Theatre in Review: Long Day's Journey Into Night (Roundabout Theatre Company/American Airlines Theatre)In Jonathan Kent's production of Eugene O'Neill's tragedy, the light of an August day fades and the fog rolls in until the four members of the Tyrone family feel cut off from the rest of the world; before the final curtain, their summer house will come to seem a cage where four tormented souls cannot help tearing into each other. I've seen several fine productions of Long Day's Journey Into Night, but perhaps never have the characters' savage emotions percolated so close to the surface. Some stagings have had a lost, almost haunted, feeling; at the American Airlines these nights, the characters' fury is red hot, their sorrows so corrosive that of course they grab desperately at anything -- a bottle of whiskey, a shot of morphine, memories of events that never took place -- to dull the pain. This may or may not be the best version I've seen, but it is certainly the most immediate. These Tyrones know where each other's scar tissue is, and they aren't afraid to probe it. That this is so is evident the moment Jessica Lange, as Mary Tyrone, enters, smiling falsely, fussing with her with hair, and flitting about the room like a hummingbird looking for a place to land. She makes little jokes and resolutely denies that the coughs racking the lungs of her son Edmund are due to anything more than a summer cold. (Edmund has tuberculosis. He knows it, his father and brother know it, and Mary knows it. But they've chosen to go along with this polite fiction until Edmund visits the doctor later in the day, and the unsurprising news is delivered.) The mood is light, almost breezy, until Mary turns and catches her husband and sons unapologetically staring at her, anxiously scanning her for signs of intoxication. As it happens, they are correct to be worried, and Lange charts Mary's disintegration, over the course of a single day, in such pitiless fashion as to take your breath away. The most fearless of actresses, she gives us a Mary who is both victim and predator. Gradually destroyed by the solitary life of an actor's wife, looking back at years spent living in cheap hotels waiting for James, her husband, to come home drunk after his show, and haunted by the death of a child, she is so eaten up with rage that it can no longer be contained. Latching onto Edmund's face with a death grip, she asks, tauntingly, "Are you afraid to leave me alone?" -- and later makes a planned trip to the pharmacy sound like a terrible threat. Later, under the influence of morphine and slipping into the past, she becomes disoriented, lost in a haze of memories from her convent school days. Seated at a table, she tries to slip to her knees, in order to pray to the Blessed Virgin (whom she still believes in, at least when under the influence); she loses control of herself and crashes to the floor. Earlier, standing at the window, she turns one of the play's more famous lines ("Mother of God, why am I so lonely?") into a heart-piercing cry. If Gabriel Byrne is more understated as James, he is equally unsparing. He captures James' garrulous nature and skinflint ways, working them both for honest laughter. But the stunned look in his eyes when he realizes that Mary is back on the needle is a kind of glimpse into the abyss. When, in response to Mary's complaint that everyone is leaving her, he says, "It's you who are leaving us, Mary," the sorrow in his voice is palpable. Accused of trying to shunt Edmund off to a cut-rate sanatorium, he defensively offers a searing account of his deprived youth, especially his regret at having purchased a pot-boiling dramatic vehicle ("that goddamned play that I bought for a song") that guaranteed him a lucrative career as a matinee idol but sacrificed his talent in the process. The sight of Byrne, standing in a dimly lit room, railing against years of deeds that cannot be undone, is one of the most powerful to be found in a New York theatre just now. As Jamie, who was driven onto the stage by his father and is now a "wised-up" Broadway rake, living only for the next belt of whiskey or whore's kiss, Michael Shannon is the very picture of dissipation. Permanently exiled from his mother's love -- she has always held it against him for accidentally, but fatally, infecting his little brother Eugene with measles -- he faces the world with a death's-head grin and an I-don't-care attitude that barely conceals the darkness festering inside. When Jamie confronts Edmund, claiming to have corrupted him on purpose ("You're more than my brother. Hell, I made you! You're my Frankenstein."), his confession of betrayal is infused with a hellish self-loathing; slipping into drunkenness, he reveals himself to be his mother's son. It's only a few steps from this Jamie to the dying cirrhosis-riddled Jamie of A Moon for the Misbegotten. If John Gallagher, Jr.'s Edmund isn't on the same level as the others -- for one thing, consumption aside, he seems remarkably robust -- it's not entirely surprising. The role is more passive and doesn't afford the same opportunities. Still, he has his moments, especially when Edmund looks Mary in the eye and says, "It's pretty hard to take at times, having a dope fiend for a mother." Also, Tom Pye's set, which, with its bare furnishings, provides insights into James' penny-pinching ways, has a slightly difficult ground plan, which Kent doesn't always handle well; often, during the first half, Mary ends up at stage left, looking upstage or out the window, obscuring herself from the audience seated at house left. Natasha Katz's lighting begins in glorious sunlight and makes brilliant use of limited illumination in the final scene; there's also a magical effect when Edmund is describing his life on a tramp steamer and the walls become transparent, revealing the clouds of fog enveloping the house. But the first late-afternoon scene is strangely conceived; it looks like the middle of the night outside the windows, yet the unlit interior -- James hates to put on a lamp -- is strangely bright. Jane Greenwood's costumes and Clive Goodwin's sound design -- catching the roar of the nearby ocean -- are both beautifully done. And the slight thrust of Pye's set plays a key role in the final scene, when Mary enters clutching her wedding dress, now completely lost to the others. Facing out, seeing God only knows what, her husband and sons glimpsed behind her in a tableau of despair, she speaks two or three of the most devastating lines in American drama: "Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time." The rest is silence. -- David Barbour 
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