Long Day’s Journey Into Night dir. by Christopher Liam Moore, and: The Count of Monte Cristo dir. by Marcela Lorca (review)

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) in Ashland, Oregon, is not well known for its O’Neill productions. In fact, this year’s Long Day’s Journey Into Nightis the first O’Neill production at OSF this millennium. Prior to this, they have only taken on O’Neill a handful of times, most recently in 1998 with A Touch of the Poet. ¹But in the 2015 season the festival organizers presented O’Neill’s most distinguished play, Long Day’s Journey, concurrently with his father’s alleged bane (“That God-damned play”), The Count of Monte Cristo, as it was adapted by Charles Fechter, James O’Neill and others. It is an interesting and audacious contrasting pair for those familiar with the O’Neill history.

According to Christopher Liam Moore, director of Long Day’s Journey, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival planners often create seasons in which productions comment on each other. ²For example, the same year that OSF commissioned the Tony Award–winning All the Way, about LBJ’s first year as president in 1963–64, they also commissioned Party People, a play about former members of militant civil rights groups whose ranks were infiltrated by the FBI, in order to present two different perspectives from the same era of American history. This season’s Long Day’s Journeyand Monte Cristobookend O’Neill’s theatrical career, providing insight into the shift of American theater from trivial popular forms of theatrical entertainment to the more thoughtful and varied dramas seen today.

O’Neill’s earliest plays show him moving as far as possible from “that hated theatre of my father.” In place of the superficial thrills and romantic fantasy of melodrama, O’Neill pursued “the impelling, inscrutable forces behind life.” ³Melodrama arose as a popular derivative of an aesthetic anchored in Romanticism. Romantic theater differed from traditional theater in its looser structure, its focus on characters whose circumstances and conscience forced them outside of “civilized” society. The Romantic hero’s preference for wildness and freedom often led to death. These works of art glorified Rousseau’s “natural man” and often included scenes of nature unleashed as a powerful metaphor of unnamable supernatural power in all its uncertainty. Romantic playwrights preferred Shakespeare to the neoclassical models that had been in favor, leading to plays that sprawled in time and space.

As the themes and ideas introduced by the Romantics gained popular acceptance, mainstream playwrights looked for ways to imitate the form while maintaining a more socially conservative world vision. The result was melodrama, initially a drama with music, in which poetic justice replaced individualism as the primary force controlling the world of the play, and so plot, rather than theme or character, became the controlling element of the drama. The flood of melodramas that followed from this impulse had a predictable plot in which good overcame evil and the characters became two-dimensional exponents of these forces. Audiences came to see these plays to escape reality and participate in an organized, easily understood world where justice always prevailed. They also came to see the thrilling special effects and realistic swordplay that risked the lives of the characters as well as the safety of the actors. This form became especially popular in America, where theater depended on the box office, and for the same reason its predominance endured much longer. And so, while O’Neill had many literary models in his career, such as Ibsen, Strindberg, and Conrad, perhaps the strongest impulse he followed was to veer away from the kind of superficial theater represented by Monte Cristo.

Serious treatment of melodrama in production is rare, but OSF artistic director Bill Rauch served as Peter Sellars’s assistant during Sellars’s stint as director...