LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT
And what a litany of sorrows O’Neill confesses on behalf of himself and his family. Alcoholism, drug addiction, sexual promiscuity, miserliness, blasphemy, even hints of suicide and murder. Drawing from his own life, O’Neill wrote Long Day’s Journey between 1940 and 1944, “in tears and blood . . . with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness” (as he said in his note dedicating the play to his wife). Fueled by booze and despair, the characters in this play–based on O’Neill’s parents and older brother–lash out at each other and themselves, baring the sickness in their souls through accusation and apology, denial and denunciation. The father, James Tyrone, an aging ex-actor who squandered his talent to become a matinee idol, lacerates himself for the failure of his family; the mother, Mary, addicted to morphine since giving painful birth to the younger son, Edmund, prays in vain for an end to loneliness and the return of innocence; Jamie, the older son, a cynical drunk embittered by the tragedy of his mother’s addiction, lashes out at the world and takes pleasure in corrupting his younger brother (having in childhood killed–perhaps willfully–another brother by exposing the infant to measles). And Edmund–O’Neill’s surrogate self–watches the world around him in wonder and horror, self-destructively exacerbating a case of consumption by reckless drinking.
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As the older brother, Jamie, Ken Beider conveys inner conflict but lacks the maturity to make this wastrel the tragic figure O’Neill saw him as; Beider might have done better as young Edmund, who is inadequately played by Scott McWilliams. Neither Beider nor McWilliams is equipped to grapple with O’Neill’s language–a common enough failing among young actors, but no less bothersome for being widespread.
