LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT

Background Notes

by Soulpepper Associate Artist Paula Wing

"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, 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 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 who corrupted him and then abandoned him, drinking 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 the familiar, muscular vernacular they spoke among themselves on stage. 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. 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. The writer called it "the other side of the coin", a consideration of what his upbringing might have been. Wilderness is a sweet play. But Long Day's Journey 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.

Playwright Biography

1888 - On October 16th, Eugene Gladstone O'Neill is born in Broadway's Barrett Hotel in Longacre Square (now Times Square), the second son to Irish actor James O'Neill and his wife Mary Quinlan O'Neill. His brother Jamie is 2 years older.

1895 - His early life is spent on the road as the family tours with his actor father - famous for playing the Count of Monte Cristo. In this year, young Eugene is sent to a Catholic boarding school, an environment for which he is entirely unsuited. He spends summers at the family's place in Connecticutt, a model for the home in Long Day's Journey.

1907 - O'Neill enters Princeton University but is suspended. He is happy enough to begin what he considers his "real education": life experience. Based on what happens next, he seems to define this as: seeing how much he can take.

1908-1912 - He tries out dissolution, shipping out to sea, drinking an ocean of alcohol, attempting suicide. He sees the world from Buenos Aires to Liverpool. He develops a deep and abiding love for the sea. In this period he marries and divorces Kathleen Jenkins. They have a son, Eugene O'Neill Jr, later a classicist at Yale University.

1913 - After coming down with tuberculosis, he confronts his alcoholism (though he does not conquer it) and turns himself toward what he will later call his rebirth. He begins to write plays.

1916-1920 - O'Neill falls in with an experimental group of artists in Provincetown, Mass. They ultimately form the Playwrights' Theater in Greenwich Village and in these years they produce all of O'Neills one-act sea plays: Bound for Cardiff, In the Zone, The Long Voyage Home and Moon of the Caribees. In 1918 he marries Agnes Boulton, a writer, and their turbulent life together produces a son, Shane, and a daughter, Oona. In February 1920 his first full length play, Beyond the Horizon is produced at the Morosco Theatre. This play wins the Pulitzer Prize (the first of four). That same year he has a big hit with The Emperor Jones, which comments on the U.S. occupation of Haiti.

1922-29 - His play Anna Christie, about the struggles of a young woman to live down her past as a prostitute, becomes an instant popular success but O'Neill himself is not fond of the play. Nevertheless, it wins the Pulitzer Prize in 1922. The next years see him produce, among others Desire Under the Elms - now regarded as an American classic, and The Great God Brown - an experimental work, not popular at the time but a forerunner of many avant-garde plays to come. Strange Interlude - in which O'Neill defied conventional length: the play opened in the afternoon, had a dinner break and ended at a conventional hour in the evening - wins him his third Pulitzer. In this period, over 3 years, O'Neill suffers the loss of both his parents and his brother, who drinks himself to death. In 1929 he meets and falls madly in love with the actress Carlotta Monterey. He abandons his family to be with her, barely seeing his children in the following years. Although the relationship with Monterey will be volatile, they stay together for the rest of his life.

1930s - At first Carlotta is great for O'Neill, she makes it possible for him to write, despite frequent moving around to accommodate the writer's eternal restlessness. In 1933 he produces his only comedy, Ah, Wilderness! In 1936 he is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the only American ever to be so honoured. Carlotta drifts into addiction.

1940s - These years are difficult: he writes the most biographical and personal of his plays: Long Day's Journey Into Night but he cannot bear to show it to anyone. In 1943, O'Neill disowns his 18 year old daughter when she marries the actor Charlie Chaplin, then in his fifties. Father and daughter never speak again, despite her attempts at reconciliation. The Iceman Cometh, one of his masterpieces, appears in 1946. A Moon for the Misbegotten, a look at the life of his brother Jamie, fails when it is first produced and is only regarded as one of his greater works after his death.

1950s - O'Neill's first son Eugene, an alcoholic, commits suicide. O'Neill meanwhile conceives an ambitious cycle of 11 plays chronicling the life of an American family. Sadly he manages to complete only A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions before tremors in his hands force him to stop writing. After several grim, unproductive, anguished years, on November 27, 1953 Eugene O'Neill lies dying in a Boston hotel room. His last words are reputed to have been: "I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room, and, God damn it, died in a hotel room." This building later became Shelton Hall dormitory at Boston University. Students there claim O'Neill's ghost haunts the place.

1956 - Despite O'Neill's written instructions that the play not be made public until 25 years after his death, Carlotta arranges for the publication and production of Long Day's Journey Into Night. It wins him a posthumous Pulitzer in 1957.

1977 - Shane O'Neill, the playwright's second son and a longtime heroin addict, jumps from a window to his death.

1991 - Oona Chaplin, O'Neill's long-estranged daughter, dies an alcoholic recluse in Switzerland.

Tidbits

• Eugene O'Neill was portrayed by Jack Nicholson in the Warren Beatty film Reds in 1981. O'Neill's daughter Oona saw the film and sent a letter to the actor. "Thanks to you," she wrote, "I can now love my father." Nicholson claimed it was the best compliment he ever received.
• The United States Postal Service honoured O'Neill with a $1 stamp in the Prominent Americans Series (1965-78)
• Director Diana Leblanc directed an unforgettable production of this play at Stratford in the 90s starring William Hutt, Martha Henry, Peter Donaldson, Tom McCamus and Martha Burns.
• The Broadway premiere in 1956 starred Frederic March, Florence Eldridge, Jason Robards Jr, Bradford Dillman and Katharine Ross. It won a Tony Award for Best Play and for Best Actor for Frederic March.
• After Shakespeare and Shaw, Eugene O'Neill is the most widely produced and translated dramatist.
• O'Neill once said: "It was a great mistake, my being born a man. I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish."

Background Notes

by Soulpepper Associate Artist Toby Malone

Arguably rivalled only by Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Clifford Odets as the greatest of all American playwrights, Eugene O'Neill's masterpiece Long Day's Journey Into Night represents Soulpepper's first opportunity to present this master playwright's indelible words. Long Day's Journey Into Night is such a starkly raw autobiographical work that O'Neill requested that it not be produced until twenty-five years after his death. O'Neill completed the play in 1942 and consigned it to his publisher's vault where it remained beyond his 1953 death, until his third wife transferred the rights to Yale University in order to establish a legacy in O'Neill's name. As a result, the play was published and premiered only three years after O'Neill's death, exposing the close connection that the piece had with O'Neill's own life. Many of the events of the doomed Tyrone family are based on O'Neill's home life: addiction, recrimination, the unspoken guilt of past events. The inspirational country home of O'Neill's youth now stands as a monument to the play, retrofitted as a museum to reflect the setting of the Tyrone family. Names, ages, and experiences thinly veiled refer to O'Neill's own life, and the catharsis of expression allowed O'Neill to process his family's means of dealing with his parents' difficulties. The emotional impact of the Tyrone family's battle with powers beyond their control is one of the great dramatic confrontations of American theatre. Heightening the impact of this devastating work is master director and Soulpepper Founding Member Diana LeBlanc, who has crafted a reputation for her insightful, heavy-hitting interpretations of American classics.