Long Day's Journey into Night

Don't read this play if you or your family have a history of drug addiction and/or alcoholism and you don't want to be reminded of it. This play is about the disintegration of a family whose members are, variously, addicted to drugs or alcohol; tormented by the failure of their dreams; or dying from disease on top of the other problems.

That said...this is a fascinating play with a explosive end. The first three acts are so quiet in comparison, in their depiction of the Tyrone family's individual miseries, that I was caught off guard and astonished by the end of Act IV.
I liked the play well enough after the first three acts, but I think I was vaguely disappointed and bored by the family members' endless tiptoeing around the sources of show more their misery and shifting back and forth between sniping at each other and trying to pretend nothing is wrong.

Everyone who reads about this play knows it is autobiographical, with the Tyrones representing Eugene O'Neill's family and the protagonist Edmund Tyrone representing Eugene O'Neill himself. With Eugene O'Neill being a famous playwright, you might think Edmund is the most interesting character; but I say no, not really. I find his older brother Jamie more complex and therefore more interesting. I'm not entirely sure why yet--I want to study Jamie more closely--but I think it has to do with the difference in Jamie's condition from Edmund's and Mary's. Jamie is a heavy drinker and possibly an alcoholic, but not terminally ill like Edmund or a drug addict like Mary. And since Jamie is out of favor with his father (who considers him a ne'er-do-well) and is receiving less attention because he's not dying, he is more distant from his family and often acts as a cynical observer. At the end, he seems the most emotionally tormented member of the family, certainly more tormented than Edmund. show less

It had been so long that nothing could blow my mind the way this play did! And I regret putting it off for some time! Long Day's Journey into Night somehow reminded me of Salinger's Franny and Zooey, the picture of a family who hopelessly struggle to find their lost self. And the fact about these two works is that you won't find any sense in them, if you never shared the same kind of desperation.

The Tyrones - mother, father, and two sons - spend a day more or less together in the country. Within the course of that day, we see all sorts of nasty little secrets that were only suggested in the first act.

This is the first O'Neill play I have read, and I have to say that I found it excellent. Not much fun, but really well done. The theme, to me, was that of excuses, excuses. The entire family has someone - someone else, that is - to blame for being the way they are. Mary blames her husband, her dead son, Edmund, life in general, not having her own house, her circumstances. Tyrone senior blames his difficult childhood, his lost chances. Both sons blame their parents. But in the end, every character admits the truth of why they are show more the way they are.

Every character except Mary. Despite many chances to admit the truth - she is a drug addict - she denies to the very end. And it is the difference between the men in the play, with their ultimate honesty, and Mary's self-deception that makes me angry with her and feel empathy for the others.

There is a chance, a small one, but still a chance, that Edmund will get well, that Tyrone will stop drinking, that Jamie will branch out on his own. But Mary is stuck where she is, dreaming and lying through her life.

Like I said, this wasn't exactly a fun play, but it was extremely realistic. Very well done and highly recommended. show less

Maybe the most intimate and autobiographical of O'Neill's plays, his mastery is as clear here as it is in his other work. In the space of a summer home and with a single family as not only the focus, but the only cast (aside from one servant), this work is both powerful and heartwrenching.

Tinged with both poetry and humor, this journey is worth reading for any mature reader. As always, O'Neill's style also makes his plays easier to read than many other dramas--this one, especially, since the cast is so small. Absolutely recommended.

This play had been on my list for a long while after finding out O’Neill wrote it at Tao House, which has been preserved near Las Trampas Wilderness Reserve in the East Bay, where I had been hiking. Unfortunately, I found it rather one-note and bleak, as if each new revelation about the members of the dysfunctional family were going to be scandalous and fascinating. The overly coy revelation of what was going on with the mother was particularly annoying, and piling on all of the other woes was a mistake. It felt like Tennessee Williams lite to me, and needed some other element to sustain itself.

Some nice quotes though:
On losing one’s way:
“None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and show more once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.”

On meaning; I absolutely loved the line “seeing the secret, are the secret”:
“Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came. The peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men’s lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, the green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint’s vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see – and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!”

On the past:
“Mary! For God’s sake, forget the past!”
“Why? How can I? The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us.” show less

An intense and heartbreaking iconic 20th Century American play that reads like a novel when taken with the meticulous stage directions. Autobiographical in nature, and meant to be released after the author's death, Long Day's Journey into Night shines a searing spotlight on addiction within a family of misfits. Dysfunctional doesn't start to describe these alternately repressed and emotionally brutal group. Grim, depressing, honest and brilliant.

I really like the structure of this play - how the story unfolds in the tiniest bits and pieces, edging along so that you never quite know what's entirely going on until the end of the play. Mary's addiction was heartbreaking, as were her confessions about what she felt drove her to them, and each of the other character's stories really broke my heart. It felt like they all hated the decisions they had made in the past, but couldn't repent them or change their direction - Tyrone would always be a tightwad, James wouldn't change his self-destructive nature, Edmund couldn't do anything for himself and didn't even try to.