"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.

King Lear

Shakespeare has been dead for about 400 years. He wrote for an audience that was just starting to get into colonialism and threw their poop out of windows. Why, then, do we still produce/watch/read/study his plays?

Because they’re stories a multiplicity of people can sink their teeth into. Because they have so many ways to access them. Because of productions like OSF’s close-to-closing King Lear.

My grandpa just died. I loved the guy, and he was the grandpa I was closest to. And grief is a funny thing for me, because I tend to analyze it and over-think it and rob it of its emotional effect by putting it all in my head. Watching Lear and Gloucester get old and die in horribly dramatic ways helped me shed my tears. As an audience member, the play effected me in a way Lear never has before. But as a dramaturg, I have to understand why.

To do that, I want to go back to Aristotle. He holds (and I quote Ingram Bywater’s translation of Poetics) that the “tragic pleasure is that of pity and fear…” (1453b 12) What does that mean? According to Aristotle “…pity is occasioned by undeserved misfortune, and fear by that of one like ourselves…” (1453a 5-6) Lear and Gloucester make mistakes, but do they deserve the extent of their misfortunes? Does the old Lear really deserve to be cast out by his daughters and wander half-naked and mentally unhinged? Does Gloucester deserve to have his eyes ripped out? They aren’t villains, who knowingly sow discord and destruction like Iago. Nor are they heroes who save kin and country like Henry V. No, Lear and Gloucester are “…the intermediate kind of personage, [men] not preeminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon [them] not by vice and depravity but by some error of judgment…” (1453a 6-8) So that’s pity. What about fear, the recognition of one like yourself. King Lear needs to have his train of one hundred knights. “Oh, reason not the need. Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest things superfluous. / Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s.” (King Lear II.4 vs.267-270) Sometimes old men struggle with the need to give up those things that they’re accustomed to, that give them a sense of independence. “And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind.” (IV.7 vs.62-63) It’s normal for people, when they get older, to feel their minds start to slip. And the humiliation that can come from admitting it was clear in Michael Winters’ performance as the titular king.

That brings us to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Any play with as many access points as Lear is easy to do poorly. So how did Bill Rauch and Company do it well? By trusting the story, and not getting in the way of it. The Aristotelian pity is present in the text, but the Aristotelian fear comes from finding the truth in the text. And there’s no recognition of truth without trust. Rauch enunciated it finely in his program note:

“We have chosen a simple, contemporary approach for this production in our most intimate space to minimize any distance between you and the play’s bracing truths. The designers and I are here to serve the actors, and our entire cast is awash in skill and courage.”

It’s easy, as an artist, to get caught up in your own creativity. It’s much harder to let go and trust your collaborators. And Shakespeare, in spite of being dead and not having had a conception of basic bathroom hygiene, is one of the best collaborators a theater artist can work with. There’s a reason his plays remain popular after 400 years.