When the world went into lockdown, what was the impact of months of isolation on families struggling with addiction? That’s the modern lens most potently shone by director Robert O’Hara on Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night in a new production at the Minetta Lane Theater. But O’Hara, so unsparingly precise in his brutal and bruising staging of Slave Play on Broadway, risks pulling focus here from a glorious quartet of performances in service to a contemporary concept that never quite clicks.
The Tyrones—James (Bill Camp), a celebrated actor; Mary (Elizabeth Marvel), who’s just returned from a stint in rehab for her morphine addiction; and their grown sons Jamie (Jason Bowen) and Edmund (Ato Blankson-Wood)—are all under the same roof again. And while it’s suspicions of Mary’s relapse that fuel much of this classic play’s fierce tensions that unspool over the course of a single day and night, substance abuse isn’t her battle alone, as her husband and sons all teeter on—or rather totter over—the edge of alcoholism.
O’Neill set Long Day’s Journey Into Night in 1912, the year that the 24-year-old playwright was confined to a sanitarium for his tuberculosis, and because of its wrenching autobiographical elements, the play wasn’t published or performed until 1956, three years after the playwright’s death. Here, the TV blasting news clips of Donald Trump’s October 2020 hospitalization and James’s surgical mask—worn below his nose after a Starbucks run—immediately reveal O’Hara’s replanting of the story in our current moment.
There’s nothing in the text itself that feels out of joint with the modern world, thanks to O’Hara’s judicious trimmings. Productions of O’Neill’s uncut Long Day’s Journey Into Night often approach four hours and O’Hara has gotten it down to less than two, with no intermission. And the cast smooths over the old-fashioned edges of O’Neill’s language with ease. But it’s the specificity of this unsubtle modernization that tugs at the play’s seams, and in case you miss the boxes of masks downstage right, there’s a giant bottle of hand sanitizer on the coffee table. We’ve all played epidemiologist for too long for a superimposed Covid plotline not to be a major distraction, and there’s some whopping distractions here.
O’Hara seems to urge interpretation of Edmund’s cough—consumption in O’Neill’s original—as Covid, but the text and production buck CDC guidelines to the point of incoherence. Why is the family so cavalier about masking as Edmund hacks away in their faces? Why is Edmund off to get wasted at the bar right after his diagnosis? And if Edmund’s Covid symptoms are bad enough to require long-term hospitalization, why is he not heading there with any urgency?
While the production features clips of CNN coverage of Jacob Blake’s murder and retains references to James’s past performances as Othello, O’Hara seems to be employing color-blind rather than color-conscious casting: James and Mary are white, their sons are Black, and a major plot point turns on Mary’s experience of childbirth. That’s another choice that unintentionally draws attention to itself. If the production acknowledges that this is a world—both ours and O’Neill’s—in which race exists and matters, it’s odd that O’Hara’s made room for N-95s but not for exploring the dynamics of the multiracial family that he’s created.
Whatever specificity O’Hara sacrifices through the Covid haze, though, he makes up for it by coaxing out a convincingly tender and tormented familial constellation. From the start, it’s easy to imagine what the Tyrones were like in brighter days, before they were seized by the claws of addiction. This production captivates most in the drawn-out moments of affection, intermittent embraces that carry the passionate finality of a last grasp on a sinking ship.
In his scenes with Marvel, Blankson-Wood, also superb under O’Hara’s direction in Slave Play, trembles with the yearning of a young man who longs to regain his lost childhood innocence from the time before he understood his mother’s addiction. Camp (Marvel’s real-life husband) conjures up James’s contradictory personas as the hammy actor and the humbled patriarch, a could-have-been great performer laid low by his own ego and lack of discipline.
It’s Marvel, though, who makes the greatest mark, triumphantly keeping alive Mary’s humanity throughout: Even as she loses focus and clarity, slipping into a morphine-induced fog, Mary remains funny, vibrant, perceptive, wholly certain that she’s doomed but battling to preserve the part of her that still wants to heal. “I tried so hard,” she confesses to her husband, shakingly, with an aching panic, moments before her jawline hardens and she denies that she’s been using again, feigning ignorance of the topic altogether.
Marvel offers an athletic performance—one that opens with yoga and closes with collapse—but it’s through her voice that Mary’s struggle manifests most expressively. She tries on a New York whiny rasp whenever she’s looking for her glasses, a routine that turns eventually from winking and winsome to pathetic and desperate. And she delivers a soliloquy as she sinks intravenously away from reality in a guttural, almost demonic, low hum.
“None of us can help the things life has done to us,” Mary suggests. We could all say the same, in referencing these last two years. O’Neill’s play isn’t about all of us, though, as much as this production might lean into the allure of universality. But as a tapestry of how four people bend and break in response to forces they cannot control, this cast, beyond the masks they sometimes wear, weaves an affectionate and agonizing family portrait.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night is now running at the Minetta Lane Theater.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
