Cry and the Family Stoned
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
A Theater Review
Leave it to the Performing Artists Collective Alliance to be the only Erie theater have the chutzpah to mount a landmark tragedy.
Unlike some local theatrical venues that peddle Disney retreads or staged treacle for the Sunday brunch geriatric crowd, PACA offers a gut punch to the soul to those willing to attend the production.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill is a true milestone of American theater that debuted in 1956, three years after the playwright’s death.
Set in 1912, the four-act, three-hour-plus performance portrays a day in the life of the dysfunctional Tyrone family of Connecticut.
How dysfunctional? The surname Tyrone should be a synonym of the condition.
The three men in the family are all alcoholics. Big time. Father James (Michael Burns) is a miser, a retired actor who chose money over his talent. Son Jamie (Roland Robbison) is a failed academic, now wastrel and a whoremonger; younger son, Edmund (Luke Scribner) is a depressive wannabe writer who’s contracted tuberculosis.
And mater? Mary (Lisa Simonian), won’t win mother of the year: A lonely woman who lives in her schoolgirl days of the past, trudging up family misfortunes who has a not-too-secret addiction.
In a house that is not a home, the four characters explode and attack one another in every conversation, conveniently ignoring or transferring their own foibles upon others. While self hate abounds, beneath it all there is a love for one another which saves them all from being dislikeable.
The true tragedy of the Tyrone family? It’s pretty much based on O’Neill’s own clan, with an alcoholic actor father, brother and addicted mother.
(Yikes! Makes you appreciate your own family, doesn’t it?)
Though not a pleasant play, the realism it paints stands the test of time. The emotions, barbs and verbal wounds seem as fresh as when they were first uttered.
Directed by J.D. Mizikowski and assistant director Char Newport, the performances of each actor conveys the two-sided coin of each role: dislike for the pitiable addicts who can’t or won’t change their own fates, yet allowing for audience empathy, as they sink into their own desperate oblivions.
Attempting to explain his lifelong penchant for penny-pinching to his son, Edmund, Burns’ monologue about how he and his Irish immigrant family suffered from poverty, slave wages, degrading jobs and empty stomachs, was especially moving.
Some slight comic relief is furnished by the Tyrone’s Irish housemaid, Cathleen (Gretchen Knapp), with a brogue so thick and authentic you’d swear the ink on her passport was still moist.
Treat yourself to the American stage classic, O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
When will you be able to see it again locally?
Then, next day, discuss it over brunch.
***Daphne Beaumont
Long Day’s Journey Into Night continues through March 23. For more information visit paca1505.org
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