"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.

My Fair Lady

All three of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival plays I’ve seen this year (Cymbeline, Heart of Robin Hood, and now My Fair Lady) not only feature dynamic female protagonists, but the women playing the protagonists find depth in the most light-hearted plays and humor in the heaviest. 

Everyone knows Lerner & Loewe’s musical adaptation of Shaw’s Pygmalion. It’s standard fair for community and high school theaters across the country, not to mention a delightful film starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. So one can imagine how it could become over-wrought and boring. That makes it up to the artists retelling this classic to do it in a way that makes it worth going to the theater instead of just popping in the DVD. Rachel Warren, under the direction of Amanda Dehnert, tells the story of Eliza Doolittle in a way that I’ve never considered, and yet perfectly explains my single greatest problem with the script.

Why does Eliza go back to Higgins? He’s clearly an awful, abusive man. For years and years I thought it was just the American happy-ending pastiche – the guy gets the girl, consequences be damned. But Warren found a part of Eliza that I’d never seen before. The simple body gesture of flinching when Alfred P. Doolittle (Anthony Heald) or Higgins (Jonathan Haugen) makes a sudden movement in her direction tells a story of a girl who was beat by her alcoholic father. Her relationship with him, being scared of him and oh so easy for him to manipulate carries over into all her other relationships with men in the play. This is especially true of that with Higgins, but also with Freddy (Ken Robinson) and Pickering (David Kelly). When she leaves Higgins, she jumps right into the arms of the first man who will have her, even though Freddy clearly has nothing going for him – he’s spent weeks literally rolling around on the street where she lives. Why? In the scene after the break-up in Mrs. Higgins’ house (played by Kate Mulligan) she tells Higgins that the difference between a lady and a flower-girl is not in how she acts or speaks but in how she is treated. She denies herself any agency, and puts it all into the hands of Higgins who treats all women like flower-girls and Pickering who treats them all like ladies.

So when she told Higgins goodbye forever and slammed the door behind her, I was happy for her, like I always am. And that slamming door was so final! Director Dehnert approached the story wanting to find the messiness in it, and to that end put the chorus in seats on stage, let the wires hang out, and put all her actors on stage for their warm-ups before the show started. All of this paid off when the huge shop door up stage opened at the end of the “good-bye forever” scene and slammed in Henry Higgins’ face. It felt very Ibsenesque. But where the power of the slamming door in A Doll House is that that’s the end, its power of OSF’s My Fair Lady is that it isn’t. It’s irony that A Doll House, by a playwright who reveled in the messiness of life, has a clean happy ending – Nora gets agency over her own life. But My Fair Lady, a light-hearted musical by the American fantasy-makers Lerner & Loewe, has an untidy heart-breaking ending – Eliza is trapped in a cycle of abusive relationships and this story will repeat itself until she’s dead or becomes Nora Helmer.