Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Roundabout’s haunted LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT gets into your skull all over again

• By drediman
• April 28, 2016
• No Comments

Watch out, the Tyrones are back in town and they’re determined to burrow into your skull, once again. Last nnight, Jonathan Kent’s breathtakingly-acted Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night for Roundabout Theatre Company roared open at the American Airlines Theatre. O’Neill’s  booze-soaked masterpiece, which still strikes me as brazenly risk-taking as any piece of theater I’ve seen, was last seen on the Great White Way back in 2003 in Robert Falls’ towering Goodman Theatre production with a starry cast that included Brian Dennehy, Vanessa Redgrave, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Robert Sean Leonard. Mr. Kent’s production, one of the centerpieces of Roundabout’s 50^th anniversary season, though more intimately-scaled than that previous production, is no less powerful.

Mr. Kent’s haunted production, which moves slowly from naturalism to evocative expressionism over the course of its carefully-paced but inevitable three hours and forty-five minute run time, does a brilliant job of simultaneously depicting both the family’s stifling present and the expansive power of memory, drugs, and lies. Certainly, Mr. Kent’s design team deserve some credit for realizing his vision. Tom Pye’s deceptively simple and subtly shifting and revealing set becomes a character unto itself as day turns into night. Working in perfect tandem with Mr. Pye’s set is the increasingly spectral lighting and sound design by Natasha Katz and Clive Goodwin, respectively. The veteran Jane Greenwood provides the detailed, period-perfect costumes.

The fascinating thing about great plays is that they reveal new layers and features with each production. This Tyrone set strikes me as less spiteful and hopelessly dysfunctional than most I’ve seen. We’re given a glimpse of real reparation here, which makes the play all the more heartbreaking if not quite as harrowing as before. As the patriarch, Gabriel Byrne gives a grounded, charismatic performance of a complex man. In Mr. Byrne’s fascinating interpretation, James Tyrone has seemingly already conceded defeat but is willing to settle for a shadow of a family life. This gives Jessica Lange’s Mary Tyrone (the matriarch, of course) the leeway to take center stage to give full effect to her relapse into drug addiction, which Ms. Lange does with both delicacy and grandiosity. As the two Tyrone sons, Edmund and James, Jr., John Gallagher, Jr. and Michael Shannon both give carefully nuanced performances that do justice to their characters’ multiple motivations and prompted – and unprompted – mood swings. This highly accomplished revival of this uncompromising American classic should not be missed.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT
Broadway, Play
Roundabout Theatre Company at American Airlines Theatre
3 hours, 45 minutes (with one intermission)
Through June 26