Playwright: Eugene O'Neill
At: The Gift Theatre Co., 4802 N. Milwaukee
Contact: 773/283-7010; $20-$25
Runs through: Oct. 15
BY CATEY SULLIVAN
The Family Tyrone may be composed of drunks and smack addicts, but you could never accuse Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical creations of lacking in culture.
In the middle of their most morphine- and whiskey-fueled benders, the characters of Long Day's Journey Into Night can still quote Shakespeare and Swinburne like scholars.
And that is one of the things that makes the Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy so very difficult to stage effectively. In the wrong hands, the Tyrones come across as a bunch of anachronistic gasbags rather than the exquisite embodiments of bottomless sorrow and wasted genius that they are.
This is a piece about a drug addict's lost soul, the passive self-destruction of her sons and the bitter realization of her husband that the best part of his life was over long ago.
In the Gift Theatre's nearly four-hour-long production of Long Day's Journey Into Night, the bottomless sorrow kicks in well before the half-way point. Alas, it's not the result of anything inherent to O'Neill's towering play.
First and most glaringly unforgivable:
Director Michael Patrick Thornton has cast the pivotal role of opiate addict Mary Tyrone with an actress who looks at least 20 years too young for the part. Even sporting a ( badly fitting ) grey wig, Alexandra Main looks more like the Catholic schoolgirl of Mary Tyrone's distant past than the mother of two grown sons. She looks like a younger sister to the consumptive Edmund ( the Eugene O'Neill stand-in ) and his resigned-to-failure brother Jamie rather than their mother. The cognitive disconnect that hits every time the three are on stage together would be enough to remove you from the play even if you could overlook the ridiculously exaggerated tics and twitches ostensibly intended to indicate Mary's withdrawal symptoms.
Then there's family patriarch, James Tyrone. Gary Wingert at least looks like the weathered man of a certain age that the role demands. But we need an embittered, raging, hubris-wrecked lion of a man whose once-luminous charisma still flares every so often. That we don't get. Wingert's delivery ranges from wooden to woodener. Moreover, there's no chemistry between Wingert and his on-stage wife—although that's in part due to the fact that she could pass as his granddaughter.
That brings us to Edmund ( Brandan Donaldson ) and Jamie ( John Kelly Connolly ) . Long Day's Journey Into Night is at heart Edmund's play, the story of O'Neill himself—a poet struggling to break free of his family's stifling demons. Donaldson has flashes of resonance, particularly in some of his third-act scenes with Connolly. But he never evokes a sense of the bone-loneliness in Edmund, or of the character's fathoms-deep artistic frustration.
It all makes for a very long Long Day's Journey Into Night.
