February 9 - March 2, 2008
Long Day's Journey Into Night
Reviewed by Brad Hathaway

Running time 3:05 - two brief breaks
A solid rendition of an emotionally touching classic

Mounting Eugene O'Neill's dramatic complex of interconnected weaknesses in a family much like the one he grew up in has got to be both a fascinating opportunity and a daunting prospect for a company that specializes in giving young adult performers the opportunity to face real challenges. It is also somehow an inevitable choice, for the talent pool the company draws from is full of actors who would just love to sink their teeth into the characters of O'Neill's only-slightly-fictionalized portraits of his father, mother, brother and self. The five cast members (there's also the maid) who do so for more than three hours do a solid job on the unique combination of venom and affection that O'Neill created, and the long evening's journey toward final resolution rarely drags. Indeed, if anything, the pace is too quick, especially in the early going when there is a feeling that they are trying to speed through the exposition with one eye on the clock. Once they settle in, however, the emotions pick up. 

Storyline: Eugene O'Neill's Pulitzer Prize winning drama presents one hot day in the New England home of the Tyrones, haunted by their pasts and the consequences of their mistakes. The father is an aging matinee idol of an actor wracked by guilt over compromising his art for financial success. The mother is a morphine addict wracked by guilt over her own weakness. The eldest son survives on his father's fame on the stage while the youngest son is suffering from tuberculosis. These terribly unhappy and destructive people tear at each other in one long day of fighting and drinking.

This, the last of O'Neill's highly autobiographical and excruciatingly honest plays, exposes the weaknesses in a family he understood so intimately, so deeply and so thoroughly that he misses none of the pain or the blame while maintaining a familial affection that keeps the portraits from seeming mean-spirited or vindictive. They are pure and simple tragedy. (He was, in reality, the young man seen dying of "the consumption." In real life, he did recover after a year in a sanitarium but that was after the events of this one long day.)

Both John Collins, as the thespian father who who can't stop acting even when he's at home with his family, and Patricia Foreman, as the drug addicted, guilt stricken mother who alternates between anger, frustration and denial, seem most affected by the too-quick pace of the early going. Each settles into a satisfying progression, however, and both become fascinatingly tragic and very human figures. Jon Townson and Andrew Picoraro are the sons who battle with self-loathing and "consumption," respectively. Townson grouses and lopes at first in an affected manner, but he warms to the emotion of the part while Picoraro strikes just the right note at the very beginning and maintains it nicely. Note should also be made of Theresee McNichol, who avoids over-doing the comedy in the smaller part of the maid with her tippling scene where she consumes quite a bit of her employers' whiskey.

Theater on the Run is a black box space which Andrew Berry fills with odd pieces of furniture to create the summer home on the banks of Long Island Sound with a painted backdrop of the seascape subdued by the fog that triggers Thomas Terlecki's recordings of fog horns. Suspended above are three timber trusses to suggest the roof over this family's heads. It is simple and effective.

Written by Eugene O'Neill. Directed by Kathi Gollwitzer. Design: Andrew Berry (set) Kathi Gollwitzer (costumes) Connor Dale (lights) Thomas Terlecki (sound) Ray Gniewek (photography) Anna Louise Gionfriddo (stage manager). Cast: John Collins, Patricia Foreman, Theresee McNichol, Andrew Pecoraro, Jon Townson.