"Long Day's Journey Into Night"

In the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's hands, Eugene O'Neill's private anguish in Long Day's Journey Into Night taps into the universal hell of addiction.

Dramaturg Lydia G. Garcia's program notes point out that the experience lived by the Tyrone is autobiographically similar to that lived by the O'Neill family during Eugene's growing up. In the very capable hands of the acting quintet (Michael Winters, Judith-Marie Bergan, Jonathan Haugen, Danforth Comins and Autumn Buck), OSF's study on the social effects of addiction resonates with startling clarity.

The set (by Christopher Acebo) and costumes (by Meg Neville) are both realist: director Christopher Liam Moore keeps any ego out of the way of the play. The opening sequence is almost a laugh a minute, punctuated by moments of tension when one of a character's addictions are obliquely referenced. As these tense punctuation points unfold, a pattern emerges: the tension exists between the three men. Mother Mary Cavan Tyrone (Bergan) brings the much needed levity. Slowly we learn that she has a problem of her own: she's addicted to morphine, and recently returned from a sanitarium. We also learn how easily she can slip back into using in the face of husband James' (Winters) alcoholism, son James Junior's (Haugen) alcoholism and gambling addiction, and son Edmund's (Comins) mysterious illness. It's so easy for her to quietly slip into the isolation of being stoned and escape the others' sicknesses, and her own sense of failure and ennui. Once she retreats into her addiction, the levity is gone and she drifts ghost-like into the background: rarely seen and never distant. The three men are left to their own devises, and explore their own vices in O'Neill's meditative prose.

Addiction, like Mary, is surprisingly invisible for its nearness to everyone. In this study, O'Neill examines the ways in which those closest to us can be afflicted, and yet, because of how isolating addiction is, it may take years before we're cognizant of what ails them. Long Day's Journey Into Night is a classic and unfortunate instance wherein a deeply personal story is in fact universal. Whether you yourself reside in that hell, or simply have to watch powerlessly as those you love sink into it, O'Neill's text resonates.

OSF's team, led by Moore, both allows O'Neill's anguish to reverberate, and gives it body to do so. It can do so because of how familiar addiction's isolation is: if you yourself suffer from one, how can you ever communicate that hell to someone who doesn't? When you watch your childhood friend retreat further and further into vodkas and crans until you can't even see him any more, how can you understand his pain or communicate your own sadness and helplessness to the guy sitting next to you who's never known any of his friends or family to suffer so? By exploring his own anguish, O'Neill taps into the universally isolating hell that is addiction, and OSF brings us into a room together to think about it.

August: Jackson County

Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County is going viral all over the country, but should it? I wondered if I would get more out of it if I saw it again, in the same way you would expect to get more out of a Shakespeare play when you see it the second and fifteenth times. After all, people seem to be treating August as a new classic.

I can’t see why.

I could complain about the acting. After all, the Old Globe had a stirring class, but OSF’s ensemble fell short of what I’ve come to expect from that company. I am, naturally, thinking of the two productions that I’ve seen a week apart together. The OSF cast was doing everything that actors should: projecting, keeping their cues tight. But it didn’t seem organic. I failed to invest in the characters, and I failed to laugh at their outrageousness. What happened was that they ended up playing it at the same level and tempo throughout the first act, and it was fairly clear to me that they were acting. I should qualify this review right now by saying that I only made it through the first act. I figured if I was going to be bored until midnight, I could at least do it in my bed, asleep.

I could be alone in this. It seems I am: everybody I talk to enthuses about August, and the audience I was a part of was pretty lively. This makes me think that the acting didn’t read as stagey to the rest of the audience as it did to me. They genuinely seemed to be into it. So why wasn’t I? Could it be that I just heard these jokes a week ago, and so they seemed old? And if that’s the case, then it tells me that August is superficial: there’s nothing under the surface.

Others disagree with that opinion. Director Christopher Liam Moore indicates in his program note that he’s fascinated by the focus on family. He posits that “there is a little bit of the Westons in each of our families.” But if this were the case, then I should be able to invest a little bit more. As it turns out, I just have no reason to care about a dysfunctional white family living in Oklahoma, especially one that parades its exaggerated extremities in front of me for three and a half hours.