Long Day's Journey proves a long night, too

Will Lyman and Karen MacDonald channel the doomed Tyrones. Photos: Andrew Brilliant.

I confess I'm on the fence about the New Rep's current version of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. It's hardly a great production of this difficult (though deeply rewarding) play - it features several of Boston's best actors, but they're slightly miscast, and the direction, by Scott Edmiston, isn't up to the demands of the text. Nevertheless, it's not a bad production, either; I doubted Edmiston could handle O'Neill's thorniest tragedy - and I count myself vindicated - but he did do better than I thought he would.  And his leads, Will Lyman and the great Karen MacDonald, have moments of piercing intensity and insight (as above) in two of the greatest roles O'Neill ever created, James Tyrone and his doomed wife Mary (who were modeled on O'Neill's own tormented, emotionally dishonest parents).  Thus, if you've never seen this drama, what I call the "Vanya on 42nd Street" effect may pay off for you; there's enough raw power here, in sporadic bursts, to allow the uninitiated to sense the intensity of the play.



If you're an O'Neill aficionado, I doubt you'll be as impressed - even though I don't quite count myself as one. I've taken a half-dozen Journeys - one of which was unforgettable - and in the end, I'd probably rate this almost precisely at the middle of the pack; it's certainly better than the boring Katharine Hepburn movie (or the disaster at the A.R.T. back in the nineties); and it's slightly better overall than the Gloucester Stage version some five years ago (although Sandra Shipley in that production was the best Mary Tyrone I've ever seen).

And thankfully Edmiston has mostly reined in his penchant for tidying up the script - mostly, that is; but he's still underlining things with his virtual directorial highlighter.  Janie E. Howland's set is heavy-handedly metaphoric, for instance; it's a pale ghost of a real house (everybody's haunted, get it?), and there are spooky sound-effects here and there that are sometimes a bit much; yes, it's all pretty clever, but it's also a little too pretty; we're aware of the design when we shouldn't be.  Still, the set does allow for one genuinely evocative bit of stage business, in which Mary, lost in a fog of morphine, passes like a blur back and forth behind a frosted door.  But on second thought, transforming young Edmund Tyrone literally into Eugene O'Neill - mustache and all - is, well, far too obvious (we know this script is autobiographical, we've read the program).  So if you tallied up the wins and misses here, you might come to a draw;  compared with Edmiston's various sins against authors in the past, though, I suppose you could count all these directorial flourishes as relatively minor.

But what Long Day's Journey inevitably highlights, I'm afraid, is that beneath his decorative skills, Edmiston is simply too superficial for O'Neill.  He arranges the play quite well, I admit; actors are set up for their solos, the pacing slows here and there but never quite comes to a stop, and the blocking is well-balanced, etc. - still, no sense of real ensemble develops over the course of the production.

And this is because Edmiston hasn't really dug into the play and worked out a coordinated emotional vision for the actors.  And that's what Long Day's Journey Into Night is all about; it's a tragic web, in which the usual "lead" is replaced by an entire family, operating as both hero and accusatory chorus.  The Tyrones are in sad shape - patriarch James is at the tail-end of a matinee-idol career which brought him riches but never cured him of his innate cheapness, or his inability to actually connect with other people.  Only now, in the twilight of his life, is he realizing that his sons are both wrecks, and that his wife is - well, Mary is slipping back into the morphine addiction she developed when a hack doctor (the only one her husband would pay for) prescribed the drug for her as a painkiller.

Lewis Wheeler does his best to hate Nicholas Dillenburg.

What's more, she's backsliding largely because she can't face the fact that her youngest, Edmund, may himself be slipping into tuberculosis (an added twist of the knife comes from the fact that it was Edmund's birth that first pushed Mary to seek pain relief).  Meanwhile elder brother Jamie surveys the deepening collapse around him with a cynical scowl - that is when he's not drowning his self-hatred in booze, brooding on his personal failures, or indulging in jealousy of his younger brother (another infant - tellingly called "Eugene" - died of measles contracted from, yes, Jamie; the real Eugene O'Neill had a baby brother named Edmund who died in the same way).

Whew.  Are we having fun yet?  Well, while I can't pretend that Long Day's Journey is a grand night out, I can argue that it is great art - one of the greatest portraits of familial dysfunction in literature, in fact.  And what makes it all the more piercing is that O'Neill understood above all that deep, familial ties are bent, but rarely broken, by betrayal and disappointment; yes, despite the tangled skein of their mutual guilt, the Tyrones still love each other, which makes the poignance of their predicament all but unbearable.

Needless to say, limning this lattice of recrimination and loyalty requires a strategy, but Edmiston doesn't seem to have one, so you keep feeling that the actors are largely doing their best on their own.  MacDonald and Lyman have worked together before, of course (in the by-now-legendary production of All My Sons at the Huntington), so they trust each other, and sometimes connect at the level O'Neill intends.  But they're actually reversed in terms of type - MacDonald has the broader, louder presence of a possible matinee idol, while Lyman often has an aura of elegant introspection, so their relationship never quite has the deep resonance it should.  Still, Lyman is sometimes touchingly puzzled, and MacDonald simulates porcelain as best she can, and in fact is often riveting (she knows all the notes she should hit) - the performance is just slightly scattershot; and we don't feel that at bottom Mary is essentially deceptive, as we really should.

But then we don't feel that about anyone; what used to be called 'actor intent' is largely missing from this production, even though everybody in Long Day's Journey is basically attempting to deceive someone (or everyone).   And this means that Edmiston has missed the motor of the play, which is why the production slowly begins to drift, and makes you feel every minute of its three-and-a-half-hour running time (a hint to future directors of O'Neill: shave ten minutes off the second act of this baby).  The gap is most apparent in the performances of the troubled Tyrone siblings; as Jamie, Lewis Wheeler actually has the only fully-worked-out portrayal to be found in the cast, but at least as of opening night it was still an intellectual exercise; he hadn't internalized it yet.  To be fair, this may have been partly due to the fact that as Edmund, newcomer Nicholas Dillenburg was a handsome blank, so Wheeler didn't have anything to work against.  Edmund often seems to be the weak point of this script; the role, I think, is underwritten, perhaps because the other characters are largely seen from his vantage point; still, there's much for Dillenburg to play that he hasn't yet figured out - most importantly, his own efforts to hide his deteriorating health, and not face the terrible moment in which he must see that his own mother (like his father!) is unavailable to him in his time of need.

Still, all things considered - if you've never had any contact with this play, you should probably see this production.  It is a worthy introduction to this dramatist, if not too much more.  And at the very least, in Karen MacDonald's performance you will sometimes see the muse of tragedy peek out from behind her mask; and in these slick, superficial days, that's something to treasure.

Loves of a blonde

There are four more where these came from: Karen MacDonald in The Blonde, The Brunette, and the Vengeful Redhead. Photo(s) by Meghan Moore.

Whatever else I may say about the A.R.T., I must admit they made one great artistic contribution to the city's theatre scene.

They fired Karen MacDonald.

And freed from her avant-garde shackles, MacDonald took the town by storm, triumphing at Gloucester Stage, the Huntington, the New Rep, and now the Merrimack Rep. I feel for Ms. McDonald, of course - I'm sure she misses that regular paycheck from Harvard. But we're all so much better off since they let her go. The tragedy is that there's no company in town who can offer her a steady job - or rather will offer her a steady job; both the Huntington and the A.R.T., the two organizations with the financial heft to field a repertory company, refuse to do so for pseudo-intellectual reasons. Which isn't so much a tragedy as a scandal. Another scandal, while I'm on the topic, is the number of great performances we might have had from Ms. MacDonald while her light was hidden beneath the pretentious basket of the A.R.T. In the past year alone we've had at least three terrific turns from her - and prior to that? How many artistic poseurs have obscured her true talent by now? Hmmm . . .

But let's not dwell on the A.R.T. - that way madness lies! Ms. MacDonald is currently lighting up the boards in Robert Hewett's The Blonde, the Brunette, and the Vengeful Redhead, a one-woman show that originated in Australia but has all but taken the global stage by storm. And it's not hard to see why: the script offers a virtuoso actress an opportunity to essay seven utterly different characters (and jump the gender line twice). Better still, it goes somewhere interesting. I don't want to overrate the play - its language is rudely vital but not remarkable, and it has at least one scene (involving a victimized little boy) that pushes the bounds of taste - but it holds you, in the manner that a good story always does. Be warned, however - this is not the broad sex comedy its title seems to promise, although there is some sex (and plenty of comedy). The story revolves around an inadvertent murder, and takes several dark, hair-pin turns; it leads toward what looks like redemption, it's true, and Mr. Hewett's tone is hardly cold; but it's always hard-boiled in something like the manner of an old-fashioned noir.

Some have complained that the author's episodic structure is a mere theatrical gimmick, but they couldn't be more wrong. In fact, Hewett's varying monologues actually put over persuasively his underlying point, that no single perspective can ever serve as an accurate representation of reality. Indeed, the play operates a bit like Kurosawa's famous Rashomon, only in reverse - in that classic movie, we slowly realized, as we listened to its characters, that we would never understand what actually happened at the scene of their crime. In The Blonde, the Brunette, and the Vengeful Redhead, however, we begin to grasp the "truth" of the matter at hand; but we simultaneously realize the people we're listening to - the people who were there - never can understand what actually happened to them. Indeed, as the script develops, we perceive that its "story" is steadily evaporating; almost all its action, it turns out, has been based on misperception. So the play has been about a blonde leading the blind - all the characters' moral decisions, good and bad, have been made in various levels of ignorance. As that eponymous blonde announces near the finale (as she reveals that she's not even a blonde at all): "Nothing is what it seems." Only in the play's last moments, in fact, do its truly good characters recognize each other and begin to grope their way closer in the dark.

For a moral philosopher, of course, this represents a crushing kind of quandary (and who knows how Saint Peter puzzles it out). But for a theatre audience, it's pretty much business as usual - we know that what we're watching onstage isn't what it seems; it's "the lie that tells the truth." Indeed, at the Merrimack, we slowly realize even the scene changes - which at first seem to reveal Ms. MacDonald changing costume from one character to another - are illusions, too. I'm not sure if this meta-theatrical detail was the idea of director Melia Bensussen, but it's in keeping with the general thoughtfulness of the production (for once this director has left her identity politics at the door). And of course Ms. MacDonald is superb throughout - I heard she had some line trouble on opening night, but that was gone by last weekend, and we could simply luxuriate in a long demonstration of the actor's art; as she did in last summer's Last of the Red Hot Lovers, Ms. MacDonald has devised subtly different voices, looks, attitudes, and body languages for every personage she inhabits; she even makes a convincing dude. My favorites among her characterizations were probably the dotty lady down the street, the trashy, double-timing neighbor, and especially the knowing, not-really-a-blonde Tanya. But any student of acting could take any of these seven performances as a master class in how the thing is done. The only question as the curtain fell, in fact, was: where will Karen MacDonald do it next time?