Long Day's Journey into Night hits close to home

By Jayne Keedle

The day was bleak and there was a chill in the air at Monte Cristo Cottage. Standing on the porch surveying the overcast skies reflected in the gray water of New London's harbor gave the cast of Hartford Stage's upcoming production of Long Day's Journey Into Night a real feel for playwright Eugene O'Neill's grim existence growing up in this house.

The play is set here, in Monte Cristo Cottage, a summer house that was the closest thing the O'Neill family came to having a home. As Long Day's Journey Into Night makes painfully clear, however, it wasn't much of one. The play is Eugene O'Neill's most autobiographical work and the first to deal with subject matter that has since become a favorite theme. His was the original dysfunctional family.

In the play, O'Neill writes, "The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too." The line, spoken by the character of Mary Tyrone, modeled after O'Neill's mother, gets to the heart of what Eugene was grappling with when he wrote this play. He had to come to terms with his own past in order to move on.

The line is equally applicable to Michael Wilson's decision to bring Long Day's Journey here to Hartford Stage. The production revisits his own recent past, the successful staging of the play at Alley Theater in Houston, Texas, and he's bringing back three members of the original Alley cast -- Ellen Burstyn, Rick Stear and David Selby -- for this production.

But this production won't be merely a reprise. Cuts to the script Wilson made in Texas are being restored, adding half an hour to the original running time of three and a half hours. And there are two new cast members, Andrew McCarthy and Derdrui Ring. Adding another layer to the subtext of this play is the fact that it is being performed where it was originally set, in O'Neill's home state of Connecticut.

So with nods to the past, the play will help catapult Hartford Stage into the future, one that sets the stage for an accomplished cast to tackle one of American's finest plays.

"O'Neill is called the father of American drama because he set out to write tragedy in a uniquely American way," says Hartford Stage Artistic Director Michael Wilson. "Stripped of romance, it's about truth and physicality."

Raised in a time when theater featured larger-than-life heroes, romance and glamor, O'Neill took a different tack with Long Day's Journey by examining the inner life of an American family. O'Neill's intention was to take events that occurred during one average day in the life of a family and then through them reveal a lifetime of traumatic events and conflicted relationships. In doing so, he also took American theater in an entirely new direction.

While his theme may have set the stage for everything that was to come -- including films such as Terms of Endearment and even TV sitcoms such as Married With Children -- O'Neill didn't write this play to revolutionize American theater. He wrote Long Day's Journey for more personal reasons: to exorcize the family demons of his past. In the end, it was an act of love and forgiveness.

O'Neill cast himself in Edmund, the youngest son through whom the other characters and their many foibles are revealed as they try to explain themselves and he, in turn, tries to understand. Although the play paints a dark picture, Edmund has a measure of lightness that, by most accounts of the playwright, O'Neill mostly retained as well.

The one light of his life was his wife, Carlotta, to whom O'Neill gave this play on their 12th wedding anniversary with this dedication:

"Dearest: I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood. A sadly inappropriate gift, it would seem, for a day celebrating happiness. But you will understand. I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play -- write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones. These twelve years, Beloved One, have been a Journey into Light -- into love. You know my gratitude. And my love!"

Although recognized as one of the best American plays of all time, the Pulitzer-prize winning Long Day's Journey Into Night is performed rarely. The main reason, Wilson says, is "it's very difficult to cast."

Wilson had a head start on the casting before he came to Hartford Stage. He mounted this production at the Alley Theater with a cast that included Ellen Burstyn, Rick Stear and David Selby. He was in the middle of the run, in fact, when he found out he had landed the job of artistic director of Hartford Stage. He asked the cast if they would reprise their roles in Hartford. They jumped at the chance.

"Last year we began work on this play. We did what I would call our first draft," says Wilson. "It's one of those plays you can do again and again because of its layers and complexity."

Casting an actress as accomplished as Oscar-winner Ellen Burstyn (Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Same Time Next Year, The Exorcist, How to Make an American Quilt), allowed Wilson to restore Mary Tyrone, the mother in Long Day's Journey, to her proper place as the focal point for dysfunction in this play.

Still, the play is an ensemble work and the remaining characters -- the father, James Tyrone; the elder brother, Jamie; the younger brother Edmund; and the maid Cathleen -- are equally complex and no less important. All the characters, says Wilson, demand a level of virtuosity that is hard to find. With this cast, however, Wilson says he feels secure.

Indeed, the actors seem ideally suited to their roles, so perfectly matching O'Neill's descriptions of each character, it's as if he wrote the parts with them in mind. Gathered in Monte Cristo's small parlor on a recent trip to the cottage, cast members look as if they belong here. Sitting on a red velvet sofa -- the only original piece of furniture in the place -- Ellen Burstyn seems to sink into her character Mary Tyrone.

Assuming the mantle of O'Neill's lonely, disappointed, doting-yet-distant mother, Burstyn is quiet and contemplative, with a faraway look in her eyes. Sad to her soul, O'Neill's mother found her own escape through morphine and her addiction is a central contributor to the family's dysfunction.

For Rick Stear, who plays Edmund, going to the house was a revelation. "It answered a lot of questions for me, questions I had about the house itself, the feeling of it and what it would be like to grow up there," says Stear. "There is something spiritual about it. There was something I don't know if I could put into words."

Before going, Stear says, he imagined what it would be like to walk up the stairs and down the narrow hallway to where his room would have been. To be able to actually take that walk, however, allowed him to go far deeper.

"I can only say this: It was a very personal experience and a very personal feeling," Stear says. "Yes, there's the feeling of claustrophobia and certainly, the feeling of being on the water. There's a feeling this is a home, or lack of home, as they describe it."

In a rocking chair, fittingly described by O'Neill in the play as his father's favorite, David Selby looks quite comfortable. He curls his long legs up under a blanket, but even with the blanket pulled up almost to his chin, he retains the commanding presence of an established actor. He can conjure a sort of jovial heartiness in an instant and is quite prepared to hold court, should the need arise. He, too, is clearly beginning to inhabit the part of James Tyrone, modeled after O'Neill's father.

James O'Neill was, himself, a classical actor well known for his role as the Count of Monte Cristo. The part made him famous, but the count's famous sword had a double edge. He became so closely identified with the part that, in the end, it ruined his chances of ever being considered for other roles.

Luckily, Selby's close identification with roles from television's evening soap Falcon Crest and the cult classic Dark Shadows have obviously not precluded him from sinking his teeth into meaty theater roles.

It was that desire to play a role with real substance that brought Andrew McCarthy to Hartford Stage. The former brat-packer, best remembered for his roles in the seminal 1980s flicks, St. Elmo's Fire and Pretty in Pink, has long wanted the chance to perform in Long Day's Journey. So much so, that he sought this production out, turning down a number of movie offers and the heftier salary that goes with them to do this work.

"I was advised not to come here," he says, smiling. "To me, it was not an issue. There's no discussion. It was something I wanted to do. It's a great play -- it's beautifully written -- and you don't get the chance to do it much."

When he was in school, McCarthy says, he committed the part of Edmund to memory. Now that he's older, however, he is more suited to his part as Jamie, Edmund's jaded older brother. However, he says, "I identify with all the characters. They're in my life."

Indeed, the play hits close to home for many. As a result, it's emotionally very demanding for the actors. "It requires you to commit and hang out there emotionally for it to work. That's a little hard," says McCarthy. Still, he adds, "I don't usually get to work on good material."

Just as with real families, whose dynamics change when other relatives arrive on the scene, so, too, has bringing McCarthy and Ring on board for this production changed the dynamic of the play for the three former cast members. "The family structure feels different," says Burstyn. "I'm hearing things I didn't hear before."

Some of what she's hearing comes from McCarthy, whose approach to the character of Jamie is very different from the actor who played the eldest son the last time out. "One of the great revelations is that Andrew is so smart and funny and winning in the part [of Jamie] that it's much deeper and richer," says Wilson.

Having different cast members has forced the repeaters to approach their parts in new ways. Even in the early days of rehearsal, Wilson says, "There were some things I had never seen before."

"I think you have to be as open as you can and not try and forcibly recreate what we did," says Selby. "The cast makes it different. I think we have to look at it as a whole new production and let it grow from here."

For the veterans, that means going deeper into their characters. "This is the first time I've ever come back to a play," says Burstyn, noting that even though she's done five films in the interim, "all the time, I was holding Mary. I'm anxious to re-explore her. It feels familiar and new. Now we can go deeper. It's the most complex play. It's the most exhilarating thing in the world."

And one that left an impression on the original actors, even long after the last curtain fell. After the play closed, Burstyn says she would have flashes of insight about her character, finger-snapping moments when she would think to herself, "That's how I should have said that!"

Now she has the rare opportunity of a second chance to make the part even more her own. The danger, of course, is not to lose some of the great moments the original members experienced in that first critically acclaimed production in Texas. Wilson isn't about to let that happen, however. "I'm not about to let them throw the baby out with the bathwater."

Long Day's Journey Into Night begins with previews on Feb. 25 and opens on March 3. The show will run through April 1.
For tickets call 525-5601.

There's No Place Like Home

Monte Cristo Cottage may be the closest thing to a home that Eugene O'Neill ever knew, but it wasn't exactly homey.

Cold and dark, the upstairs rooms are claustrophobically small. Where there might have been ocean views, there were no windows, presumably to keep out the cold. The coldness, however, was as likely to emanate from the family living within those walls as from the frigid gales blowing in from the water outside.

Instead of a kitchen, around whose hearth a family might have gathered, there was only a makeshift cooking area in a lean-to shed. When it blew away, presumably in the 1938 hurricane, Monte Cristo curators decided not to restore it. The family, after all, took most of its meals at a local boarding house.

James O'Neill's stinginess was legendary and a source of irritation to his son, Eugene. His father made $30,000 a season as an actor, a princely sum at the time, yet in Long Day's Journey Into Night, arguments take place about the expense of turning on a single electric lightbulb. Eugene O'Neill once described the house as "a summer dump, where everything was done in the cheapest way."

Although the family had its share of loud and often drunken arguments -- his father had a thirst for whiskey and a fondness for barroom society that he never quite quenched -- the house more often echoed with ear-shattering quiet. These walls kept the silence of family secrets, disappointments, disillusionments and unspoken accusations.

Eugene's room sits at the end of the narrow hallway upstairs. On his wooden desk, handmade for him by the Provincetown coast guard, a remembrance of his days on the Cape, lies a letter to a friend as if O'Neill had just blotted the ink.

Over the narrow brass bed is a cross-stitched embroidery, a common enough decoration at the time. In this setting, however, its homily mocks: "There is no place like home."

Indeed, for O'Neill, home is where everything started. Raised so close to the stage, he learned the craft of theater from his father as a child, perhaps more by osmosis than by any conscious effort initially. Tragedy and despair were in his blood, born of his Irish heritage where it was distilled through famine and poverty. From his mother's religious longings, he learned to be haunted by his own lost faith. His death wish, on the other hand, seemed to be entirely his own.

Photographs of Eugene O'Neill are all over the house and are strikingly similar in one respect: In none of them is he smiling. His expression is severe, his heavy brows knitted, as if he wants to build a wall between himself and the world. His emotions are betrayed, however, in his eyes that, though brooding, can't mask a deeper sadness. O'Neill's favorite photograph of himself was taken when he was a boy, sitting alone on a rock in his school uniform, his sketchbook open, gazing out to sea.

Always a lover of the sea, which he sailed on and swam in, even midwinter, in later photographs O'Neill looks sinewy tough, posed by the waterfront in his bathing suit, his hands on his hips. Oddly, this macho posture only serves to make him seem more vulnerable, exposed to the elements.

Yes, home -- or the lack of one -- was where it all began and ultimately, it was to this place that he had to return emotionally to complete his master work. Long Day's Journey Into Night was released by his wife, at his request, posthumously. Only then would he be prepared to make his peace with the past.

Monte Cristo Cottage is located at 325 Pequot Ave. in New London and is open to the public from June to Labor Day, Tuesday to Sunday. It is, however, open to groups and schools for pre-arranged tours. For information call (860) 443-0051.

-- Jayne Keedle