A New Insight Into Edmund Tyrone by Way of the Second Girl

In light of this panel’s theme, “Representations of Eugene O’Neill,” and in consideration of the Roundabout Theatre Company’s superbly cast current revival of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, I’d like to discuss O’Neill’s most renowned autobiographical avatar: Edmund Tyrone. Recent circumstances have led me to do so by way of the relatively minor character in the epic family tragedy, the Tyrone family’s “second girl” Cathleen. The role of Edmund is being performed this spring by John Gallagher Jr., with Gabriel Byrne as James, Jessica Lange as Mary, and Michael Shannon as Jamie. Although at this point I have no idea how Gallagher plans to interpret the role, about a month ago I received an e-mail out of the blue from the young actor, Colby Minifie, who’s been cast as Cathleen.

Minifie sent an impressive list of questions: Where would Cathleen have lived? What was her job description? Was she based on a real person? Could Cathleen’s name have been assigned in homage to O’Neill’s first wife Kathleen Jenkins? I answered each query as best I could, more often using historical sources on Irish servants in the early twentieth century than biographical sources on the O’Neill servants, about which virtually nothing is known. Inevitably, our exchange came around to the unkind description of Cathleen in O’Neill’s stage directions where she is called “ignorant” and “dense” with a “well-meaning stupidity.” That demeaning language surprised Minifie, given O’Neill’s reverence for all things Irish, and she was inclined to deepen the role intellectually and emotionally. I suggested she get her hands on a copy of The Second Girl by Ronan Noone, a recent play that dramatizes Cathleen’s behind-the-scenes interactions with two other servants, the cook Bridget and the chauffeur Smythe. (Noone’s play appears elsewhere in this issue of EOR.) I hadn’t read the script, but Minifie contacted the Huntington Theatre Company’s dramaturge for the 2015 Boston production, received a copy, and forwarded it to me. As I’d expected from Beth Wynstra’s review of The Second Girl in this journal (EOR 36:2), Noone’s portrait of Cathleen is far more charitable than O’Neill’s, and his stage directions pointedly describe her as “far from stupid.”

Fig. 1.

Colby Minifie as the “second girl” Cathleen in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s 2016 revival of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Noone’s was a noble project, without question—an Irish American defending this young Irish immigrant from The Master’s evident snobbery. Yet after further exchange with Minifie, we gained insight into O’Neill’s way of characterizing her. In the logic of the tragedy, the dramatic irony established by Cathleen’s ignorance and “well-meaning stupidity” just might heighten the tragic tension of the play. Her inability to deduce what is right in front of her—namely, the morphine addiction of her mistress and the destructive impact of this on her men—allows for a strong contrast of the ingrown family and those, like Cathleen, who dwell outside that particular hell. (Inserting a daft or otherwise benighted interloper into a family crisis is a dramatic maneuver later used more conspicuously and with a striking effectiveness by Sam Shepard.)

With this realization in mind, my thoughts turned around to Edmund. I argue in my biography that of the four Tyrones Edmund is an innocent in contrast to the rest of the Tyrones, and far and away the least responsible for the family’s tragic situation. James is a miser; Mary is an addict; Jamie is hell-bent on self-destruction; while Edmund’s fault lies in the simple fact that he was ever born at all. After the discovery and subsequent publication of Exorcism, O’Neill’s dramatization of his suicide attempt in late 1911 and a kind of prequel to Long Day’s Journey, we find a much different portrait of the artist...