Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” touches on many emotional problems in its masterful depiction of America’s first dramatized dysfunctional family: self-hatred, jealousy, self-pity, self-destruction and regret, to name just a few. Yet in Arena Stage’s extremely moving production of “Long Day’s Journey,” none of those elements turns the play’s characters into monsters. Instead, the play illuminates people who are simply fallible and profoundly human.
O’Neill’s play takes place in 1912 near the sea in the Connecticut home of the actor James Tyrone Sr. (Peter Michael Goetz). He has been married for 35 years to Mary Tyrone (Helen Carey) and is the father of two grown sons, James Jr. (Andy Bean) and Edmund (Nathan Darrow).
The play begins one morning with the men celebrating the apparent good health of Mary, who has recently returned from a sanitarium where she was being treated for morphine addiction. Yet Edmund is concerned that she may use again.
| Onstage |
| ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ |
| Where: Arena Stage, 1101 Sixth St. SW |
| When: Through May 6 |
| Info: $40 to $85; 202-488-3300; arenastage.org |
In fact, Mary not only begins to use morphine, she goes to the pharmacy and buys more as she can’t live with pain, which she says comes from the rheumatism in her hands. Her more serious pain is guilt stemming from the death of an infant son.
Carey is gentle yet powerful as Mary, a woman lost in her memories and her sense of disillusionment. When she attacks her husband for not giving her the life she wanted, for making her follow his selfish career, Carey infuses the part with a complicated mix of vitriol and adoration that has made Mary one of O’Neill’s supreme female characters.
Under the smooth direction of Robin Phillips, the four characters in this “Long Day’s Journey” work as a well-orchestrated ensemble. Goetz provides the right kind of blustery self-indulgence as James Sr. Bean is explosive as the cagey James Jr. Darrow is remarkable as the ailing Edmund, whose sensitivity and forthrightness force the other characters to reveal their interior lives, creating a sense of reconciliation at the play’s end.
Phillips wisely did not turn the emotional whirlpools eddying wildly throughout this play into a tsunami of brutalized feelings. Instead, he provides a piercing, credible vision of four people caught up in the great swings between affection and anger that identify them as Tyrones, while trying to deal with their imprisonment in an interior emotional fog that mimics the fog outside.
