Dysfunctional family dynamics.
Addiction.
Mental illness.
Financial uncertainty.
Health care woes.
These are a few of the hallmarks of the new American dark side, the anxiety-spawning pressure points of contemporary society. They’re in the news every day. They’re what we talk (or, often and more pointedly, don’t talk) about over drinks and around dinner tables.
Playwright Eugene O’Neill’s quasi-autobiographical masterwork Long Day’s Journey into Night, currently onstage in an astonishingly powerful production at St. Pete’s American Stage, touches on all of these issues in a personal and modern way — eerily so, given that the play was written in the early ‘40s, and set in 1912.
Most theater fans are familiar with the show’s plot: A family convenes at their seaside home in an attempt at reconnection — or perhaps even a fresh start — that feels more like a failed escape. James and Mary Tyrone’s playful flirting gives way to sniping about the past — his acting career squandered on a single role, her treatment for morphine addiction, the family’s precarious financial situation due to questionable real estate deals. Sons Jamie, a failing actor himself, and Edmund, a failed everything, really, emerge from the breakfast table to project their own miseries and grievances. Over the course of a single day, the facade of familial bonding crumbles, driven by worry over Mary’s relapse and Edmund’s worsening health (not to mention the fondness of the Tyrone men for whiskey), forcing the Tyrones to alternately address and ignore the elements of their relationships that are tearing them apart.
Some things never change, apparently. All that’s missing is an intergenerational argument about the president.
Which isn’t to say that American Stage’s excellent production updates O’Neill’s work; the speech, Trish Kelley’s wonderful costume design and James Kronzer’s gorgeous, detailed set are all spot-on for the time. It’s just that these themes are so timeless, universal and poignantly rendered in O’Neill’s work that they can’t help but resonate with modern viewers — and, one assumes, viewers of any generation since the play’s original production in 1956.
(Perhaps that’s why it’s been adapted for film and TV at least five times.)
And this version is excellent. The cast is nearly flawless. Janice Stevens imbues Mary Tyrone with the mood swings and sense of flailing helplessness an addict must feel on the cusp of relapse. As Jamie, Billy Finn affects a world-weary cynicism that fails to disguise his despair, and Josh Odess-Rubin is particularly good as tender, empathetic Edmund. James Keegan, though, is a real standout. His bigger-than-life James Tyrone is boisterous one moment and full of blame the next, as he tries and fails to understand what’s happening to his family while simultaneously caught up in his own narcissism. Along with a perhaps underused Rose Hahn as simple housegirl Cathleen, they bring O’Neill’s words to painful, emotionally haunting life.
It’s not a good life, but it’s one we can all recognize from the worst moments of our own — the things we wish we’d never said to loved ones, the things we wish we’d said but didn’t, the times we wanted more than anything to help but couldn’t.
Perhaps that’s what makes this work so timeless, in the end: that the past is always present.
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