Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Abstract

As audience members shuffled past each other in masks and took their seats at the Minetta Lane Theatre in New York City’s West Village during the short, frigid days of early 2022, an on-stage monitor playing CNN placed us in the foment of summer 2020. The monitor glowed with footage of the former president refusing to condemn white teen shooter Kyle Rittenhouse. Before us was the living room of the Tyrones’ summer home, strewn with Amazon boxes and clutter, hand sanitizer prominently set on the coffee table. A yoga mat shared space with furniture. Without sound, these images provided some of the many visual signals that this production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, famous for its insistence on looking back, would be taking audiences on a shorter temporal journey. Instead of decades, this play of recent sorrow would glance back about a year and a half.If Clint Ramos’s set design weren’t enough to immerse the audience in pandemiccore, his costume design put the characters in the frumpy casual aesthetic of our time. Magnetic stage and screen actor Elizabeth Marvel entered as Mary Tyrone in black leggings and a gray hoodie, straight out of a yogurt commercial. She toted a giant smoothie with a pink straw and settled into some impressive downstage downward dogs that were perhaps the contemporary interpretation of Mary’s “young, graceful figure, a trifle plump, but showing little evidence of middle-aged waist and hips.” At first, O’Neill’s dialogue seemed to layer seamlessly onto the new context. After all, the play opens with James Tyrone (Bill Camp) commenting on his wife’s weight (“You’re a fine armful now, Mary, with those twenty pounds you gained”). A wry chuckle went through the crowd. As this materially comfortable older couple bickered about James Tyrone’s poor real estate investments and suspicion of “Wall Street swindlers,” it was easy and even pleasurable to appreciate the fresh resonances of a play depicting a day in 1912, written in 1941, and first performed in 1956.Director Robert O’Hara received a Tony nomination for directing Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play and is also a celebrated playwright. After the Williamstown Theatre Festival’s production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire with Audra McDonald as Blanche was canceled due to the pandemic in 2020, O’Hara directed the play as an audio production. Produced and distributed by Audible Inc. (owned by Amazon), that project set the stage for Audible’s producing this staging as part of its transformative Audible Theater endeavor, which funds live productions and then releases companion audio performances. Indeed, a 100-minute audio performance of this production is now available to stream alongside dozens of other works. Hence, this Long Day’s Journey Into Night is the site of significant innovation in US theater production, distribution, and consumption. O’Hara was mentored by the prolific playwright and director George C. Wolfe and recently told American Theatre that “being in a Black queer body” meant he knew he could never “make everybody happy” as a playwright and director and has, therefore, never made that his goal. O’Hara also directed Danai Gurira as Richard III for Shakespeare in the Park’s summer 2022 season. Therefore, this production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night can be placed within the context of O’Hara’s growing engagement with, and disruption of, the traditional white canon, as well as in relation to Wolfe’s 2018 Broadway production of The Iceman Cometh, which cut the text and cast Denzel Washington as Hickey. However, in contrast to that splashy revival, this was a decidedly intimate staging without screen-celebrity casting.O’Hara made three significant interventions. Not only did he make the setting contemporary, but he also truncated the script by about half, and cast the parents with white actors and the sons with Black actors (fig. 1). Together, O’Hara’s choices created a production in which shifting meanings materialized and dissipated based not only on the casting and on actors’ interpretations of the characters, but also on audience members’ points of reference.To an audience member unfamiliar with the plot, this Long Day’s Journey might have seemed initially like a play about a self-absorbed white couple who had unthinkingly adopted two Black children now struggling to support each other as Black men in a racist society. When the monitor played CNN reporting about Kenosha, Wisconsin police shooting Jacob Blake, this seemed like a pointed critique of trying to “survive the white gaze,” as Rebecca Carroll terms it. However, the adoption scenario disappeared as Mary delved into her guilt over the baby who died and her difficult birth of Edmund (fig. 1).For those who knew that Marvel and Camp are married in real life, Mary and James’s affectionate and combustive scenes could seem like impressive acting exercises or a risky breach of boundaries. Sometimes we could see each actor in a Brechtian “both/and” formulation—or perhaps a neither/nor in which the actors were not quite themselves and not fully in their version of Mary, James, Jamie (Jason Bowen), and Edmund (Ato Blankson-Wood). Experiments with casting and compression came together in cutting Cathleen the maid (or “second girl”) from the script. This made the family, particularly Mary, seem even more isolated, and meant the audience had no surrogate for witnessing the Tyrones’ dissolution. Along with other dialogue cuts, Cathleen’s absence muted the original Irishness of the play, transforming the Tyrones into an unhappy American family cloistered by the pandemic and their own past, without the specter of the Old Sod.O’Hara’s edited script made the events seem less haunted but more pressured. O’Neill’s play covers about sixteen hours and, in production, tends to run about four, creating a 4:1 time representation ratio. Cutting the script to a bit less than two hours further compressed the representation of time to an 8:1 ratio. Without intermissions, the audience followed the Tyrones relentlessly from sunny day to foggy night. Digital red time stamps that correlated with O’Neill’s stage directions helped audience members unfamiliar with the play track the day, while helping the rest of us understand when we were moving into a new act. O’Hara’s temporal dramaturgy allowed the play to comment simultaneously on the Tyrones as an individual family and on the general state of the United States. When James demanded that Mary “for God’s sake, forget the past!,” it retained the personal intensity of one family’s turmoil. However, Mary’s iconic response, “the past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too,” not only launched her harrowing description of James’s neediness, Jamie’s dangerous jealousy, and baby Eugene’s death, but also augered the United States’s continuing entrenchment in a cycle of racial violence and public health failure.Given the nation’s contemporary opioid crisis, Mary’s morphine addiction mapped readily onto current desperations. Mary is under constant surveillance by her family because they fear her morphine relapse and retreat to “detachment”—an adjective O’Neill uses about thirty times in his stage directions. The audience could not detach from Mary because the set design gave us more access to her than O’Neill’s script suggests. An upstage staircase led to a second-floor window cut into the stage left wall. It revealed a wallpapered nook with a tiny desk: the infamous spare room of Mary’s relapse. The use of vertical space alleviated some of the stagnancy of the living room, while access to Mary’s private realm deepened a squeamish voyeurism on Mary’s addiction. The audience witnessed Mary tying off her vein, shooting up, and nodding out. Watching Mary deprived her of privacy, implicating the audience in the character’s surveillance. This created dramatic irony and decreased the audience’s ability to check our own temperaments by aligning ourselves with Jamie’s cynical—and accurate—assumption that Mary has relapsed or with Edmund’s self-protective hope and codependent naivete. Projection designer Yee Eun Nam created brightly colored morphing shapes that exteriorized Mary’s internal changes. At one point, a projected skeleton took the stairs. These design choices both concretized and abstracted Mary’s physiological alteration, something that viewers of more traditionally staged productions would only ascertain via Mary’s entrances after long absences.“Whose play is it?” James asks Edmund as they play cards in the bleary whiskey fog around midnight. Cutting a great deal of James’s career laments and resentments about Edmund’s literary taste made the patriarch less of a raging narcissist and more of a frustrated drunk and OCD cheapskate. Camp’s performance felt unsatisfyingly muted, which made me wonder if I was addicted to thinking of James Tyrone as a magnetic bombast. Act 4’s man-to-man between Camp and Blankson-Wood channeled little electricity. The 2020 setting did not work for Edmund’s arc because, ultimately, COVID made a poor replacement for the tuberculosis that affects Edmund in O’Neill’s script. A mask dangled from Blankson-Wood’s wrist and was worn over his mouth briefly, but not in a way that suggested true fear of contagion. The conversations about cheap doctors were reasonable enough, and James’s demand that Edmund “stop coughing” became one of the most hostile moments in the production. Nevertheless, act 4’s masculine whiskey bender only picked up compelling tension when Bowen entered as a deliriously miserable, postcoital Jamie.Long Day’s Journey Into Night occupies a strange place in the mid-twentieth-century US theater canon. Written before The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Death of a Salesman, yet premiering after them, it joins those plays in grappling with white masculinity’s insecurities and compensations. While O’Neill’s brothel dialogue felt too anachronistic, Bowen’s remarkably calibrated performance convincingly depicted an older brother oscillating between vindictiveness and protectiveness. Although not the case with act 2’s scene between Bowen and Blankson-Wood, act 4’s confrontation between Jamie and Edmund potentially evoked Link and Booth from Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog. That is, just as Marvel’s and Camp’s whiteness was heightened when they were on stage as Mary and James without the younger Tyrones, in their final two-hander scene, Bowen and Blankson-Wood read as Black brothers locked in familiar arguments about sex, money, and parents (fig. 2). As much as this production didn’t treat O’Neill’s play too preciously, this moment seemed to reify its canonicity, as it forged a potential link between two pathbreaking Pulitzer Prize–winning American playwrights: O’Neill and Parks.While Jamie Tyrone doesn’t seem to know what to make of his forlorn sexual energies, Mary’s opioid haze accesses her regret about her sexual awakening as a Catholic high school senior meeting a professional actor eleven years her elder. Mary’s final monologue can be a plaintive denouement to the male Tyrones’ combative act 4 confrontations, or it can end the play with a climax of high reverie. Marvel descended the stairs in a culminating ecstasy reminiscent of Molly Bloom finishing Ulysses. Her performance underscored the centrality of Mary to this production. This seems fitting, since this small-scale off-Broadway production developed because of Marvel’s interest in the play. Crossing the stage with meticulous vulnerability, Mary was not a foggy ghost haunting the Tyrone men with sporadic entrances and exits. She was the absolute nucleus of this nuclear family. Marvel made everyone in the theater house feel alone in the Tyrones’ house with her.