozy Mary, and the
undereducated, but unvarnished Cathleen is their psychic disconnect. Mary has
zero inclination to explain to her presumptuous housekeeper the spine tingling,
consuming power of morphine. Her simple riposte: “it kills the pain,” is plain
spoken—everything that Cathleen (a self-appointed novice bedsitter) needs to
know. Conversely, Cathleen, a thrill-seeker and nosey-parker of sorts, has zero
concern over her tactless breeching of the embedded, master-servant,
Connecticut-Yankee compact; her sly interrogation of Mary in this delicately
tricky “consultation” scene is lawyerly: “Ma’am, if I didn’t know better, I’d
think you a drop taken.” Stoned or straight, beer, wine, whiskey or opioids,
Cathleen’s probity is encode for “not that it’s any of my fucking business,
Mrs. Tyrone, but if I didn’t know better I’d think you were dead behind the
eyes…” and, perhaps further, “do you have any more of what you’re taking…?” The
point of the Mary/Cathleen interlocution is that there is no point; when Mary is psychically attuned to the syncopation of
morphine, foghorns, banshees and whale music, she feeds the urge—the need—to
proffer utterances, to speak in non- sequiturs, to hover and nod over her
Steinway piano, to tell her drinking buddy and her cagey house keeper how good
her “high” is… and in this case, in this particular morphine rush—to tell
anyone who will listen just what exactly she’s experiencing in the moment:
convulsive pain followed by joy, ecstasy and rapture. Cathleen then, by way of
casual if insidious sisterhood, and for her own somewhat perhaps unscrupulous
inclinations, is shaking the cloying Mrs. O’Neill from her tree. The later
exchange between Mary and Cathleen concerning Cathleen’s run-in with the local
pharmacist over procuring Mary’s daily regimen of morphine is reason enough to
sense that Cathleen is probing Mary about the medical and perhaps (even) legal
implications of the proverbial “monkey” on her back.
CATHLEEN—The way the man in the drugstore
acted when I took in the prescription for you. (indignantly) The imp[i]dence of
him!
MARY—(with stubborn blankness) What are
you talking about? What drugstore? What prescription? […] Oh, of course, I’d
forgotten. The medicine for the rheumatism in my hands. What did the man day?
(then with indifference) Not that it matters, as long as he filled the
prescription.
CATHLEEN—It mattered to me, then! I’m not
used to being treated like a thief! He [the pharmacist gave me a long look and
says insultingly, “where did you get this?” (LDJ 776).
The irony of Cathleen’s remonstrance to
Mary is almost laughable it’s so disingenuous. Perceptibly, as Cathleen’s
feigned indignation to the pharmacist suggests—the pharmacist—like a detective
eyeballing an amateur criminal—has made
Cathleen (sized Cathleen up, blown her cover) for the drugstore cowgirl that
she is. Following on this unseemly “skit” in the pharmacy, the subtext of the
offended housekeeper’s line is apparent: “He [the pharmacist] read me like a
book… but then again, I’m used to being read like a book, I’m used to being
treated like a thief…” The deception suborning all parties to this rouse, this
hearsay—Mary, Cathleen and the Pharmacist, is palpable, but Edmund’s assessment
later in Act III of Cathleen’s very murky history as a gossip monger is
unqualified: “For God’s sake, Mama! You can’t trust her [Cathleen]! Do you want
everyone on earth to know? (LDJ 786). “Can’t trust her?” Really? That makes two
people: the Pharmacist and now Edmund. Taking the Pharmacist’s condescending,
belligerent question and Edmund’s malevolent remark at their face value, a
discerning audience is forced to ask a fundamental question about this Act II
moment: from where do these dismissive and insulting questions come from? And
from where does Edmund’s caustic remark derive? In what reality does Cathleen’s
reputation “live”? And further: is Edmund tapped into Cathleen’s subliminal
character in a way that the rest of his family is not? And while we’re on the
subject of subliminal characters: is Edmund fucking Cathleen? Consequent to all
of these questions, there’s much more here in Act III than a simple pow-wow
between Mary and her duplicitous Maid. Mary’s final squelch before careening
into an opioid trance is summative. Her remark to Cathleen concerning her relationship
with the pharmacist is, like Edmund’s remark, unfiltered and revelatory:
MARY—Yes, he [the pharmacist] knows me (776). Again, as with all discerning
readers, actors and audiences the questions dangles: what does “he knows me”
imply?
The crux of this BAM/Harvey alternative
view of the Mary/Cathleen gathering is not based on something far-reached, but,
rather, a fidelity to the prevailing Act III text. This often undervalued,
sentimentalized scene between the keeper-of-the-house and the keeper of a highly
controlled substance known as morphine, is an axis—the wheelhouse—of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. To that
end, it should be case-hardened in its reading and highly consequential in
production. Often it is rendered anomalous, as filler of sorts between the imperious
plot-line of Tyrone and Edmund, and the unconscious plot-line of Mary and her
multifarious issues. The final proof of this apposition is, again, text-based,
and is played-out in Mary’s remonstrance to her drug mule/house maid and
confidante (Cathleen) concerning her local drug supplier—the surly pharmacist:
“As long as he [the pharmacist] filled the prescription.” Patently, as borne
out with alacrity by Leslie Manville’s eerie, dissuading performance, “filling
the prescription,” is all that ever matters for Mary. As in all serious
anthropological “digs”, the BAM/Bristol excavation of this deeply complex, but
uncomplicated play is near breakthrough.
Royal Academy Stage-Irish
The creepy and darkly funny subtext of
this otherworldly drinking
scene in Long Day’s Journey Into Night is communicated shrewdly, cleanly and
knowingly by Manville, an Oscar-nominated Bristol Old Vic veteran, and Jessica
Regan, a Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts alum. Both actresses reveal the
paranormal mood of this imbibing scene with aplomb; obviously, as technically
trained conservatory actresses they know that it’s one thing to “be”
psychically liberated and inebriated, but it’s something totally different to convey psychic liberation and
inebriation. The difference between being
and conveying is not subtle. Manville
and Regan communicate that difference through nods and winks, and self-possessed
body language. Their exchanges are conducted through eye-avoidance [4],
mood-lifters and contradicting words and signals (for instance, Cathleen
denying an offering of whiskey while deftly reaching for a whiskey decanter).
State-of-mind and “sense-memory” (what they think and how they personally feel)
do not seem to be a part of the Bristol Old Vic acting process. We thank
Manville and Regan for their physical and vocal acuity, particularly Regan who
was assailed by at least one local critic for her “stage Irish” voice [5] and
stage-Irish conception. Nothing regarding her droll performance or her pristine
Irish brogue could be further from reality.
“Stupidly puzzled…”
For the actress interpreting the role of
Cathleen, O’Neill’s doubly acerbic stage note—“stupidly puzzled” [Cathleen]—is
a perfect reverse barometer. The tendency for any performer deconstructing this
peculiar mother/maid interlude might be to consider what O’Neill (a copious and
overbearing note-giver) has put on the page, and then, with the temerity and
expediency of a well-informed, well-seasoned repertory performer, consider the
opposite. Here are a few reasonable alternatives to O’Neill’s dramaturgical
overreach: “wryly inquisitive”?—perhaps; slightly or coyly aggressive”?—maybe,
or even “bordering on impudence” or “with brazen haughtiness…” But “stupidly
puzzled,”? —not the most honest or objective stage modifier for a character
probing her employer about her disreputable and even scandalous addiction issues. An experienced discerning
actress such as Jessica Regan might easily subtract the editorial misstep in
O’Neill’s hyperbolic character descriptor. And, in her quintessential moment in
Act II she does, to a delimiting extent. Regan’s “Cathleen” is ever so slightly
roguish for a moment, the door to rumor mongering, mischief, duplicity and,
perhaps, illegality, is cracked slightly… the question hangs: will Cathleen go
through it? The answer, obviously, is no, Cathleen lets the matter—the medical
and scandalous issues—die on the vine… but we—the discerning BAM audience know
that this tiny, dodgy moment of dark comedy and treachery is there for the
taking.
By way of a careful valuation of the
text, a potential obfuscation for the performer lies not in Cathleen’s
forwardness and presumptuous (those are good things), but, rather, in the
contradictory and heavy-handed stage note: “stupidly puzzled” that informs and
contravenes our shared view of Cathleen. “Stupid”, as character signifiers go,
is unambiguous. But “puzzled,” by inference, assumes a level of curiosity and
probity that is inherently interesting to a performer and, ultimately, an audience.
As such, Cathleen’s negative intelligence quotient as denoted by O’Neill’s
“stupidly-puzzled” stage note is misleading and contradictory to the crafty
insouciance that Cathleen reveals in her soft, but stealth interrogation of her
pie-eyed employer. The slightly tone-deaf author, Eugene O’Neill, and his oily
Irish character, Cathleen, as revealed by Jessica Regan’s very puckish
performance, are not synchronous. If O’Neill’s stage notes are to be believed,
O’Neill and Regan are at cross-purposes. To paraphrase a pearl-of-wisdom of the
immortal social critic, Henry Ford, perhaps O’Neill—Nobel Laureate and
tragedian, should lead, follow or get out of the way.
4
As the night closes in at the beginning
of Act III, as O’Neill’s psychically grating sonic effects are calibrated, Mary
Tyrone’s state of mind becomes muddled and somewhat persecuted. The existential
quandary for Mary as she processes her opioid-receptor intake, is not whether
the foghorns are “whaling” again, but, rather, when are they ever not whaling? Cosmically, musically, the
bells and horns hound Mary. They hound her by “reminding” her and “warning” her
that her life has become cataclysmic. Now, after 90 minutes of lashing,
torrential, ritualized domestic violence, followed by foghorns, banshees and
pharmaceutically licensed mood lifters, an audience—an exhausted, furrowed, BAM
theater collective—might be inclined to ask some predictable, if impertinent,
questions. Here are a few probable choices: Where are we? Who the hell are these
people? – Why are they here? When will it end? The answers to these
right-minded questions are quixotic: This is an Ulster-tribal funeral and
picnic… these are the “four haunted Tyrones… this is 90 minutes of four + hours
in the theater…and (further) this is Long
Day’s Journey Into Night, and (still further) this is O’Neill—this is his
final conclave.
5
TYRONE—[…] When I was ten my father
deserted my mother and went back to Ireland to die. Which he did soon enough,
and deserved to, and I hope he’s roasting in hell. He mistook rat poison for
flour, or sugar, or something. There was gossip it wasn’t by mistake but that’s
a lie. No one in my family ever—
EDMUND—My bet, it wasn’t by mistake. (LDJ
807)
At the epicenter of this tribal harangue
is the patriarch of the Tyrone clan, James Tyrone. Tyrone’s place on stage—his
command post—is as central to the dramatic event as the throne of Arthur. The
living room of the Tyrone family’s summer cottage is by design a cathedra, an
inner sanctum where all family disputations are brought to bear, but never
resolved let alone healed. – Tyrone’s place at the table, a hawk-eyed,
cigar-smoking arbiter of sorts, is a directorial control that holds the familial
gathering (and the theatrical event) together. So sharp-eyed is Tyrone over his
domain that his housekeeper Cathleen refers to him a hawk-eyed: “The Master’s
sure to notice what’s gone from the bottle. He has the eye of a hawk for that”
(LDJ 774). This central conceit—Tyrone as arbiter, as wounded but, able King
Fisher, as all-seeing, but not necessarily all-knowing eye, is a fixed idea
that director Richard Eyre sustains across the near four hour running time of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Much like
the geodesic mapping scene of King Lear
where Lear provokes his warmongering daughters to a grisly, eye-engorging clan
war, Tyrone is peppered, harangued, interrogated and skewered by his wife and
his booze-addled sons—ad nausea—and with impunity—dawn to dusk, and with no
respite:
JAMIE—(staring at his father, ignoring
his explanation) I know it’s an Irish peasant idea consumption is fatal. It
probably is when you live in a hovel on a bog, but over here, with modern
treatment—
TYRONE—Don’t I know that! What are you
gabbing about, anyway? And keep your dirty tongue off Ireland, with your sneers
about peasants and bogs and hovels! (LDJ
732).
Regardless of his beleaguered state
Tyrone holds his ground, unflinching and unmovable until the wrong insult from
his discordant family knocks him off his game; when that happens Tyrone is out
of his chair, challenging all comers; and true to form, his ungrateful swarming
tribe—like the beggars in the house of plenty—gnaw and peck at Tyrone’s eyes,
hand, feet and legs, demanding bleeding restitution for some past transgression,
real or imagined. Irrespective of the charges and fabrications hurled against
him by his family, no one in these shameful bear-baiting scenes gets to their
alcohol, their morphine, their books, their diary or the piano without going
through the stalwart Tyrone. Like a tyrant with his back against the wall in
the midst of a palace coup, Jeremy Irons’ James Tyrone is unrelentingly, the
noble squire of his manor, the keeper of the keys. And by way of his dominion, Tyrone
has no dominion at all. He’s a prisoner in his own manor. Admirably and
fearlessly, he welcomes our judgment, but with two of the three family members
in a state of somnambulism or total inebriation—and the third on the brink of
consumptive quarantine—these family tribunals—these show-trials—are a cul de sac, a false, empty, bottomless
promise for the august Shakespearean actor. In this final conclave of the
Tyrone family there’s never a righteous payback for Tyrone, no moment in the
sun. Old Man Tyrone never gets his just due or a full hearing. It’s always a
dire and tragic circumstance for the man of the house. Willy-nilly to the
carnage, or the bona fides of these war games, he’s forever the bad lieutenant,
the headless King—Arthur without his stuff. As mentioned earlier in this
discussion, Director Richard Eyre unpacks and interrogates this “Roundtable” conceit
very early in the dramatic event, and maintains it throughout. This essential directorial
and scenic idea—the Chair and Table of Arthur—the seat of authority—is the crucial
dramatic value of this enduring, rehabilitated New England legend.
6
His [Tyrone’s] clothes,
assuredly, do not costume any romantic part. He wears a threadbare, ready-made
grey sack suit and shineless black shoes, a collarless shirt with a white
handkerchief knotted loosely around his throat. There is nothing picturesquely
careless about this get-up. It is commonplace shabby. He believes in wearing
his clothes to the limit of usefulness, is dressed now for gardening, and
doesn’t give a damn how he looks (LDJ 719)
Contrary to O’Neill’s unflattering and
very non-bourgeois descriptors of James Tyrone’s “morning” costume in his
initial entrance in Act I, Tyrone’s basic “gardening-look” as conceived by
designer Rob Howell is provincial, but slyly theatrical. Like his books, liquor
and cigars, Tyrone’s accessories are stylish and well manipulated throughout
the production; O’Neill’s as-written “white handkerchief knotted loosely around
Tyrone’s neck” is, in designer Howell’s reinvention, an erstwhile Brooke’s
Brothers scarf replete with white paisleys and crimson patina. Further
contravening O’Neill’s miserly description of James Tyrone is Tyrone’s slightly
indifferent academic look; his knitted summer jacket and vest, and his bundled
scarfs give him the cachet of a pipe smoking mower from (for example) Monet’s
seminal painting, The Card Players; eventually
a panama hat (later a bowler), an Edwardian dressing gown, and a
dark-blue/black professional suit and collar in the later moments of the play
are worn by Tyrone with knack and éclat. As Irish dandies are concerned, James
Tyrone, in the popular, if perhaps apocryphal tradition of Edwin Booth and Ned
Harrigan, is an impeccable stylist. Under Jeremy Iron’s rendering, Tyrone’s
nattiness, his deft story-telling arts, his dexterous use of smoking props, writing
utensils, artifacts, relics, drinking vessels and sartorial accouterments are
his hallmark. Even at home and in his middlebrow, New London neighborhood,
Tyrone carries himself as a clever, if exiled New York roustabout. He is, as
his wont, a truly nifty “poet and sport.” As are his impervious, and somehow
dapper sons. Even at their rabid worst, Jamie and Edmund Tyrone have a sense of
self that is genuine and fairly spruce; their off-white shirts and open dog
collars appear to be somewhat “lived-in” and worn-for-wear, but never too
slovenly. Despite their studied indifference to the external world Jamie and
Edmund remain presentable and even dignified when they need to be. The dark
suit, natty tie and authentic Geoff cap of the lanky Edmund Tyrone late in Act
II are spot-on to the period and the moment. Here’s an example of a fashion
implement shading the attitude and disposition of James Tyrone as he sizes up
his struggling son Edmund late in Act II:
Edmund enters. He has
changed to a ready-made blue serge suit, high stiff collar and tie, black
shoes. TYRONE—(with an actor’s heartiness) Well! You look spic and span. I’m on my way
up to change, too. (LDJ 767).
Selflessly, genuinely, and appropriate to
the delicate medical issues that will challenge his beleaguered son, James
Tyrone responds to Edmund’s “blue suit” nattiness with a fatherly perk: He [Tyrone] pulls out a small roll of bills
from his pants pocket and carefully selects one [a ten dollar bill]. Edmund
takes it. He glances at it and his face expresses astonishment. (LDJ 767). Edmund’s response is wide-eyed,
angelic:
EDMUND—[…] This isn’t a dollar. It’s a
ten spot.
TYRONE—(embarrassed by his generosity)
Put it in your pocket. You’ll probably meet some of your friends uptown and you
can’t hold your end up and be sociable with nothing in your jeans (LDJ 767)
Despite their ragged, derelict inclinations,
the incorrigible Tyrone brothers somehow always manage to pull it off, to look
“nice,” to act accordingly, to pacify their neighbors, their parents, and even
accommodating women if that’s what is called for. For Jamie and Edmund
accountability and respectability are easily manipulated if carefully
construed. By way of straw boaters, oxford bags, saddle shoes, and preppy
accouterments, Rob Howell’s costumes suggest something uniquely and brashly Connecticut
Yankee about this brutal fraternity. Although Howell’s costumes are
turn-of-the-last-century faithful, there is nothing formulaic about the “look”
of this repertory costume parade. Tyrone, in his innumerable jackets, vests and
dressing gowns is always outfitted according to purpose: a late morning
breakfast, a trip to a local physician with Edmund, an afternoon constitution, ritualized
mealtimes, neighborly gossip sessions, the evening vespers, and so forth.
Ironically, perhaps incongruously, despite his comfort-fitting summer wardrobe,
Tyrone appears to be braced for the perfect storm. His announced exits from his
New London cottage are preempted by a bundling that suggests, perhaps, a point
of no return. It’s as if he’s wrapped for a Winslow Homer Nor’easter. When
Tyrone leaves the summer cottage orbit he returns disheveled and weather-beaten,
ready for a glass of pursers rum and a neatly-packaged-hand-rolled Panamanian cigarillo.
This storm-warning forbearance of Tyrone’s pervades the Monte Cristo Cottage
and is enhanced by the dim, cocker-shell lighting (Peter Mumford, lighting
design) and the opaque, if somewhat anachronistic skylight and panoply that
frame the windswept, gabled house. Late in the play, this affectation of
flickering oil lamps and quasi-musical foghorns echoes the unsettling and
eventually terrifying mood of Moby Dick
and the satanic Ahab. So mood-stricken is lighting designer Peter Mumford’s Tyrone
household that the portending eight-bells ritual of the Imperial and
Continental navies would not be totally out of synch in the final act of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Unlike a
number of O’Neill plays that propound an overwhelming seafaring aspect, James
Tyrone’s wicker lamps, his wardrobe, his dressing gown, his smoking utensils,
whiskey cruets, and most importantly—his high-renaissance theater library, are the
prevailing motifs in the BAM/Bristol Long
Day’s Journey Into Night.
7
Lesley
Manville > Mary Tyrone
Mary Tyrone as mastered by Bristol Old
Vic veteran Lesley Manville is an overstated performance. Her remonstrance to
her husband and sons across the four-hour event is operatic in nature, almost
to a level of melodrama. Invariably, (in a good sense) she blows Tyrone, Jamie
and Edmund off the stage with her diaphragmatic breathing and her inexhaustible
personal pleas. Consistent with her catlike performance, the intensity and
bravura of Manville’s indelicate effort is thoroughgoing and provocative. As celebrated
British, Irish and American Mary Tyrones “go” (Geraldine Fitzgerald, Zoe
Caldwell, Jessica Lange, Laurie Metcalf, Vanessa Redgrave, et al.) Manville’s
sonorous interpolation is one to be contrasted and studied. Manville’s diminutive
stature, moonstone eyes, porcelain mask, elegant form-fitting dresses, shawls
and robes, and her beautifully and intricately quaffed platinum hair bring a
regal Nordic quality to the Mary Tyrone retinue. Although recent archived
Google images of an erstwhile Bristol Old Vic production show Manville’s “Mary”
as a glassy-eyed, cosmopolitan brunette, the Bristol/BAM “Mary” is attuned to
an archaic, almost fabled matriarch. Historically, O’Neill’s plays have earned
mythic stature in Scandinavia, particularly Sweden, with film luminaries such
as Bibi Anderson, Ingmar Bergman and Lars Hanson offering magnanimous
contributions to the O’Neill canon. Hanson created the role of James Tyrone in
the original (the original-original) production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night in 1956 in Stockholm under the
direction of Bengt Ekerot [6]. Concordant with the provocative experimentation
of the O’Neill oeuvre in Sweden, a pan-Scandia Mary Tyrone is not farfetched.
Just as Mary Tyrone has been defined by her somnambulant night-walks, her
spider-like tendencies and her wispy demeanor, this Bristol Vic Mary Tyrone is
husky, throaty, roguish, and strangely powerful, at times formidable. Manville’s
Viking-Mary doesn’t fear sobriety and the external world as much as loathe it;
inordinately in Manville’s exercised performance she assails her dismissive
husband, her sneering, passive-aggressive sons, and (inferentially) the
low-brow townies and gossipy neighbors she’s forced to abide in the summer
off-season in New London.
8
Walter
Kerr>Robert Ryan> Jeremy Irons
To bring some historical perspective to
Jeremy Irons’ psychic approach to deconstructing and building a dignified and
knightly character for the enigmatic James Tyrone, herein is included a
retrospective on one of the more visible productions of O’Neill’s play as
produced at the Promenade theater in New York City in 1971, and directed by
Arvin Brown, a highly credentialed director of American repertory drama and
O’Neill enthusiast. In a bold stroke, Brown cast classic Hollywood heavyweight,
Robert Ryan in the role of James Tyrone. Ryan’s reception and reviews were
generous and even magnanimous, departing perhaps from a point of movie cultism.
Outspreading from the karma of Arvin Brown’s theatrical coup de grace is a
Robert Ryan/Jeremy Irons nexus that conceivably could live on in O’Neill
industry memory. This Ryan/Irons nexus derives from The New York Times’ revered drama critic Walter Kerr’s assessment
of Ryan’s performance, and O’Neill scholar Brenda Murphy’s affirmation of that
assessment. Kerr showed Ryan’s “Tyrone” to be equal parts “papist,” gentlemen
and grandee: “He [Ryan as Tyrone] surrenders nothing, not even his stubborn
fatuous certainty that Shakespeare was an Irish Catholic (Kerr 3). In a
scholarly treatise entitled O’Neill: Long
Day’s Journey Into Night, Prof. Murphy concurs with Ryan’s reading of
Tyrone to be “controversial,” “quiet spoken,” and a “gentle figure” (Murphy 66).
Comparatively then, Jeremy Iron’s BAM/Bristol Shakespeare-centric Tyrone is
quiet, gentle, fatuous, stubborn, partisan, and highly impolitic. Although
“controversial” might be too clichéd a 70’s phrase to describe Iron’s herculean
performance, he is provocative to a point of triumph.
*
Lawrence
Olivier, Florence Eldridge, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Robert Ryan et al.
“[Olivier is] beyond criticism and beyond
praise…”[7] (Hobson, Sunday Times)
“Florence Eldridge plays a shattered
mother—her white hair drifting mistily about the damaged prettiness of her
face…” (Kerr, New York Herald Tribune) [8]
It [James Tyrone] is a great part, and
Robert Ryan moves into it with care, love and understanding. [Ryan] shows us
the character, little by little, and finally creates a picture of a man,
neither good nor bad, but understanding” (Barnes, NY Times.com) [9]
Notable interpretations of James Tyrone
and Mary Tyrone can be accredited to English icon Lawrence Olivier, Hollywood
stars, Florence Eldridge (wife and co-star to the inestimable Frederick March,
the original Broadway James Tyrone) and Irish actress, Geraldine Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald’s revival of Long Day’s
Journey can be argued to be primal because of the classic Hollywood heavy,
Robert Ryan objectifying, taunting, but eventually embracing Mary in his
“leather-tough” “realistic” reading of James Tyrone (Kerr 3). Like Jeremy Irons
in his stealth rendition of the Tyrone patriarch and Lesley Manville in her
catlike rendition of Mary Tyrone, all of the aforementioned performers,
designers, producers and directors have brought meaning and power to the O’Neill
oeuvre. With the exception of film/theater auteurs such as Lawrence Olivier
whose trans-Atlantic James Tyrone is historic, filmic and indelible, the work
of these O’Neill interpreters exists in time and liminal space, not necessarily
in book, film and made-for-TV-movie deals. Although the O’Neill industry is,
apparently, booming and trending, a performer’s half-life in the O’Neill
factory is fleeting. Perhaps Lesley Manville’s diaphragmatic reading of Mary
Tyrone will garnish her a permanent place in the pantheon of experimental and
pioneering O’Neill characters. When assessing Manville’s bearing on the O’Neill
industry, what casting director, artistic director, literary manager or
theatrical agent could deny that her performance will push the conversation
about how to build this affected and disaffected O’Neill voice; collaterally,
Manville’s performance will widen the audition of other moth-like roles in the
tradition of Blanche Dubois, Amanda Wingfield, and the bullied Linda Loman of Death of a Salesman. Perhaps timeless
lines such as “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers,” “attention
must be paid,” and “I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a
time” (LDJ 828), will be reconsidered for their baldness and emptiness rather
than their eleventh hour desperateness. Considering that alcohol, lemon cokes with
chipped ice, and morphine free-basing are the maledictions of choice of Mary
and Blanche, their need to be heard is existentially consistent with the need
to be vocal, abrasive and insinuating. Unseemly man-cave humor, dysfunctional
sons, and bullying husbands, are the heavy burden of these broken, highly
fetishized female characters. Perhaps, as Manville’s over the bow performance
suggests, it’s time for Mary to blow her horn. Having seen a number of
luminaries in this notoriously “injured bird” role, Lesley Manville’s breakout
performance is a shout-out to the O’Neill industry. As they say in Ireland,
“the likes of Ms. Manville will not be seen again…”
- Timothy V. Dugan, D.Litt., Associate
Professor, Department of Communication Arts, St. Francis College, author The
Many Lives of Ajax: The Trojan War Hero From Antiquity to Modern Times
(McFarland, 2018).
Copyright c. 2018 by Timothy V. Dugan - All Rights Reserved
NOTES
[1] I use the phrase “North American in
my discussion of repertory theater to include Mexico, Cuba, Canada and the
Caribbean. For the seminal book on North American theater see Londre and
Watermeier’s The History of North
American Theater. See Works Cited.
[2] For this and all quotations from
O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night I
use the Library of America anthology:
Eugene O’Neill, Volume III: Complete
Plays 1932-1943, Travis Bogard editor. See O’Neill, Works Cited.
[3] Sound design by John Leonard. See BAMbill, Works Cited.
[4] For more on eye communication, body
gestures and non-verbal communication see Joseph DeVito, The Interpersonal Communication Book, 14th Edition. Pearson
Publishing, New York.
[5] Voice and dialect coach, Penny Dyer.
See BAMbill, Works Cited.
[6] Bengt Ekerot directed the world
premier of Long Day’s Journey Into Night at
the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm, February 2, 1956. Although Ekerot’s
reputation as an actor and director is well established in Europe and in
theater/cinema biographies, his role as “Death’ in Ingmar Bergman’s seminal
art-house film The Seventh Seal, has
given him a place in contemporary film lore and film scholarship. Academics,
film critics and film buffs identify the white-faced reaper as portrayed by
Ekerot to be iconic.
[7] Review of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. By Harold
Hobson, Sunday Times, London. Reprinted in Brenda Murphy’s O’Neill: Long Day’s Journey Into Night. See Murphy, Works Cited.
[8] Review of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s journey Into Night. By Walter
Kerr. New York Herald Tribune, November
8, 1956.
[9] Review of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. By Clive
Barnes, New York Times, April 22,
1971. See Barnes, Works Cited.
WORKS CITED
BAMbill: Who’s Who: Long
Day’s Journey Into Night. BAM Harvey Theater.
May 2018; Winter/Spring Season, Brooklyn
Magazine, Brooklyn, NY. Print.
Barnes, Clive. Rousing ‘Long Day’s Journey’. Review of: Long Day’s Journey Into Night, by Eugene O’Neill. Promenade
Theater, New York. New York Times 22
April 1971. https://www.nytimes.com/1971/04/22/archives/stage-rousing-long-days-journey-miss-fitzgerald-keach-ryan-naughton.html
Hobson, Harold. Review of: Long Day’s Journey into Night. By Eugene
O’Neill. Sunday Times. Reprinted in O’Neill: Long Day’s Journey Into Night. By
Brenda Murphy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. https://www.nytimes.com/1971/05/02/archives/do-the-tyrones-live-here.html
Kerr, Walter. Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Review of: Long Day’s Journey Into Night. By Eugene O’Neill. Helen Hayes
Theater, New York. New York Herald
Tribune, Nov. 8, 1956. http://www.eoneill.com/artifacts/reviews/ldj1_tribune.htm
___. One
‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’. Review of: Long Day’s Journey Into Night, by Eugene O’Neill. Promenade
Theater, New York. New York Times, May
2, 1971. https://www.nytimes.com/1971/05/02/archives/do-the-tyrones-live-here.html
Londre, Felicia Hardison and Daniel J.
Watermeier. The History of North American
Theater: The United States, Canada, and Mexico: From Pre-Columbian Times to the
Present. New York: Continuum. 2000. Print.
Murphy, Brenda. O’Neill: Long Day’s Journey Into Night. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2001. https://www.nytimes.com/1971/05/02/archives/do-the-tyrones-live-here.html
O’Neill, Eugene. O’Neill: Complete Plays: Volume I: 1932-1943. New York: The Library
of America, 1988. Print.
