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.

O come, all ye faithful

Dan Roach and Will McGarrahan shoot first and pray later in Next Fall.

There has long been a certain gap in intellectual ambition at SpeakEasy Stage, as I've lamented before, but their production smarts often made that easy to forgive. Now my recent falling-out with them may have made me less forgiving, or their programming may indeed have become more under-achieving, I'm really not sure;  but their current show, Next Fall,  only seems to up the ante on their trend line; it's an exquisitely produced gay weepie, and jeez, is it dumb.

To be fair, you can generally count on some intellectual edge from SpeakEasy founder Paul Daigneault, or longtime director Paul Melone.  But Next Fall is a Scott Edmiston show.  Which means every edge in it has been sanded down to a soft curve; as it grinds on, you realize every failing will be understood, every shortcoming will be sympathized with - and every falling tear will glisten like a sweet trickle of sap.

I'm not sure when, exactly, Edmiston became our sultan of sap.  He used to throw the occasional marvelous party, but now he prefers pity parties (his last production was of a play about a Jewish boy who wanted to paint his mother on the cross; I'm not kidding).   Which is too bad, it seems to me. Edmiston has a light, secure touch, particularly with comedy; why can't he stick to light, funny shows?  Actually, he has stuck with the "light" part this time; though it pretends to various depths, Next Fall is obviously superficial - not the tragic love story it styles itself as, but instead another narcissistic coming-out story in disguise, this time played out at death's door.

For yes, playwright Geoffrey Nauffts has dragged out of the closet the central melodramatic convention of the AIDS era - the hottie dying young - and dusted it off just as if nothing had really changed about being gay in America.  This time said hottie - "Luke," played by Dan Roach - has been struck down by a passing cab rather than a virus, but just about everything else about Next Fall is comfortingly familiar: the bigoted, clueless parents, the relationship Luke kept in the closet, the quirky girlfriend, even the candle shop - they're all there.  We often feel we're in a Movie of the Week from 2005. Or maybe 1995.  Or even 1985.

The "twist" this time around, though, is that Luke is a Christian.  He actually prays after he ejaculates, in fact.  He's expecting the Rapture.  In short, he deserves to die!  I mean - praying after sex is understandable in a nineteen-year-old at Bible camp, but in a thirty-something hottie in Chelsea?  Please.  And as for the "critique" of Christianity that SpeakEasy seems to think this play is mounting - again, puh-leeeze.  Critiquing Christian prejudice against gays is like shooting loaves and fishes in a lavender barrel.  In the past, SpeakEasy has made hilarious theatrical hay with actual faiths like Catholicism - which for all its horrors and flaws is still a genuine moral and intellectual edifice.  You can critique it - there's a hypocrisy there to get angry about.  But post-Protestant "Christianity" is only a handshake and a haircut; there's just nothing there; you can't satirize it, it's already self-satire.

But the politics of Next Fall are really just feints from the main event, anyhow, which is the extended coming-out party of Adam (Will McGarrahan), Luke's lover.  For once poor, closeted Luke has landed in the ER, there is suddenly a lot of 'splainin' to do in the waiting room!  Especially to bigoted, macho dad Butch (Robert Walsh).  (I know, I know . . . "Luke," "Adam," "Butch"!  Don't get me started.)

Now there probably is a solid play to be drawn from this set-up; but it would have to be drawn from the real world, in which the terrible choices of life-and-death situations were given their full force.  But even as Luke approaches brain death, and his eyes are about to be harvested, Nauffts keeps the focus on Adam and how no one will really accept him as he is, as if life were one long encounter group at some high school's Gay-Straight Alliance.  It doesn't even seem to occur to Adam that maybe it's not about him anymore, or that he and Luke painted themselves into this particular corner, and that maybe it's time to shed a tear for his dying lover rather than himself.  And while Nauffts indicates here and there that he's aware Adam's fabulous gay lifestyle isn't much help with the great beyond, he seems unable to allow his Christians - who do, after all, have a kind of angle on "end-times" - any real spiritual credit; he can't complicate his caricatures enough to allow them a true dialogue.  Instead he takes cheap shots to punch things up, like saddling Butch with the n-word, as if he were frying up squirrel in some broken trailer in backwoods Alabama.

Given the limits of the play, I suppose it's a credit to Edmiston and the expert cast he has drawn together (as he always does) that a few tears are, indeed, expertly teased from Next Fall.  The stand-outs are the reliable Amelia Broome, who makes light work of Luke's chatty, wounded mom, and Robert Walsh, who brings more sympathetic skill to the role of Butch than perhaps it deserves.  Meanwhile Will McGarrahan is his usual poised, ruefully witty self as Adam, but I simply didn't believe in his love for Luke - who was made a pretty, but also a pretty empty, vessel by Dan Roach.  To be fair, however, McGarrahan does pull off a moving coming-out duet with Broome, and Roach actually gets through Nauffts's Guiding-Light-level finale.  And around the edges of the production there were intriguing turns by Deb Martin and Kevin Kaine, who simply didn't have enough to do.  The detailed design work is by Janie E. Howland; the predictable but appropriate score by Dewey Dellay.  I wish all these people were working on something more ambitious, but hey, at least they've got work, right?  And no doubt they'll be working again soon, frankly; because all things being equal, something tells me we'll be seeing a play much like this one from SpeakEasy Stage - perhaps as early as next fall.