Long Day's Journey Into Night - Playbill

long day’s journey into night eugene o’neill artist note: This is a scary play to work on. Scary because it’s long, and there are lots of lines to learn, and the characters tend to think and speak in paragraphs, instead of sentences. Scary because the play is so honest, so intimate and demanding. And scary because people have such vivid memories of other great productions, including the famous 1994 – 95 version our director, Diana Leblanc did in Stratford with William Hutt, Martha Henry, Tom McCamus, Peter Donaldson and Martha Burns.

We’ve been using the first hour of most days to work on memorizing. Then we assemble ourselves on our boxing ring of a stage and pound away at each other. The script is brilliant.

The script is frustrating. And exacting. And thrilling. And the company is a kind of a dream team, with Diana directing, Peter Hartwell designing, and an acting company that includes Evan Buliung, Gregory Prest, Krystin Pellerin and my wife, Nancy Palk. The rehearsals have been exciting to watch and rewarding to be in. We’ve all been working pretty hard; scraping away the excess, trying to be clear, and to hear what’s really being said to us. It can be quite harrowing at times. They can be so cruel. The Tyrone family is bound to each other and trying to escape from each other at the same time.

But, demanding as it is, we all feel so lucky to be working on this masterpiece. This is the first Eugene O’Neill play I’ve acted in, and it seems very clear to me that he knew how to write for actors, and he certainly knew how to write for audiences. We hope you enjoy the journey.

Sláinte.

Joseph Ziegler, James in Long Day’s Journey Into Night

* Sláinte, is an Irish wish for health

illustration: brian Rea

Long day’s Journey into night eugene o'neill   usa 1956

production

cast

Diana Leblanc director

Evan Buliung Jamie

Peter Hartwell Set & costume designer

Nancy Palk Mary

Steven Hawkins LIghting designer

Krystin Pellerin cathleen

John Gzowski sound designer

Gregory Prest edmund

John Stead fight director

Joseph Ziegler james

Diane Pitblado dialect coach Krista Blackwood production stage manager Susanne Lankin assistant stage manager Kelly McEvenue alexander coach Sarah Kitz assistant director

production sponsor

background notes “There is no present or future – only the past happening over and over again – now.”

There is a particular thrill in coming to the plays of Eugene O’Neill, and especially to Long Day’s Journey Into Night, his posthumously acclaimed masterpiece. This “play of old sorrow” was locked in a vault while he lived. He didn’t want it to be seen until 25 years after his death but his widow ignored his written instructions and at least she was able to experience the audience’s immediate embrace of O’Neill’s most personal and cathartic work.

O’Neill had a tragic sense of life that was bred in the bone. He’d been circling around the wound of his origin for years, but when he wrote Long Day’s Journey Into Night he tore away fiction. In an act of soul-baring bravery he considers his family: his self-involved parents who adored and tormented each other, and his beloved older brother Jamie who loved Eugene but couldn't help corrupting him, and who drank himself to death in early middle age. O’Neill admits to everything: the rage, the hurt, the tortured hope, the inevitable betrayals and perhaps most of all, the enduring love he feels for each member of his family.

He embraces them all – including himself – in this amazing act of self-revelation. Like all O’Neill characters, the doomed, destructive Tyrones try mightily to maintain their hopes and dreams but inevitably slide, almost helplessly, into despair.

O’Neill was an innovator with a titanic capacity for work and study in spite of his ongoing struggles with alcoholism and depression. The first American dramatist to use theatre to explore serious ideas, his influences range from Chekhovian realism to the modernist techniques of Ibsen: an audience at an O’Neill play heard on stage the familiar, muscular vernacular they spoke among themselves. His subject matter broke new ground as well: he wrote about prostitutes, sailors, alcoholism and drug addiction, political injustice, the tyranny of religion – all material not considered at that time to be suitable for the stage.

And he dared to bring seemingly disparate things together: his love of ancient Greek drama, for example, can be felt in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. The story of the Tyrone family, in its searing power and unsparing honesty, in the size of its emotional canvas, draws from the Greek tragedies O’Neill admired.

Possessed of a tragic and very personal vision, he only wrote one comedy: Ah, Wilderness, set in the same time and place as Long Day’s Journey Into Night. The writer called it “the other side of the coin”, a consideration of what his upbringing might have been. Ah, Wilderness is a sweet play. But Long Day’s Journey Into Night is intoxicating, mesmerizing, a gift to actors and audiences alike. All these years later, we can still feel the danger as one fragile and conflicted human being faces his past and also, by the play’s end, the enormity of O’Neill’s lonely achievement. In telling this profoundly sorrowful story he somehow, remarkably, turns his heartaches into art.

Biography Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was born in a hotel room on Broadway in October of 1888. One of the finest American playwrights in history, O’Neill is (after Shakespeare and Shaw) the most widely produced and translated dramatist in the world. A master of realist tragedies such as Desire Under the Elms (1924), The Iceman Cometh (1939) and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1941), O’Neill’s words have left an indelible mark on theatre history. Long Day’s Journey Into Night (written in 1941, first performed in 1956) is his autobiographical masterpiece and a haunting story of family, isolation, addiction and despair.

Background Notes by Associate Artist Paula Wing.

soulpepper production Jacqueline Robertson-Cull

Geoff Hughes Joanne Lamberton

head of hair & makeup

cutters

Janet Pym

wardrobe coordinator

Kathleen Johnston

Natalie Swierz

sewer

dresser

Mike Keays

Barbara Nowakewski

Greg Chambers

carpenter

1st hand

props builder

Duncan Johnstone Daniela Mazic scenic artists

soulpepper administration additions Diane Cook

So-Jeong Choi

Toby Malone

development manager

communications co-op student

resident dramaturge

soulpepper thanks:

Susan Dicks & Co.

Soulpepper Theatre Company is an active member of the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres (pact), the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts (tapa) and Theatre Ontario, and engages, under the terms of the Canadian Theatre Agreement, professional artists who are members of Canadian Actors’ Equity Association. Scenic Artists and Set Decorators employed by Soulpepper Theatre Company are represented by Local 828 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.

is proud to be a sponsor of Soulpepper Theatre Company and its production of

Long Day’s Journey into NIght

YOUNG CENTRE FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS DISTILLERY HISTORIC DISTRICT