"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.

Re-telling "A Wrinkle in Time"

Tracy Young's adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, playing at OSF through November 1st, is a beautiful re-telling of a beautiful story about learning to live and let live and love.

Alejandra Escalante

Young, who also directs, is credited in the Playbill as an adaptor, but this play is really a staging of L'Engle's original text, abridged. This devotion to text, already a hallmark of OSF's work, brings L'Engle's classic tale of embracing your flaws and allowing yourself to love directly from the private pages of a book to the public space of the Angus Bowmer theater.

Meg Murry (Alejandra Escalante) is swept away from her suburban home with her genius little brother Charles Wallace (Sara Bruner) and friend Calvin O'Keefe (Joe Wegner) by the three Mrs. Ws (Judith-Marie Bergan, K.T. Vogt on opening night, and an unaccredited actress as Mrs. Which) to save her father (Dan Donohue). The children learn from the Happy Medium (Kate Mulligan) that all good things in the universe are at war with the Black Thing, a heavy evil presence. Some of the best fighters in this war have come from our insignificant planet - Jesus, Crazy Horse, etc. The Mrs. Ws tesser the children through space-time to the planet Camazotz where Mr. Murry is being held captive by IT, a malevolent intelligence through whose influence the entire planet has succumbed to the Black Thing. In order to defeat IT and save her family, Meg has to embrace her flaws - particularly difficult for an awkward adolescent girl - and to discover the thing that "she's got that IT hasn't got."

At its core, that's just what L'Engle's story is - an adolescent girl learning to accept herself for who she is. L'Engle and, by staging her text, OSF invest us in Meg's journey by establishing a binary moral code. This isn't hard for the audience to accept - we're brought up on binary moralities, whether they be God versus Satan or American freedom versus foreign oppression. In L'Engle's story, the Mrs. Ws are the standard bearers for Good, and teach Meg to accept herself as an individual. IT, whose modus operandi is to subvert the wills of others to ITs own, bears the standard for Evil. This simple devise is the key to A Wrinkle in Time's longevity and continued appeal - it encourages us, especially the young adults among us who need it the most, to simply be ourselves and to encourage those we care for to be themselves.

A Wrinkle in Time is a joy to read and a joy to see on the Angus Bowmer stage. People of all ages need stories that encourage them to love themselves. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is deeply invested in English and American theater classics, and A Wrinkle in Time is a welcome addition to the OSF canon.