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New York
Post,
May 7, 2003
Oh,
What A 'Night'!
By CLIVE BARNES
Eugene O'Neill's "Long
Day's Journey Into Night" may just be the worst great play ever
written.
Yet it never fails to move, and in the right hands, it will chill
the heart and warm the soul.
And it has never been in better hands than Robert Falls', whose
effortlessly magnificent staging opened at the Plymouth Theater last
night.
I have seen every major American, British and even Swedish cast, but
this one Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Dennehy, Philip Seymour Hoffman,
Robert Sean Leonard and (let's hear it for the spunky little Irish
maid) Fiana Toibin is the all-around finest.
The play is O'Neill at his harrowing best a long night's journey
into genius, sad, at times funny, but ultimately just truthful.
If all art is autobiography, this is art at its most unvarnished.
For here O'Neill is excavating his own past a crucial 1912 night
in the Connecticut summer home he shared with his elder brother,
mother and father, the elderly, prosperous but parsimonious actor,
James O'Neill, called here James Tyrone.
It is, as O'Neill wrote in the work's dedication, "a play of old
sorrow, written in tears and blood." And it's long. Most plays
compress time, but here O'Neill manages to make it seem as long as
life.
The writing is commonplace everyday broadcloth clichιs tumble over
one another unnoticed in documentary profusion but O'Neill's
effort is so monumental, the pain in the recollection so profound,
that we feel an almost voyeuristic guilt in bearing witness to it.
Theater being what it is, even in a perfect cast some are more
perfect than others. Here, all pales beside the sight of Vanessa
Redgrave grabbing a play by the throat and running off with it.
Watch her hands, sometimes fluttering like anxious mice, sometimes
trailing with lost regret; watch her eyes, sometimes cunning with
hope, sometimes dead with dope; listen to her voice, mostly a
plaintive counterpoint to the melancholy fog-horns floating outside,
yet capable of shrill horror.
This butterfly transmogrified into a moth hits tragedy early but
squarely with the graceful prophetic power she understates into the
line: "before the fog comes back because I know it will." She is
wonderful.
Philip Seymour Hoffman grandstands with such subtle bravura, his
face bleary with drink, that he makes the elder brother, Jamie, an
incredibly credible mix of good nature, broken failure and
disappointed malice.
These are two consciously even self-consciously virtuoso
performances against which the other two players in the quartet have
to place themselves.
Helped by Falls, not to mention O'Neill, they do it with daring,
simple craft.
Dennehy is bluffly wonderful as a blind bull of a James Tyrone,
filling in his character with great actorly bits of business (note
his just-enough gesture at the mention of Oscar Wilde) and staring
out with only dim comprehension at his collapsed world.
And then there is the superb Robert Sean Leonard, a Hamlet to
Redgrave's Gertrude. As the younger brother, the stand-in for
O'Neill himself, he bears himself with the anxious air of a reporter
at a traffic accident where he fears someone he knows might have
been killed.
What more is there to praise about this anatomy of misery dissected
to the naked bones? Of course, there's Brian MacDevitt's brilliantly
crepuscular lighting, and Santo Loquasto's to-the-life costuming and
his brown-gray house that etches on the memory.
Like the play, so much like the play . . . |
