Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill (review)

A single day, a single space: the Flock Theatre production of Long Day's Journey into Nightallowed playgoers to experience both within Eugene O'Neill's childhood summer home. This 2017 revival marked the first time that O'Neill's autobiographical play was performed within the Monte Cristo Cottage, a registered national landmark and the setting of the text's dramatic action. This temporary inhabitation of the family's living space, and the curated responses to O'Neill's career within it, added to the claustrophobic atmosphere alluded to within the work. The production choices reinforced the play's thematic concerns, placing the playgoers within a literal archive of the O'Neills as the family's theatrical counterparts undertook their painful enactments of memory and history.

Instead of a constructed set, the audience and cast shared the sitting room of O'Neill's family home, which was designed to replicate the script's paragraphs of stage directions. With twenty-five chairs for playgoers, they and the actors occupied less than 200 square feet of space. The close physical proximity allowed playgoers an unusual degree of physical and sensory intimacy with the dramatic characters. For instance, when Anne Flammang's Mary Tyrone talked about the Thames River, playgoers could look outside the window with her to share, if not her precise perspective, her view. In her character's exits upstairs, Flammang went up a staircase (whose unattached spindles reinforced James O'Neill's purported stinginess), retreating past the portraits of James and Ella O'Neill. And as her children Edmund and Jamie (played by Victor Chiburis and Eric Michaelian) conferred about Mary's movements in the "spare room," where she doses herself with morphine, they (and the playgoers) experienced Flammang's pacing overhead. The cast faithfully replicated the stage directions throughout: some exits to a side porch within the script meant that the actors used the cottage's wraparound porch and remained visible to the audience members that had windows nearby. Occasionally, the fog referenced in the production (often as a metaphor for Mary's addiction) appeared in the landscape. For playgoers, this proximity to the play's specific environment reinforced the extent to which this family could not escape one another. We also were captive within the family home.

Flock Theatre's director Derron Wood continued this naturalistic commitment to the script by having the production's timing synchronized with the dramatic action. Playgoers had two alternate ways to experience the production: the first option allowed audience members to see acts 1 and 2 starting at 3:00 pm and to return for the final acts at 7:30 pm. The other option allowed playgoers to follow the time sequence of this "long day": a 9:00 am start, followed by act 2 being performed at 12:45 pm, act 3 at 7:00 pm, and act 4 at 8:00 pm. That sequence replicated the play's temporal shifts, allowing the production to function as a sort of living history project or multidimensional art piece. With a running time of just over three hours, both options offered playgoers the opportunity to explore New London's O'Neill-specific sites (his family's graves, James O'Neill's silhouette at the Thames Club), to walk upstairs and see the bedrooms of the O'Neill family (which include some scale designs of sets for O'Neill's plays), or to explore the museum exhibitions set up in some of the downstairs rooms. The museum includes Michael J. Peery's two "Duality" paintings of Eugene O'Neill, which feature mask-like smiles, complete with mustaches, that appear to be affixed to the painting (as though the underlying expressions were not considered sufficiently optimistic). This tromp l'oeildetail adds to the space's complicated public and private representations of the O'Neills. The chance to encounter these exhibits in such close physical and temporal proximity to the play was an unusual...