Here's a clear, sanitized, very bright production of Long Day's Journey into Night, a play most would never consider clear, clean, or very bright. Jonathan Miller, a director some would consider unconventional, has made the choice to use overlapping dialogue throughout--at times four speeches going on simultaneously--and this production will be famous for years to come by completing the playing time of O'Neill's master-work in two hours and forty minutes.
This virtual textbook study in overlapping dialogue is the naturalistic attempt to have the play ring the bell of absolute truth, of honest-to-God lifelike speech. When this method of delivery works, the remarkable rhythms of life are being struck. But there are times when the actors inadvertently boost their volume in order to be heard, and the result is words volleyed in a round of competition. The idea serves to single handedly bedevil or bedazzle the production.
The necessary ensemble development required to play such give and take is here. Jack Lemmon plays the one-script career actor, James Tyrone, but he is very much with the rest of the cast. It is no star vehicle for him, as Long Day's Journey…is very much Mary's play. Bethel Leslie gives us Mary in a prolonged sentence, which, once, the morphine weaves its "poison," allows us the pleasure of seeking out the points in her prattle which might be either insights or a series of sad, twisted truths. Lemmon's Tyrone never screams for her "to forget the past"; instead he attempts to caress her away from it as much as he can.
Much of the play, then, makes the case that we should feel ingratiated toward the family. However, in the
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