Long Day’s Journey Into Night centres on the Tyrone family, and is a thinly disguised study of American playwright Eugene O’Neill’s own parents and sibling in the early decades of the 20th century. The Tyrones are a family of Irish heritage that is filled with hurt, rage, anger and deep love. Sadly, they’re also filled with endless liquor and, in the case of the mother Mary, with morphine.
The family is tortured. The father, a once-great stage actor who sold out for wealth and success in a stupid melodramatic play which he performed thousands of times, is a cruel miser; the mother is filled with self-loathing and sickness over turning her back on a musical career and on her beloved Virgin Mary. And of the two brothers, one is a wastrel and the other is possibly dying of consumption.
The play is savagely and heartbreakingly autobiographical, so there are good reasons why O’Neill — who is widely seen as one of the greatest American playwrights (although not in this critic’s opinion, beyond this single play) — wanted it locked away for a quarter-century after his death. It was not. Instead, it won a Pulitzer Prize, and the 1962 film version (starring Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards and Dean Stockwell) was wildly praised and is still remembered fondly by most who have seen it.
Who else today would dare to perform this powerful, occasionally funny, but ultimately emotionally crushing, three-hour-long play, except the magnificent Soulpepper, in the Distillery District? Diana Leblanc, who directs this production, gave it a superior rendering at Stratford back in the mid-90s, and it is wonderful that she is trying to climb this treacherous mountain once again. While Leblac’s latest production of this truly towering play is extremely good, it does not achieve the earlier heights. But I come to praise this fine attempt, not to bury it, and I would not have missed it for the world. Nancy Palk, as the drug-addled Tyrone mother, has never been better. Her final scene, as she drifts into a room where the men in her family sit drunk in the dark (“I'm tired of making the power company rich!” says father Tyrone — played decently by Joseph Ziegler, Palk’s real-life, sober husband — as he twists off the light bulbs), can break your heart. Next to Palk, the greatest impressions are made by the two loser sons, Evan Buliung as the older and Gregory Prest as O’Neill’s stand-in for himself. They are both excellent, and act at Broadway level.
Do you want to be challenged by theatre, or merely patted on the head, as most modern theatre, both comic and dramatic, does? Do you want to be moved to tears and see one of the most agonizing — yet deeply loving — fictional families in human history? I cannot say that this family is typical, thank God, although I wish that every psychiatrist in the world would sit through a production like this one; they would see just how much parents and children can hurt, betray, yet still care so deeply for one another.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a play written in sorrow and pain, and, at its best, is deeply moving and unforgettable. I applaud Soulpepper for bringing it to southwestern Ontario again, since it is far and away O’Neill’s finest piece of theatre. It is probably not a show for a family in crisis to watch together, as its laughs are few. But its insights are many, and I am very glad to have seen it once again.
Young Centre for the Performing Arts, 50 Mill St., Bldg. 49, 416-203-6264. Runs until March 31.
