Michael Stewart Allen, John Leonard Thompson, Dennis Creaghan and Maureen Anderman in Long Day’s Journey into Night. (Photo by Samantha Mighdoll)
There is something about the great works of American drama that brings out the best in Palm Beach Dramaworks, as exemplified by its powerful, impeccably performed production of Eugene O’Neill’s epic autobiographical masterwork, Long Day’s Journey into Night.
Late in his life and career, O’Neill looked back at his formative years and at the dysfunctional family environment from which he — barely — survived. He and his older brother grew up under the thumb of their father, a former stage star gone to seed, obsessed with money and stingy to the core. But it is O’Neill’s mother, a woman addicted to morphine since his difficult birth, who is given the central role in this depiction of their back-biting clan, riddled with feelings of despair, guilt and recrimination.
Initially, despite the challenges the family faces, there is optimism. Perhaps Mary Tyrone (Maureen Anderman), the often-absent matriarch, has finally kicked her crippling morphine habit. Maybe the coughing spells of younger son Edmund (Michael Stewart Allen) do not point to a diagnosis of consumption, with its almost inevitable fatal result. And James Tyrone (Dennis Creaghan) might be able to break the combative cycle of resentment that so defines his relationship with son Jamie (John Leonard Thompson).
But over the course of the single day that the play spans, that optimism will turn to harsh, downbeat reality “written in tears and blood,” as O’Neill put it. Still, that does not prevent him from writing poetically, nor from creating towering roles for actors to devour.
Maureen Anderman and Carey Urban in Long Day’s Journey into Night. (Photo by Samantha Mighdoll)
Director William Hayes has cast a quartet of performers of presence and power. Creaghan embodies the actorly tragedian gone to seed. As he confides in Edmund in the whiskey-fueled final act, he ruined his career by pursuing a single lucrative role and forsaking the classics. As O’Neill’s alter ego, Allen responds to his usually cold, closed-off father, revealing the touch of a poet within him. Thompson seethes with jealousy of his brother, which he unleashes that night, following a night of boozing and whoring.
But the production belongs to Anderman — a mid-rehearsal addition to the cast — as frail, fragile Mary. In a family of men of the theater, she insists she has no interest in performing, yet from her efforts to hide her addiction, she has developed exceptional acting skills. Anderman impressively charts Mary’s mood swings before and after taking her “medicine,” but she is at her best recalling a bygone moment of happiness when she first met and fell in love with James.
As usual, the Dramaworks design team deepens the production with evocative visuals. K. April Soroko’s spacious and attractive living room of the Tyrones’ Connecticut summer cottage belies James’s claims of poverty. Brian O’Keefe’s period costumes suggest the formality of the times and Donald Edmund Thomas’s lighting charts the arc of the Tyrones’ long day.
That three-and-a-quarter-hour day calls for stamina on both sides of the footlights, but it is a journey full of rewards.
LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, Palm Beach Dramaworks, 201 Clematis St., West Palm Beach. Through Sunday, Feb. 28. Tickets: $64. Call: 561-514-4042, ext. 2.