Arts and Manners

O’Neill’s posthumously published Long Day’s Journey into Night (New Haven: Yale University Press) was expected to bare the master’s heart and to reach into his creative secrets. The play, written in 1940, was dedicated to O’Neill’s wife, Carlotta, with a reputed injunction against public disclosure for a considerable period of time. Ever since, the world-wide, learned and devoted circle of O’Neill scholars had been buzzing with rumors about the profundities contained in that shamelessly honest confessional. It turned out to be an honest confessional all right. But the profundities remain buried with O’Neill.

Long Day’s Journey into Night employs five actors for almost four hours, in four acts, without the benefit of a plot. In short, it’s in the authentic O’Neill tradition. The (sometimes excruciatingly retarded) action takes place in 1912, in the Illinois summer home of James Tyrone, a second rate actor and, indubitably, a first-rate replica of Eugene O’Neill’s father. From 8:30 in the morning to about midnight of the same day (indeed, a very long day’s journey into night), Tyrone’s wife, Mary, tries to comprehend why she became a drug addict; his elder son, James, why he became a coarse lush; and his younger son Edmund (Eugene O’Neill), why he has ended up as a tubercular and hopelessly misanthropic poet. The fifth persona dramatis is Cathleen, a servant girl, whose only visible place in the author’s design is, I’m afraid, to provide what is known in the trade as comic relief. (She doesn’t.)

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William S. Schlamm

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O’Neill’s posthumously published Long Day’s Journey into Night (New Haven: Yale University Press) was expected to bare the master’s heart and to reach into his creative secrets. The play, written in 1940, was dedicated to O’Neill’s wife, Carlotta, with a reputed injunction against public disclosure for a considerable period of time. Ever since, the world-wide, learned and devoted circle of O’Neill scholars had been buzzing with rumors about the profundities contained in that shamelessly honest confessional. It turned out to be an honest confessional all right. But the profundities remain buried with O’Neill.

Long Day’s Journey into Night employs five actors for almost four hours, in four acts, without the benefit of a plot. In short, it’s in the authentic O’Neill tradition. The (sometimes excruciatingly retarded) action takes place in 1912, in the Illinois summer home of James Tyrone, a second rate actor and, indubitably, a first-rate replica of Eugene O’Neill’s father. From 8:30 in the morning to about midnight of the same day (indeed, a very long day’s journey into night), Tyrone’s wife, Mary, tries to comprehend why she became a drug addict; his elder son, James, why he became a coarse lush; and his younger son Edmund (Eugene O’Neill), why he has ended up as a tubercular and hopelessly misanthropic poet. The fifth persona dramatis is Cathleen, a servant girl, whose only visible place in the author’s design is, I’m afraid, to provide what is known in the trade as comic relief. (She doesn’t.)