James
Karas
Miles Potter
directs a highly commendable production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Eugene
O’Neill’s long-winded family saga for the Stratford Festival. It plays in the
small Studio Theatre which has the advantage of intimacy and the issue of
limited space.
Long Day’s
Journey tells the story of the Tyrone family.
James Tyrone is a one-role matinee idol who sold his soul to Mammon and abandoned
Melpomene (maybe). He rose from poverty and did amass some wealth but he could
not shake off his years of hardship and remained a miser all his life. He was
convinced of his great acting talent and recalled or perhaps imagined playing opposite
the great Edwin Booth and alternating the roles of Othello and Iago with him.
Photography by Emily Cooper.
It is a
devastating portrait of O’Neill’s father and Scott Wentworth does a superb job in
the role. He shows us James as a heavy drinker, an arrogant man, a selfish
husband and a repulsive miser who keeps his whisky locked up and can tell if
someone has had a drink from an open bottle. His sons are forced to pour water
into the bottle to fool their father.
Wentworth does a
superb job of presenting all those traits in Tyrone but I missed the matinee
idol. This Tyrone is the one-role actor who thinks of himself as a star while
regretting prostituting his talents for money but his star quality is never
shown.
The long day’s
journey into night is the story of James’s wife Mary brilliantly portrayed by
Seana McKenna. Mary is a pathetic woman who was raised in a convent and fell in
love with the image of Tyrone as an actor and had to live the reality of cheap
hotels, addiction to morphine, the death of a son and the double life of hiding
from reality until she goes into the inevitable night. McKenna gives a
deeply-felt portrayal of the unfortunate Mary who goes from the pretense of
health to the reality of madness. She shows us Mary’s torn interior as we see
the wrecked exterior behind which the truth is supposed to be hidden.
Charlie Gallant (left) as Edmund and Gordon
S. Miller as James.
Photography by Emily Cooper.
James Tyrone Jr.
(Gordon S. Miller) is a wastrel who spends his time drinking and whoring and
has no other ambition in life.
Edmund (Charlie
Gallant) is the youngest son and he is suffering from tuberculosis as did
O’Neill. It is a self-portrait of the playwright as a sickly man, a would-be
poet and a dreamer. Gallant with his sallow complexion, deep-set eyes and
sickly appearance has to cope with the fear of tuberculosis and his father’s
penny pinching. Mendacity, as Big Daddy put it in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, is
a deeply rooted habit in the Tyrone family.
The cast has to
express the hatreds, love and harrowing ghosts and emotions that tear the
Tyrones apart and keep them together.
The maid
Cathleen with her thick Irish brogue is very funny and provides a perfect
contrast to the warring Tyrones and Amy Keating is a delight to watch in the
role.
The play takes
place in a summer home in Connecticut during a single day. The Tyrones wear
light summer clothes and should be enjoying the holiday. The set by Peter
Hartwell and costumes by Gillian Gallow are a pleasant image of a well-off
family enjoying the summer. Again the image and the reality do not match.
O’Neill’s
verbosity is inescapable but in Long Day’s Journey is becomes a tool
for driving home the emotional morass and the toxic atmosphere in which the Tyrones
live. Despite some complaints, in the end it all adds up to a great night at
the theatre. .
______
Long
Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill continues
until October 13, 2018 at the Studio Theatre, 34 George Street East, Stratford,
Ontario. www.stratfordfestival.ca
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