Theatre in Review: Long Day's Journey Into Night (Minetta Lane Theatre)

	Ato Blankson-Wood, Bill Camp, Jason Bowen, Elizabeth Marvel. Photo: Joan Marcus

I've seen plenty of high-concept revivals in my time but Robert O'Hara's production of Long Day's Journey Into Night is in a class by itself. Rarely, if ever, have a director, cast, and creative team been so grimly determined about dragging a classic play, kicking and screaming, into the twenty-first century. It has its admirers but, to me, it proves once again that Eugene O'Neill is the most intractable of playwrights; reinterpret his works at your peril. O'Hara and company give it their all, but the strain is evident throughout; they're working at cross-purposes with the writer they claim to admire.

O'Hara has reframed the original text in many ways. Before the play begins, we see a montage of cable news clips, including reports on the previous presidential election, the COVID pandemic, and race-based shootings -- all the stress points and outrages from the last two years. The cast members enter dressed in hoodies, cargo shorts, polo shirts, and, occasionally, face masks. And O'Neill's title never had less resonance: This is more of a pit stop, running less than two hours as opposed to the usual three or more. The time savings have been achieved in part by eliminating both intermissions and cutting the minor role of Cathleen, the maid. (Without a servant, the characters mostly dine on takeout.)

You may wonder what such contemporary touches have to do with the tormented Tyrones of 1912: James, the ruined, penny-pinching matinee idol; Mary, his aggrieved, drug-addled wife; older son Jamie, an aging, burned-out Broadway sport; and younger son Edmund, a would-be poet wasting away from tuberculosis. This production is apparently rooted in the notion that a play's relevance to our time must be made blindingly explicit in every detail. As Elizabeth Marvel, who plays Mary, told the Times, "It very much speaks to this moment, when a lot of people are having to return home to their families, dealing with addiction and codependency during a crisis, while not being able to get out."

But it is on these points that the production wobbles most glaringly. The Tyrones are trapped in their house by psychological and financial dependency, not health restrictions; no vaccine will solve their problems. The men's epic drinking and Mary's dope habit are products of another time, caused by a toxic cocktail of Victorian morality, old-school Irish-Catholic piety, bitter disappointments, and crippling shame. (These are only the highlights.) And while TB once spread in epidemic proportions, its ramifications were, in many ways, very different; AIDS, with its associated stigma, would be a better point of comparison. Throwing in references to other social problems, such as those mentioned above, does nothing to illuminate the family's twisted dynamic. The Tyrones suffer because they can't stop torturing each other, not because Donald Trump is running for re-election.

There are many other incongruities that feel out of place in the production's contemporary context: James' fabulous success as a barnstorming stage star, Jamie's penchant for hanging out in whorehouses, and Edmund's attempt at fleeing his family by shipping off to sea. The characters seem to exist in a time warp, surrounded by modern trappings yet bound by the conventions and manners of a long-gone era. Rather than heightening the drama, these choices blur the dramatic picture.

The production's relative speed is, arguably, deleterious to the performances, depriving the actors of the time needed to connect with their characters' ravaged souls. Bill Camp, as James, succeeds best, in part because a certain seedy grand manner is native to him; he also has a solid grasp of the childhood poverty that has left James permanently fearful. He and O'Hara have worked out some telling bits of business, for example when James, overcome with emotion, hugs and kisses Edmund, then nervously cleans himself with sanitizer. At the same time, his performance never comes near such predecessors as Laurence Olivier, Brian Dennehy, and Gabriel Byrne. As Jamie, Jason Bowen has his moments, especially when staring, intently, at Mary, searching her face for telltale signs like dilated pupils; overall, however, he is insufficiently dissipated and lacking in the needling sarcasm that is Jamie's best weapon against his father. If he overdoes the drunkenness in the final scene, he does rouse the needed fury and self-loathing for his climactic encounter with Edmund. Coughing dutifully into his handkerchief and staring into the middle distance, the talented Ato Blankson-Wood delivers a strangely uncommitted performance as Edmund, offering a strictly pro forma reading of his gorgeous, ecstatic account of life on the water.

If Blankson-Wood can't find the lyricism in O'Neill's words, Marvel is positively determined to murder it. The actress has clearly, conscientiously done her homework, intent on rendering Mary's addiction with documentary authenticity. She plays the early scenes straightforwardly, her cheerful manner barely concealing her growing anxiety. (There's no hint of fragility, or of her clinging to the memory of a genteel, sheltered past, but whatever.) Once she starts shooting up -- which we see, no fewer than three times -- she delivers her lines in a grating form of baby talk; one must fight not to tune her out. Her final speech, one of the most heartbreaking in American drama ("I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time") becomes a run-on monotone mumble. It ends with her falling to the floor and snoring loudly.

Everyone involved is determined to treat the piece as a thoroughly contemporary family drama. But this is Long Day's Journey Into Night, not August: Osage County and the playwright's singular style is given no respect. When you take away the longing, the loss, the awful beauty out of O'Neill's writing, very little is left. The play is a terrible indictment of his family (and, perhaps, himself), but there's forgiveness in its poetry; he loves the Tyrones enough to give eloquent voice to their sorrows. Without it, you have a clinical case study and a rather banal one at that.

The design is a jumble of elements, some of which work better than others. Clint Ramos' set design is, interestingly, dominated by a forbidding upstage wall with a cutaway view of Mary's room. If the rest looks cluttered and depressing, I guess that's the point; the same is surely true of his deeply unflattering costumes. Alex Jainchill's lighting expertly tracks the progression of time noted in the show's title. Palmer Hefferan's sound design delivers all the necessary effects, including crashing waves and a foghorn, along with some very light reinforcement for at least one cast member. The projections by Yee Eun Nam amount to overkill; aside from the opening news montage, they include a skeletal image of Mary climbing the stairs and a visual display, when Mary gets high, that is more psychedelic than anything in Flying Over Sunset; we the get point, many times over.

I've seen productions of Desire Under the Elms and Mourning Becomes Electra come to grief due to directorial mishandling; even so, this is a special case. Long Day's Journey Into Night was famously written, in O'Neill's own words, "in tears and blood." Its power comes from the totality of his vision; mess with that and you have risk producing something dispiritingly pedestrian. The play's dark magic is absent from the Minetta Lane stage. --David Barbour