Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Richard Eyre, Wallis Annenberg (review)

The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts sits less than four miles from the apartment where Eugene O’Neill’s mother, Ella, died in February 1922. Following the death of her husband James eighteen months earlier, Ella, on whom the character of Mary Tyrone is based, took control of the estate, including all that “bum property” mentioned in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. One parcel lay in Glendale, just outside Los Angeles, and so, to arrange a sale, she decided to spend a few winter months in sunny California, accompanied by her eldest son Jamie, who had taken to living a sober life by his mother’s side. Ella was eight years beyond the point when she’d kicked the morphine habit, in seemingly fine health, when she suddenly had a stroke and died less than two weeks later. The happy picture of the life Ella had achieved in a home away from home dissolved in an instant as Jamie resumed drinking. Three thousand miles away, Eugene O’Neill was in a pitched battle with his own alcoholism, struggling with the lures of success and the demands of marriage, an unhappy and guilt-ridden man. When the news came that his mother was critically ill, he responded with an excruciating telegram in which he declared that doctors forbade him to travel (“WOULD LEAVE IMMEDIATELY IF ABLE. YOU MUST ACCEPT THE TRUTH. I AM IN TERRIBLE SHAPE.”). Ella returned “home” for burial in New London “in the baggage car ahead,” with a suddenly wrecked Jamie who would join her in death less than two years later.

Eugene O’Neill would have recalled that cross-country train journey— and all the associated distance, loss, and guilt—when he and Carlotta traveled by railroad to the West Coast in 1936. He wound up in California, where he wrote Long Day’s Journey, the play that most directly reaches out to those family graves in Connecticut, 3,000 miles away. The West was a site of loss but also a site of recovery in 1940–1942 when O’Neill wrote Long Day’s Journey, also A Moon for the Misbegotten, which told the story of Jamie’s gruesome 1922 train journey in all its horrifying details, except omitting the fact that Eugene was not there to meet him at the station. “Get me out of your life,” says Jamie in Long Day’s Journey, “think of me as dead—tell people, ‘I had a brother, but he’s dead.’” That is exactly what Eugene did until he gave him a suitable memorial in Moon, in Connecticut, not far from the Tyrone house.

As I settle into the plush seats of the Wallis to see this production of Long Day’s Journey, which has made the journey from the Bristol Old Vic in 2016 to the London West End in 2017 to the Brooklyn Academy of Music earlier in 2018 and finally to Beverly Hills, I think about the journeys of the O’Neills, from east to west, from Ireland to Buffalo and Cleveland, from the Irish under-class to convent school and Broadway, from a summer house in New England to a Tao House near Mount Diablo—and the sun’s east-west course from act 1 to act 4. The actors in this cast all struggle to find some appropriate accent, and no wonder, as language is a Protean beast, a fluid currency in the wash of global exchange, which is a pervasive theme of O’Neill’s dramas. The way we talk in the morning is not the way we talk at midnight. Speaking to the world means solving the puzzle of “belonging,” and “the whole misbegotten mad lot of us” struggle to find our stations in the theater, as in life.

Jeremy Irons takes (as a lion takes) the role of James Tyrone, commanding the audience’s attention from the first moment to the...