Day 65: Long Day's Journey into Night, by Eugene O'Neill (At the Lyceum Theatre)

There's a lot I could say about this play. I was certainly talking about it all through the (over half an hour) bus ride home. I'll steer away from the commentary I found in the program and elsewhere online and stick to my own impressions, that should keep this down to a more-or-less standard length post. After the realisation that one of the actors looks strikingly like a friend of mine (not the first time that's happened) the first thing that really stood out was how "acted" the first few scenes felt. Part of that may have been the entire cast putting on accents, along with this still being in previews, but as the story unfolded I started to think that may have been deliberate, since two of the characters are themselves actors, and everyone is hiding something from someone else and thus "acting" normal anyway. The difference when those pretenses are dropped, one by one, are all the more emotional as they are played so much more naturally.

There's something I can identify with in almost every character in the play. For most of the scripts I've looked at so far, I find myself following one charcter more closely than the others, or at least having a better idea of what it is that makes them tick. There's also one scene of the father drunkenly telling his son how he wound up the way he is, an alcoholic washed-up has-been of an actor. And he lights up talking about "the old days", which is brilliant, and pretty much the only time I found myself genuinely smiling along with the action (there really isn't a lot of positive emotion involved in most of the story). The same scene also contains some fantastic advice and a not-so-subtle warning to those even thinking about becoming an actor. Throughout the play, having an actor and his two sons on stage proves a gloriouus excuse for quoting mainly from Shakespeare in a far more relavent and effective way than I've ever seen elsewhere.

I came away from seeing this feeling like I'd run a bit of an emotional marathon. The story deals with passion, chronic illness, addiction, general family friction and a lot of (not) dealing with your own past or that of people you love. It's all the stuff that everyone probably has some experience of, though hopefully not quite to the extent and concentration of the family on stage, but that nobody really talks about. And it's exactly the not talking about it, and eventually everything coming out (mostly through copious amounts of whisky), that drives the play. Although nobody is actually dead on stage by the end, it's still a pretty powerful message about bottling up fears and secrets... and I'm pretty sure it's the voice of my old English teacher in my head saying the watered down whisky bottle, and the fresh ones kept locked up in the cellar are sort of a metaphor for the ongoing thread through the story.