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LET ME SAY THIS at the outset: Eugene O'Neill is America's most important dramatist and Long Day's Journey Into Night is America's greatest play. Its stature poses a daunting challenge to any director or actor who approaches it. In its most recent Broadway production, which ended its run three months before the fiftieth anniversary of O'Neill s death in 1953-directed by Robert Falls with Vanessa Redgrave as Mary Tyrone, Brian Dennehy as James Tyrone, Philip Seymour Huffman as Jamie Tyrone, and Robert Sean Leonard as Edmund Tyrone-the challenge was gloriously met.
As I walked to the Plymouth Theater on Forty-fifth Street and Broadway the thought struck me that O'Neill was born, back in 1888, in a hotel two blocks away, on Forty-third Street. That birth is the controlling event in Long Day's Journey, perhaps the main cause for the agony of the Family Tyrone. By now everyone knows that Long Day's Journey is an autobiographical play, the one that O'Neill had to write after he had explored his family situation in one way or another in many of his previous plays. Here he confronted his past head-on, facing his dead, as he wrote in his dedication to his wife Carlotta,"with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones." The word "all" in the dedication indicates that in the act of writing O'Neill is attempting to understand himself as well as his family and to forgive himself and his family for the hell they created for each other. And what a family-his mother a morphine addict, his father a miser and self-absorbed matinee idol, his brother a drunkard and cynical wastrel, himself a tubercular budding writer. In Long Day's Journey we have Theater working on Memory to produce a family drama of universal significance. The words of Carlotta reveal the pain of the play's composition: "When he started Long Day's Journey it was a most strange experience to watch that man being tortured every day by his own writing. he would come out of the study at the end of a day gaunt and sometimes weeping. His eyes would be all red and he looked ten years older than when he went in in the morning."
No question that Long Day's Journey...