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

The Wingfield apartment. George and Martha's college campus home. Lee and Austin's mother's kitchen. In addition to serving as settings, these iconic spaces of American drama reflect and extend the themes of their respective plays, as well as the hopes and fears of the characters featured in them. In April 2017 Flock Theatre produced Long Day's Journey into Nightat Monte Cristo Cottage in New London, Connecticut, the very place where Eugene O'Neill set his deeply autobiographical play about his family. The novelty of being, to borrow from the musical Hamilton, "in the room where it happened" was enough to make this production of O'Neill's masterpiece notable. However, the production went far above simply placing the iconic play in its inspired setting. Derron Wood's thoughtful directing and the actors' nuanced performances in the small spaces of the cottage served to illuminate the difficulties of forgiveness when encroaching and inescapable problems of the past destroy the closest familial ties.

Monte Cristo Cottage was a summer residence for the O'Neill family, and despite its idyllic setting a place of great sadness. Drug and alcohol addiction, serious illness, and painful memories of death and unfaithfulness all plagued the O'Neills during their stays at the residence and are the very problems dramatized in Long Day's Journey into Night. For those who know the play well, the Flock production was thrilling, as audiences could look out the windows and actually see the river mentioned in the text or be close enough to read the titles of the books that O'Neill painstakingly describes in his opening stage directions. The twenty-five-member audience was seated in the small sitting room of the cottage, alongside the back windows, which allowed a view of the home's front door, staircase, dining room, and door leading to the front porch. Such a vantage point heightened the sights and sounds of such elements as slamming doors, characters racing or slowly descending on the staircase, and stealth or not-so-stealth walking on the front porch.

Wood's direction further emphasized the claustrophobic nature of the home, as well as the characters' inability to escape the problems of the past, present, and one another. At the start of the production the family gathered jovially around the center table in the sitting room. As the play and the day wore on, however, and as the effects of morphine and alcohol took hold, it seemed that family members did everything they could to distance themselves from one another (despite the fact that the sitting room did not allow for much of a divide). At the end of the play, Jamie tucked himself into the upper-left corner of the room, indicating his need for safety, protection, and distance from the drunken fighting and his drugged mother. He delivered many of his closing lines from this spot—a move that would likely not be possible in a large theatre setting. Despite the fact that almost all of his lines were delivered facing the corner, the nearby audience could still hear his sad laments.

Wood used indoor and outdoor spaces simultaneously and effectively. When Jamie, in a drunken stupor, confessed to Edmund in the sitting room that he both loves and hates him and that he will do "his damnedest" to make his brother fail, father James watched the scene through the porch door window, for example. This granted the audiences a rare opportunity to witness James's reactions to his sons' interactions and the confession that Jamie makes to Edmund. The father's pained expressions from the porch revealed just how much emotional weight his sons' strife placed on him.

The acting performances, particularly by Victor Chiburis as Edmund and Eric Michaelian as Jamie, were superb. Unlike the other three characters in the play, Edmund does not have a significant confessional monologue or moment where the audience gains a...