Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Opening Night: April 27, 2016
Closing: June 26, 2016
Theater: American Airlines
“Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is the tale of an ordinary summer’s day with extraordinary consequences. Drawing so heavily from Eugene O’Neill’s personal history that it could only be produced posthumously, the story centers on the Tyrones, a dysfunctional family with a drug-addicted mother, penny-pinching father and two troubled sons.
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April 27, 2016
A violent storm front has moved into the American Airlines Theater, where Jonathan Kent’s static, star-packed revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” opened on Wednesday night, and like so much of our weather these days, it seems to be human-made. It may be the special-effects team that’s generating all that moody fog and wind. But it’s Gabriel Byrne, Jessica Lange, Michael Shannon and John Gallagher Jr. who are providing the thunder and lightning. I mean the histrionic kind, of course, the sort of heavy-weather acting you associate with the distant era in which James Tyrone, the aging, grandstanding matinee idol played (very effectively) by Mr. Byrne, ruled as a king of the stage. Voices are raised, lapels are grabbed, fate is cursed, backs are turned, shoulders are squared, and bodies are sent tumbling to the floor. Yet you can’t avoid the feeling that this tempestuous climate is artificially controlled. All of the leading performers in this production are proven powerhouses. They all have at least moments of the probing intensity that they’ve shown in their previous work. And Mr. Byrne serves one of the most subtle, fine-grained slices of theatrical ham on record.
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April 27, 2016
In Broadway’s star-studded revival of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” the character of James Tyrone is the seasoned stage actor. But his beloved and bedeviled wife, Mary, also puts on a hell of a show. Junkies do that when they’re shooting up and want to hide it. Mary’s not fooling James or their sons, Jamie and Edmund. She’s just wreaking havoc, as she’s done for decades. But the politeness fades on an August day in 1912. “It’s pretty hard to take at times, having a dope fiend for a mother!” rages Edmund. Boom! That line, first heard 60 years ago, is as piercing and explosive as ever. More grenades get tossed in this mighty American tragedy. The tormented Tyrones rip through illusions and hurl regrets, recriminations and harsh truths. O’Neill is at his most autobiographical in this Tony- and Pulitzer-winning drama. Repetitive and long-winded too. Even a perfectly tuned production can be an endurance test. Performances aren’t all equal in Jonathan Kent’s nearly four-hour Roundabout staging.
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April 27, 2016
One of the more surprising aspects of the latest Broadway revival of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” a play defined by its malignant sorrow, is the nervous laughter that often ripples through the audience. Eugene O’Neill’s intimate epic, first produced in 1956, three years after his death, lasers in on the gloomy insularity of characters representing the playwright’s own unhappy family. But Jonathan Kent’s starry production, led by a transfixing Jessica Lange, also invites us to see reflections of our own closest relationships in the haunted Tyrones — bound by love and hatred, need and rejection, co-dependence and isolation in an agonizing present tormented by the long reach of the past. Much of the acrid humor that keeps bubbling up comes from Michael Shannon’s dangerously unpredictable Jamie Tyrone, the unrepentantly cynical eldest son, a failed actor turned dissolute Broadway loafer. But the heat-seeking center of the production is Lange’s morphine-addicted Mary Tyrone, a role she played previously in London 16 years ago.
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April 27, 2016
It can be a challenge, making the contemporary case for Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” It’s as long as its title warns, for one thing. It’s repetitious and maudlin and dated; attempts to update it only make it a greater slog. I’d seen three of the five previous Broadway productions of the play; each had its attributes, none adding up an entirely successful evening, until now. The revival that opened tonight at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s American Airlines Theatre is, in a word, transfixing. It may sound like no fun at all to spend nearly four hours with the dope-and-booze-befogged Tyrone family, but by the time this journey was done, I was completely given over to the dark and dangerous spell of O’Neill’s masterpiece. It was as though I was seeing it for the first time. This would have been impossible without one of the rarest convergences on Broadway: an all-star cast and director that works as well on stage as they promised on paper.
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April 27, 2016
As the morphine-addicted Mary Tyrone in the latest Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s bitter masterwork, “Long Days Journey Into Night,” Jessica Lange brings stunning colors to the role of a woman clawing her way through fog. You can’t take your eyes off her; it’s a mesmeric performance. But don’t look here for the “simple, unaffected charm” described in O’Neill’s stage directions. Lange’s Mary is a desperate fighter, defensive and manipulative, switching in an instant from self-pity to sneak attack. By turns, she is loving, wistful, lonely, proud, vicious and confused—but above all, she is an addict. Her dodging and feinting may not fool anyone for long, but they buy her some time on credit that she ran through long ago. In Jonathan Kent’s production, the other actors orbit around Lange’s blazing star turn in painfully believable patterns of resignation. Gabriel Byrne plays her husband, James, with striking weariness and restraint; his heartbreaking account of his impoverished childhood helps explain (if not excuse) the miserliness that has cost his family dearly. As their dissolute oldest son, Jamie, the riveting Michael Shannon infuses his climactic drunk scene with acrid dark humor and reluctant, wounded tenderness toward his consumptive younger brother, Edmund (a willfully sincere John Gallagher Jr.). In their ruined dreams and undelivered promises, they are trapped in grooves they have dug for themselves and each other.
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