The Poison Talking
By Una Chaudhuri
Long Day's Journey Into Night
By Eugene O'Neill
Plymouth Theatre
236 W. 45th St.
Box office: (212) 239-6200
They're back. And they're at it again. America's
First Family, the everlasting Tyrones, back in their summer cottage
on the beach, back to face the grim music of their disappointments and
despair, and back also to challenge us to account for ourselves, our
hopes and dreams, our betrayals and breakdowns. In the masterful revival
of Long Day's Journey Into Night at the Plymouth Theatre, the
appalling difficulty of the play yields a rare theatrical experience,
four hours of self-disclosure of an intensity that renders the distinction
between actor and character altogether academic. Under Robert Falls's
sure direction, Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Dennehy, Phillip Seymour Hoffman,
Robert Sean Leonard and Fiana Toibin, give performances of historic
caliber and consequence, laying bare a new layer of this play's endless
insights into the American cultural imaginary. As the country embarks
on a possibly disastrous political journey, this mother of all American
plays speaks of the limits--even the pathology--of self-involvement.
The main insight of O'Neill's play is the idea
that hell is not just--as Sartre famously had it--"other people": it
is other people to whom one is tied with bonds of blood and biography.
Hell is family. Hell is that welter of indestructible memories and stone-etched
resentments, the ceaselessly repeated exchanges of anger, sorrow, need,
disappointment, frustration, and shame that is the dark language of
kinship. "Written in blood," as O'Neill himself described it, Long
Day's Journey Into Night was also written in that first, horror-stricken
understanding, given by psychoanalysis, of the explosive tensions and
crippling toxicity of what later came to be called, without irony, the
nuclear family. With its unflinching ear for the cruel insinuations
and shocking outbursts of family talk, Long Day's Journey towers
above such later classics of the genre as Pinter's The Homecoming
and Shepard's Buried Child by virtue of its painful and patently
autobiographical honesty. This day in the life of an aging couple and
their two sons lays bare the author's own struggle to wrest creativity
from family pathology, art from illness, truth from failure.
The power of the play, it has often been said,
is largely due to its intense inward focus: although the text states
that the action occurs in 1912, the play does nothing to bring that
action into relation with any public events of those tumultuous times,
nor of those (including a world war) in which the play was written,
1939-40. The Tyrones seem a world unto themselves, hermetically sealed
off from everything else.
And yet a keen awareness of the larger world
was one reason O'Neill gave for imposing the notorious twenty-five-year
posthumous ban on publication of the of the play (and unlimited ban
on production): while often remarking that this was the finest thing
he had ever written, he added that it was not a work he wanted to bring
to the world "in this crisis-preoccupied time." His wife and executor,
Carlotta, did not honor these requests. The play was published three
years after O'Neill's death and premiered the same year, 1956, in Stockholm,
Sweden. The young director of that production, Bengt Ekerot, regarded
the play as the definitive accomplishment of the Ibsenite-Chekhovian
paradigm of psychological realism, in which everything emanated from
impulses deep within the characters, nothing from the world around them.
By contrast, the first--and now legendary--American production, directed
by Jose Quintero, set the emotional mass of the family's interactions
within a larger framework suggested by the play's diurnal structure
as well as its major symbolic image: the fog. Quintero asked for a design
that would "bring nature into the set" and show the characters' journey
in relation to "the various speeds and moves that the sun experiences
as it makes its long voyage across the sky." David Hays, the designer,
responded with a set built around three large windows, through which
the play's powerful non-human actors--the sun, sea, and fog--entered
to shape the family drama into a tragedy of radical non-belonging.
In the half-century since those premieres, the
play has become a monument of both psychological realism and poetic
symbolism. The forms of behavior and rhythms of speech that constitute
the family's pathology have been brilliantly observed to the point of
clinical diagnosis. At the same time, the halting lyricism of the young
poet's self-accounting--"stammering is the native eloquence of us fog
people," says the character Edmund--is matched by a paradoxical landscape
of open sea and enclosing fog, the romance of the one contrasting bitterly
with the carceral effects of the other. In the acclaimed 1988 Stockholm
production directed by Ingmar Bergman (which visited BAM in 1991), the
impact of environment on the inner life of the characters was literalized
through the expressionist device of still images projected behind the
stage: the facade of the house, a closed door, the fog enshrouded house,
at the end a radiant tree. Bergman also disrupted O'Neill's insistent
unity of place by setting the last act on the verandah of the cottage,
placing Edmund closer to the outside world. Few productions have pushed
the play toward a more specific social context, although European ones
have frequently looked for the characters' universal humanity through
an understanding of their American context. The director of the first
Italian production (Milan, 1956) asked if "anyone who looks closely
at Edmund and James" would not be reminded of "the two sons of Willy
Loman, Miller's traveling salesman? Their fall/failure takes place on
the same terrain."
Willy Loman might easily come to mind in the
widely acclaimed production currently on Broadway, if only because Death
of a Salesman was the last, and hugely successful, collaboration
between the play's director Robert Falls and one of its stars, Brian
Dennehy. Dennehy indeed brings a kind of white-collar pathos to the
role of James Tyrone, highlighting the money-anxieties of the potato-famine
Irish immigrant over the bluster of the bardolatrous actor. His petty
self-delusions are no match for his wife's titanic regrets, which inexorably
drag the men around her into the depths of despair. As played by Vanessa
Redgrave, Mary Tyrone dominates this excavation of O'Neill's subterranean
labyrinth of regret and recrimination. Her performance is so detailed
and so riveting that it changes the basic question of the play, the
one rooted in its retrogressive action: why is she so hurt, angry, damaged?
Watching Redgrave go from flirtatious playfulness to sadistic sarcasm
to terrifying attack and finally back to childlike innocence, one finds
her husband's explanation--"it's the poison talking"--utterly unsatisfying.
Watching her flutter and start and fidget and--in one heartbreaking
moment--literally climb the walls, one wonders: what is the poison really
saying?
What is this masterpiece of American drama saying
at this "crisis-preoccupied time," so different from the one
in which it was conceived? Are those elusive forms--modern tragedy,
American tragedy--more possible in the aftermath of our recent
horrors, and can O'Neill's family saga be a resonant echo chamber for
the nation's sorrow? The set of this production, designed by Santo Loquasto,
suggests something of the trajectory the meanings must now follow. The
set tells a story of radical otherness, framing the anguished
subjectivity of the characters within an immense and eloquent objectivity.
The stage is dominated by a vast expanse of dark wood, the walls of
the Tyrone family house stretching endlessly upward. The naturalistic
living room, neither cozy nor cold, neither shabby nor elegant, lies
low to the ground, weighed down by the mass of darkness rising above
it. As they tower above the anguished action of the play, these mammoth
walls signify ceaselessly: they are the walls of a tomb, the hull of
a ghost ship, the trunk of a gigantic tree. Over time (and of course
it is a long, long time, over four hours) they become the overarching
and inflexible contours of the human condition, simultaneously amplifying
and dwarfing the anguish of the frail creatures beneath them. Under
their impassivity, the Tyrones's self-analysis, pathologically rigorous
as it is, is revealed as inadequate to the complex challenge of living
maturely in the real world.
Edmund laments that he was born a man: "I would
have been more successful as a sea gull or a fish." Invoking the non-human
world of mute creatures and silent things, the poet longs for an alternative
to the destructive "talking" of the poisoned self. Although this production
eschews a transcendence of the kind signified by Berman's radiant tree,
its courageous pursuit of everything that lies beneath the "talking"
brings another kind of resolution into view: the exhaustion of inwardness
and the turn to the outside world, with hope and humility.