Stacking the Deck

uniform stood for. This dream will torture her life and her family’s as it did her father’s.

Last season on Broadway, O’Neill proved, in what many called his masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night, that he was a virtuoso of the theater. He also proved that he never could outgrow an adolescent hostility to his family, and the need to assert his independence against all the theatrical, racial and religious traditions that he felt as a repression and a tyranny. Yet man must establish his identity in a human context and tradition; the isolation-stage must pass with adolescence, when one stands free of, though in, the family. O’Neill never did. He could only look backward, and lacerate the ones he feared to love. He was not the Irishman whose “fog” is drink alone; but he was Irish, and could not leave the clan—nor the Irish creed: in this as in all his plays, he is trying to go to confession.

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Warren Eyster

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uniform stood for. This dream will torture her life and her family’s as it did her father’s.

Last season on Broadway, O’Neill proved, in what many called his masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night, that he was a virtuoso of the theater. He also proved that he never could outgrow an adolescent hostility to his family, and the need to assert his independence against all the theatrical, racial and religious traditions that he felt as a repression and a tyranny. Yet man must establish his identity in a human context and tradition; the isolation-stage must pass with adolescence, when one stands free of, though in, the family. O’Neill never did. He could only look backward, and lacerate the ones he feared to love. He was not the Irishman whose “fog” is drink alone; but he was Irish, and could not leave the clan—nor the Irish creed: in this as in all his plays, he is trying to go to confession.