Family: They know everything. Home is the least private place there is. The intimacy of immediate blood ties was for Eugene O'Neill, as it is for many others, inescapable. Family is a life-term sentence, destined to be served out either within the restraining bars of the home itself or in absentia at any of the globe's four corners. Home is where people feel, for brief grace periods, the most relaxed and, more often, the most alienated. No other writer, arguably, has written more incisively--or with more poignant elegance--about family than Eugene O'Neill.
O'Neill's greatest work for the stage, Long Day's Journey into Night, one of the most grueling emotional marathons for an audience, is also his most clearly autobiographical. He came from a family of Irish addicts and was one himself. Long Day's Journey into Night is a dissonant quartet for voices in pain: a morphine-addicted mother, an impossibly cheap and alcoholic father, an alcoholic and libertine brother, and yet another alcoholic who was also consumptive (O'Neill himself). The Tyrones are the family O'Neill had.
Only Bona Fide Comedy
But the Millers of Ah, Wilderness!, O'Neill's only bona fide comedy, is the family he wanted: one with its share of problems, it is true, but every bit as warm and generous as the Tyrones are nervous and haunted. (O'Neill's own two sons, Eugene, Jr., and Shane, both committed suicide.)
The two plays--O'Neill at his most despairing and most hopeful--were in repertory at the First International Festival of the Arts this past summer in New York City to celebrate O'Neill's centenary. Seeing them in such close proximity to one another, we see the difference between O'Neill's reality and the fantasy he so charmingly concocted for himself in Ah, Wilderness!
One of the first questions that comes to mind out of this occasion is, Is there any new way to do O'Neill? The answer is, probably not. Both plays are so rooted in their time, with hardly a line of dialogue wasted, that they resist radical interpretation. (Long Day's Journey set on a boat? Ah, Wilderness! played out in the Hamptons?) At any rate, neither of these Festival productions is interested in new approaches. It's just as well, since in O'Neill it is essentially the performances that count.
Long Day's Journey into Night, specifically, has enjoyed several revivals during the last 15 years or so. In 1975 Robert Ryan and Geraldine Fitzgerald played the hapless Tyrones; in 1972 in the West End Sir Laurence Oliver and Constance Cummings essayed them; and there is, as well, the 1962 Sidney Lumet film starring Sir Ralph Richardson and Katharine Hepburn.
In the latest production, the two protean roles of James and Mary Tyrone (Jamie and Edmund are supporting roles, albeit two of the stage's meatiest) are taken on by the team of Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst, who come to their roles with quite an O'Neill pedigree. And they are second to none of the formidable pairs listed above.
Actors stamp famous roles with their own personalities. Robert Ryan's Tyrone, for instance, was particularly virile; Olivier, the consummate technician, concentrated on Tyrone, the matinee idol who never fulfilled himself as
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