Long Day’s Journey Into Night dir. by Katherine Owens (review)

Although the twenty-first century finds the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex richer in high-quality theater than your average Yankee might suppose, most of the better companies favor Shakespeare, Shakespeare, and Shakespeare or gritty plays of recent vintage. This arrangement might satisfy the likes of O’Neill’s James Tyrone (“we are such stuff as dreams are made on”) and his reactive son Edmund (“we are such stuff as manure is made on”), but plenty of us hereabouts would relish more frequent evidence of drama between, say, Bottom and Top Girls. Gratification has come from an unexpected source. Undermain Theatre, an edgy company named for its subterranean space on the periphery of downtown Dallas, has since 1984 promoted the usual icons of the European avant-garde as well as newer and still more discomforting playwrights, many of whom, like the company itself, have worn their punk tatters proudly into a respectable maturity. Perhaps nudged toward O’Neill by Artistic Director Katherine Owens’s fondness for Strindberg, the company has finally worked its way to O’Neill, whose late masterpiece Owens herself has smartly directed.

On balance, the production is a fine one, and at its best it is splendid. A boxy dark-wood set more Old West than New London jars a bit, but company member Bruce DuBose’s Tyrone sweeps aside such niggling concerns upon his entrance, flattering and flirting with his suitably disengaged wife, played by Joanna Schellenberg. DuBose’s relish for acting the actor is evident from the get-go, and not the least of costume designer Giva Taylor’s contributions is her nod to Monte Cristo, Tyrone’s “God-damned play that I bought for a song,” in the dark jacket and the flowing, amply lapeled white shirt that Tyrone wears in the histrionic fourth act. DuBose’s devastating delivery of Tyrone’s definitional line—“what the hell was it I wanted to buy”—reveals a man raging at a persona he cannot shed. To coin a phrase, Tyrone needs always to be “in characters.” DuBose never forgets this, and I expect henceforth to hear his velvety baritone, now pleading, now declamatory, whenever I read this play.

Fig. 1.

Mary Tyrone (Joanna Schellenberg) comforts Edmund (Josh Blann) in the Undermain Theatre’s production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Dallas). Photo: Katherine Owens.

One wonders if O’Neill’s doomed stipulation that Long Day’s Journey never be performed is in part an acknowledgment of the difficulty of casting Mary Tyrone, the center that won’t hold and the lead who wants only to exit. Schellenberg’s disconcertingly youthful Mary is thoughtful and deliberate but rarely transmits the addict’s urgency; we sense a general preference for the upstairs, spare-room high over the downstairs depression, not a consuming need to shoot up now, or else. More substantively, Schellenberg cannot reclaim the stage for her character when she returns at play’s end, wedding dress in tow. Perhaps DuBose, Shelby Davenport (James Tyrone Jr.), and Josh Blann (Edmund) have played the preceding scenes more well than wisely; perhaps the daunting brevity of Mary’s famous curtain speech stacks the deck against all but the rarest actor. Plenty of talented actors have come up short in this demanding role, and when Schellenberg shines—for example in her twitchily comic scene with the “second girl” Cathleen (Katherine Bourne)—she shines as brightly as the eyes that betray her illness.

The play’s irony crystallizes in the moments prior to Mary’s final entrance, when the Tyrone men drink themselves pie-eyed and fret about her addiction. The underlying calamity here concerns the destabilization of the familial quartet. Mary has cheated the men by renouncing the role of recovering addict, which had allowed her, neatly if briefly, to serve as both the foil for those subject to “the good man’s failing” and the receptor of a love that O’Neill portrays...