Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Long Day's Journey Into Night is a quartet. Depending on the varying choices and qualities of the players, it can seem to be mostly Mary's play, as in the 2016 New York production with Jessica Lange, who so empathetically studied and gave herself over to the soul-emptying plight of addiction. It can seem to be mostly James Tyrone's play, as in the 2016 production at the Undermain Theater in Dallas, where Bruce DuBose's chesty baritone conveyed the man who carries the day in the barroom, still puts a twinkle in the serving girl's eye, and who also carries the memories of a blighted childhood and the disappointments of unfulfilled ambitions. It can even in some productions feel like it could or should be mostly snarky, dark Jamie's play, like in the 2003 New York production where Philip Seymour Hoffman made us think that maybe he really is the most wised-up guy in the room, even if he can't find a comfortable place for himself on earth.But rarely do you walk away feeling it was mostly Edmund's play.And that's odd when you think about it. Edmund is clearly the stand-in for the young Eugene. These memories are his after all, plumbed in a quest to understand his ghosts in the last years of his life, the only survivor of that particular recrimination-fueled, substance-supported family. It is entirely his point of view. We notice that Edmund seems to be drawn with a kinder pencil, beset with consumption that might just be a bad cold, but without evident moral flaws. If the actor doesn't remember to cough once in a while, you'd hardly notice or remember him. He's just the younger son.So it was refreshing and interesting to see the Classics Theatre Project production of Long Day's Journey at the Stone Cottage Theatre in Addison, Texas, and to hear Edmund's lines as if I'd never heard them before. I was reminded of Mike Nichols recalling the first time he'd seen the young Meryl Streep, in an ensemble show. He wondered why everyone else had to say the written lines while she could apparently say anything she wanted to. Noah Riddle was simple and grounded, paying attention and sharing the moments, asking to be understood, asking for basic consideration for his mother from his brother and father, exchanging stories in a bid for mutual understanding, revealing the glee and gloom of his poetic gifts, then asking for consideration from his mother for himself when she was too far gone to give it. In this he traced O'Neill's own predicament as described by the biographer Stephen A. Black, never feeling seen or supported by his mother, who seemed to avoid him out of guilt over the fact that the child he was replacing had died.Riddle was like a contemporary young adult, a bit loose-jawed, a bit adenoidal, but totally himself and present, apparently allowed to say whatever he wanted. He didn't seem to consciously add ornament or vocal variety or dramatic pauses. He just stayed in the moment, however rough it got. And so did we.As a result, he became what O'Neill may have always wanted Edmund to be—the point-of-view character through whom we see and evaluate all the others. Their personalities are the trials he must navigate on his journey, a journey not just to Mary's night of opiated oblivion but, for all Edmund knows, to his own prematurely mortal night.Give director Jackie L. Kemp great credit—those are some pretty damned high stakes, and a convincing lens through which to see the play.Kemp and managing artistic director/cast member Joey Folsom also made powerful use of the setting of the Stone Cottage Theatre. It is literally a stone cottage, within a striking campus of daring modern theater spaces. When you enter the cottage, you are essentially inside the Tyrones' summer home, with no more than twenty chairs for the audience placed around three sides of the living room, just beyond the areas warmly lit with help from lighting codesigner Luisa Torres. We tread the same boards, share the inescapable space, the same air, with the Tyrones. Kemp gave us sight lines that feel like intimate scenes from a movie, with enough motivated action to keep our eyes tracking around the room to the bar cart, the chairs, the piano, the central table, the bookshelves famously detailed by O'Neill, and back to the bar cart again and again. It must require tremendous concentration from the actors to feel as if they live in that home with eyes so close all around them. Clocking in at two hundred minutes, the play is long—that's right in the title. But my attention rarely flagged. We are in that home with them, having that day.Stephen Miller (James Tyrone) and Mary-Margaret Pyeatt (Mary Tyrone) both gave highly intelligent, expertly crafted performances, filled with nuanced, appropriate dynamics. The Mary character is sometimes considered exceedingly flirtatious, needing constant male attention, a cousin type to Tennessee Williams's Amanda in The Glass Menagerie. Pyeatt portrayed her more as a woman of her times, constantly having to serve male expectations while navigating her need for "that damned poison," more of a frail June Lockhart with a secret. We got the contrast between her roles as a family member and as an employer enjoying a breather with a servant. Pyeatt fully gave us the artifice and the arc of Mary. I'm not entirely sure she gave us the truth inside the falsehood, though, the felt, all-consuming drive of addiction.Similarly, Stephen Miller had an impressive bag of tricks. His readings were reliably well considered, illuminated, and rendered, almost like good slam poetry, with attention to pace and dynamics. But he didn't seem primarily focused on actually affecting the family members he's struggling and straining with. It's a subtle thing that goes to where the attention is placed, on really trying to overcome obstacles as opposed to really trying to expertly craft the performance. One can easily dismiss such reviewer comments. How can I really know after all? But as someone wise once said, if you don't feel anything, they won't feel anything.To boot, Miller is a fine-looking man but didn't convince as a former matinee idol who holds court at the bar and still gets admiring looks at sixty-five. You could argue that neither did Brian Dennehy when he played opposite Vanessa Redgrave, although he had great presence. And Ralph Richardson, though obviously an outstanding actor, certainly didn't fill out Tyrone's shoes in the 1962 Sidney Lumet film with Katharine Hepburn. Gabriel Byrne had the looks. Bruce DuBose had the taxed virility. It's a tall order.And then we come to Joey Folsom as Jamie. What an interesting treat. His darkness was etched deep into a Mephistophelian sneer, very much like a young Bogart, and very much as we hear O'Neill's brother was in real life. We usually get a Jamie who's a fun sport with hip patter. Folsom's Jamie was that too but a more willful rebel without a cause. He wasn't just commenting wryly from the sidelines. He was calling the shots. It was a strong choice. And when he comes home drunk, he is totally, scarily shitfaced and staggering. There was a risk of "playing a drunk" versus playing the struggle of denial against the effects of alcohol. But we could believe this Jamie really gets that bad, and did that night, pushing it until the last possible drink, the old K. O.And I don't want to neglect the very enjoyable turn of Cheryl Lowber as Cathleen, the insufficiently subordinate immigrant summer servant. (They don't send their best.)Addison itself was a treat too. I've lived in the Dallas orbit for the last fifteen years and didn't know what attractive, well-designed public spaces and gathering places it has to offer. With such ambitious choices of material, impressive talent available to pull it off, and inspiring places to do it, I'll definitely be coming back to the Stone Cottage Theatre for more.One can always quibble. I can anyway. But this Long Day's Journey made a significant contribution to my understanding of the play. O'Neill, and his family, at the time the events of the play took place, did not know whether or not Eugene was about to die a young man. It's all right there in the script of course. But our anxiety is dimmed on that point because we know right out of the gate that he lived to look back on these events many decades later. This is a casualty of O'Neill's being so autobiographical. Living the events so intimately at the Stone Cottage Theatre, though, it was possible for a while to experience the truth that we can't know how life will turn out until it does.