Nothing pleases clinical therapist Peter Lynch more than spending the afternoon or evening sharing Eugene O’Neill with someone who  is homeless, in recovery from alcoholism, HIV positive and/or mentally ill. And that’s why Colleen Dewhurst liked him. And that’s why she agreed to recreate her interpretations of Mary Tyrone and Josie Hogan before an all-day conference of health care providers who assist clients such as Lynch’s. The event took place at 400 West 43rd Street in New York City in the Manhattan Plaza’s Ellington Room located only a few blocks away from the site of O’Neill’s birthplace on 43rd and Broadway. The date was 15 October 1988, the eve of Eugene O’Neill’s 100th birthday.

When Lynch called Dewhurst and made his request, the Tony Award­winning actress listened with rapt interest to his explanation of the conference event and his expectation of her “role” within it. Dewhurst listened to Lynch’s beguiling Irish brogue and was pleased when he peppered the presentation of his ideas with poetic and literary references that confirmed his love of language and his knowledge of art. She was also moved by his passion to use arts appreciation as an integral aspect of his therapeutic work. Lynch then asked Dewhurst to present selections of herself playing Mary Tyrone, the character she had recently performed at the Neil Simon Theater during New York’s International Festival of the Arts. He also wanted her to perform Josie Hogan in selections from A Moon for the Misbegotten, the role that had won her kudos when she had performed it on Broadway in 1973. Lynch wanted Dewhurst to recreate two of her signature O’Neill roles before an audience of 135 people comprised mostly of social workers, a handful of theater lovers who were followers of Dewhurst, and some retired actors who would be attending as residents of Manhattan Plaza.¹ There would be no press or publicity about her performance except within the therapeutic community and Dewhurst would receive no pay. These conditions did not deter Dewhurst from accepting Lynch’s invitation. She did so despite the fact that, as the preeminent O’Neill actress of her generation, her time was in particular demand that week. On the evening of October 16, the day following Lynch’s planned event, Dewhurst was slated to host a star-studded celebrity celebration of O’Neill’s birthday at Broadway’s Circle in the Square Theater.

Dewhurst agreed to Lynch’s invitation because his cause to champion the disenfranchised was also hers. In 1988 Dewhurst was the president of Actors Equity. As such, she exercised as much political clout as she could to call attention to the escalating AIDS epidemic and its horrific effect on the arts community. And as her dear friend and O’Neill soul mate Jason Robards had done in recent years at the Mayo Clinic, she wanted to share the many faceted aspects of Eugene O’Neill’s life and legacy with anyone who might benefit.²

Dewhurst also confided to Lynch that she had a further personal reason for accepting his invitation. The recent transfer of the New Haven production of Long Day’s Journey into Night directed by José Quintero in which she costarred with Jason Robards and her son Campbell Scott had abruptly closed shortly after arriving in New York due to lack of finances. Dewhurst told Lynch that performing Mary Tyrone at his therapeutic professional conference could give her an opportunity to pay her final respects to Mary since she hadn’t had proper time to “say goodbye to her” before having to give her up (Lynch 2002).

Dewhurst did tell Lynch that, in all honesty, she had some resistance to using O’Neill for therapeutic reasons. She thought of O’Neill as a master craftsman whose great works should not be reduced to being solely about addiction or dysfunctional family issues. Lynch assured her that he agreed. Long Day’s Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten would inspire the clinicians in attendance to use works of art and literature to instigate a deep and rich dialogue with their clients. This exchange would be one based on a mutually shared process of self-examination undertaken by both therapist and client through mutual contemplation of the content and meaning of O’Neill’s plays. Lynch told Dewhurst that his intentions were not to undermine O’Neill’s artistic merit and he reassured the actress that he had no interest or plan to involve her in any psychodrama.

Lynch concluded that it would be valuable to integrate the arts into the therapeutic experience while he was still in training to become a therapist. During his years of study he had been taught that if a client told him about how she or he had been affected by a movie or play that he had to listen to the client’s statements in a “neutral way” (2004). But Lynch was not content with this directive. Instead he thought:

What a great thing to use this as a way to have a shared dialogue between us. A client would tell me they had gone to see a specific play and I would ask them to tell me a lot more about it because I think there’s a lot that we can share together about that. People do that in life. People do that with friends. A lot of times you go to the theater with friends and you go out for coffee and you talk about it. So why wouldn’t you talk about that in therapy or in a psychiatric setting? So, I just wanted to link the two. It goes back to Freud’s analysis of Hamlet. People have paid attention to theater and have analyzed it. What’s interesting to me is that it levels the playing field. When I’m looking at a play I’m no more an expert than my client who could be homeless or in the worst stage of drinking looking at the same production. What is it that Dick Whittington says? “Even a cat can look at a king.” (2004)

In 1977, when he was twenty-five years old and a recent graduate of University College, Cork, Ireland, Lynch enrolled as a graduate student in the School of Social Work at the University of Connecticut in West Hartford. During his training at UConn, Lynch was assigned fieldwork at the Veterans Hospital in West Haven, CT. His first client was a terminal cancer patient named Rod. At the time Rod learned of his diagnosis, he had been sober in the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) program for twenty years. Rod had five children; his youngest was ten. Yet, and as Lynch described him to Dewhurst, Rod seemed at peace. Lynch found him to be the essence of what the AA program promises, an individual who had found serenity. Prior to meeting Rod, Lynch had only one experience with the AA program, and this only because a faculty member at University College, Cork, required his students to expand their training by attending an AA meeting. This was Lynch’s only exposure to Alcoholics Anonymous during his many years of therapeutic training. Lynch’s next experience with AA would be through Rod. Rod’s way of applying what little Lynch knew of the AA program, particularly his application of the Serenity prayer to his physical decline, deeply affected Lynch.

When Rod died, his family asked Lynch to give the eulogy. It was the first time Lynch had been given such a responsibility. He decided to present his thoughts as if he were writing a letter introducing Rod to God. Present at the funeral was another recovering alcoholic named Charlie, a friend of Rod’s who was native Irish like Peter Lynch. Charlie liked Lynch’s method of eulogizing Rod and like Dewhurst, he was struck by Lynch’s capacity for empathy. Charlie was the artistic director of the Gaelic Players, a New Haven, Connecticut-based community Irish theater group. A few days later Charlie called Lynch to ask him to play Jamie in the Gaelic Players’ upcoming production of Long Day’s Journey into Night. It was during that first encounter with O’Neill that Lynch found the key to developing one of his prime therapeutic tools.

Playing the character of Jamie caused Lynch to examine personally the emotional agony, shame and suffering of an active alcoholic. Although Lynch did not share with Jamie the problems of addiction, he did find that they had other things in common. As Lynch described it,

. . . the part that got me to understand Jamie is the fight scene with Edmund. We staged it so that we actually fought on the ground. I have five brothers so I know what it’s like to fight with a brother, the rivalry and the ambivalence of sibling love-hate. The fight between Jamie and Edmund is the kind that doesn’t get resolved. It tells about the hatred that they have for each other and the love, especially during the Frankenstein speech of Jamie’s. While I think sometimes watching it that you often feel you could cut that part out of the play because it’s so painful, performing it helped me to understand that Jamie is—to coin an Irish phrase—“there’s a bit of a want in him.” He’s needy. It’s a softer way of describing Jamie than using psychiatric labels and diagnoses. (2004)

Lynch found that he could not shed the character of Jamie once the production closed.

Even though Lynch knew nothing about the actual history of Eugene O’Neill’s family at the time he acted in Long Day’s Journey into Night, performing Jamie made him realize that Jamie was not going to survive. The role required him to take upon himself the spiritual anguish of a hopeless alcoholic, a psychic state that contrasted profoundly with that of a recovering alcoholic’s spiritual freedom, the latter a quality of emotional calm evidenced in Lynch’s client, Rod.

After playing Jamie, Lynch began to experiment with ways to use theater, and in particular the works of Eugene O’Neill, for therapeutic healing and professional teaching.³ The day Lynch convinced Colleen Dewhurst to appear as Eugene O’Neill’s mother in order to celebrate his 100th Birthday, he described the ultimate goal of his therapeutic methods as being an attempt to use art to create “a bridge of love.” This was an image Lynch drew from a novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, written by another great American playwright, Thornton Wilder. Lynch quoted Wilder to Dewhurst, saying, “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning”(Wilder 148). According to Lynch,

Theater can be a way both of getting out of oneself but also of getting back into oneself. I think it was Emily Dickinson who said, “tell the truth but tell it slant.” Theater allows you to tell the truth but tell it slant. Sometimes the truth about our life, if we’re impoverished and if we’re in awful pain, is terrible. But if we can link our pain to the human condition, it gives us hope and light. (2004)

The section from A Moon for the Misbegotten that he asked Dewhurst to present that day was from the end of act 3 during Tyrone’s confessional scene at the point where Josie says, “I understand now, Jim, darling, and I’m proud you came to me as the one in the world you know loves you enough to understand and forgive—and I do forgive!” (933). Lynch’s reason for this choice was the amazing revelation in the scene that “this awful person— Jamie—can be forgiven” (Lynch 2004).

This first introduction of Lynch to the plays of Eugene O’Neill by way of two recovering alcoholics, Rod and Charlie, encouraged Lynch to learn more about alcoholism and its roots and also to learn more about the life and writing of Eugene O’Neill. Lynch’s search brought him to study family therapy with Monica McGoldrick, an internationally respected family therapist and one of the founders of the family therapy movement. McGoldrick’s expertise included the study of genograms for use in family assessments. Lynch discovered that McGoldrick had made a genogram of Eugene O’Neill’s family history and had traced, through the playwright’s family tree, the psychiatric trail of depression, alcoholism and suicide going back four generations. After learning of the O’Neill family’s legacy of spiritual and psychological betrayal, Lynch took pity on O’Neill and decided that this great playwright, who was also frequently negligent as a husband and father, deserved a second chance. It was at this juncture in his development as a clinical therapist that Lynch came up with the notion to have Eugene O’Neill’s mother give him a birthday party. And Lynch wanted Colleen Dewhurst to be there as Mary Tyrone to celebrate O’Neill’s birth in a way O’Neill’s real mother never had.

Because Peter Lynch has a way of getting what he needs for his therapeutic causes, Dewhurst dutifully appeared on that October day in 1988 to share birthday cake and Irish music, to read Yeats with Peter Lynch (because O’Neill liked to read Yeats while his dog Blemie sat beside him) and to recreate once more her wrenching portrayals of both Josie Hogan and Mary Tyrone. Dewhurst was so moved by the event that she later thanked Lynch by requesting a favor from him. Would he send her a memento, a picture that Lynch had shown her and that she found intriguing? It was a photo of an anonymous man sleeping in front of a poster of the 1988 Quintero production of Long Day’s Journey into Night (see frontispiece). She wanted to send a copy to Jason and to José because they were both in recovery from alcoholism. She knew how touched they would be at the sight of the man whose circumstances appeared fragile in ways that suggested he might be indigent or at least wavering on the edges of a psychological abyss. Years later Lynch considered Dewhurst’s motives for requesting that particular photo and reasoned that perhaps she wanted it because the unidentified man, “comes between Colleen and Jason in a way that bridges the gap between them—he reaches across” (2004).

Stories such as this little known moment in the life of Colleen Dewhurst pour forth from Peter Lynch when he recounts the many times he has brought together the famous and the infamous to muse and mediate upon the legacy and work of Eugene O’Neill. In his current position as the Clinical Director of ALSO-Cornerstone, a New Haven, Connecticut-based nonprofit social service agency dedicated to promoting substance abuse recovery, mental health and supportive housing, Lynch regularly integrates contemplation and study of the life and works of Eugene O’Neill along with his agency’s other efforts to help individuals seeking help with what are termed “special life issues.”⁴ For instance, Lynch helped bring together several groups to create a program called “O’Neill After School.” The program is coordinated by Robin Callahan, the Director of Prevention and Intervention for ALSO-Cornerstone and actor/director Stephen Kennedy Murphy. This educational outreach program is designed to help disadvantaged middle school teenagers and give them the opportunity to learn about Eugene O’Neill’s life and legacy while attempting their own first-penned scenes and short plays. These writing projects emulate O’Neill’s earliest one-act plays with the full knowledge and awareness of O’Neill’s own troubled youth and young adulthood.

Besides educating those who are needy at ALSO-Cornerstone’s facilities, Lynch organizes off-site educational events for his clients. Lynch believes that for the homeless and disadvantaged, attendance at art’s events, and especially the theater, is as important as food, clothing and shelter. Lynch is disappointed by what he terms a “class system” in the US when it comes to attending most arts events:

The theater and opera in the United States is elitist. In Italy opera is an ordinary evening out. In Ireland the theater is for everyone, not just those who have higher education. You look at the normal base of people who attend Yale Repertory Theater or Long Wharf Theater and they look like the “upper classes,” people who are at the post-masters level [of education]. It’s a class thing here. It becomes another way of isolating. (2004)

Lynch has found that it’s not the performers with concerns about who is in the audience, but the mainstream audiences themselves that cause the breech. Lynch observed:

. . . people in the theater are wonderful about giving us tickets and not being restrictive at all. People in churches are not as open as people in theaters are. You don’t have to explain it to them. They get this. They’re not as judgmental of themselves or about the disease as much. And there is something about us performers. We all love to have anybody who will applaud. Every performer wants an audience. I think they see that our clients can be a wonderful audience that rounds out the performance. (26 July 2004)

Lynch prepares his clients prior to taking them to an arts event by meeting with them privately and giving a talk expressing his own interpretation of the play.

There are clients who ask for the script ahead of time when we are doing plays at the Irish Club. I didn’t even know some of them were reading. And then, after they see a play, they will talk to me for years about a character they saw me do in a play. One of the fascinating things for them when I’ve been in a play is that they will talk to me about the difference between me the character and me the person. This opens up new possibilities. (2004)

During preparation sessions Lynch emphasizes aspects of the play that he feels will move his clients and also entertain them. His view is:

Many theaters have after the shows talks. But if you look at who they invite to lead them—they may have the most brilliant professors from Yale who come and talk on a Sunday afternoon but they tend to be the kind of people who don’t connect with an audience that is—kind of like   Shakespeare’s original audience. So the way that the education departments in the professional theater set up the after-the-show talks tends to reinforce that kind of classicism and restrictiveness. I think the first goal for our clients is to discover that attendance at plays can be fun. Then the play can meet the standards of a great piece of theater and disturb and challenge us. (2004)

And so Peter Lynch takes his clients to live theatrical performances that are often followed by arranged pre-show or after-the-show talks, sessions that he carefully and sensitively orchestrates and monitors. In February 1989, the Studio Arena Theater in Buffalo, NY, allowed a visiting troupe of performers from Dublin’s Abbey Theater to use its production of Long Day’s Journey into Night as a vehicle for Lynch and other social workers and their clients to learn about dysfunctional families. In May 1986, at the Palace Theater in Stamford, Connecticut, actress Claire Bloom remained in makeup and costume after a performance as Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night and sat onstage while permitting Lynch to use her as a clinical example of a woman suffering from depression. In 1999 members of the Hartford Stage cast of Ellen Burstyn’s production of Long Day’s Journey into Night appeared post-performance to engage in an after-the-show dialogue with clients and health care personnel trying to understand the problems of alcoholic families. And numerous times on Stage II of New Haven, Connecticut’s Long Wharf Theater, an institution strongly associated with the works of Eugene O’Neill,⁵ Lynch has staged his own theater/therapy performance events incorporating selections from the plays of Eugene O’Neill. The casts for these events are comprised of amateur and professional actors who are often themselves recovering alcoholics, or family members of individuals suffering from addiction or mental disorders.

Peter Lynch also integrates his homeless clients with audiences who regularly attend the theater. When he goes to the theater with a large group, it is highly possible that unsuspecting audience members find themselves sitting next to individuals who recently begged from them on a nearby street corner. To Lynch, this mingling of the haves and have-nots is the fulfillment of the American Dream, one Lynch accomplished for himself in another way, having once been an Irish immigrant on American shores.

Since his first art/therapy conference with guest Colleen Dewhurst, Lynch has broadened the scope of his endeavors. As he became more and more comfortable with such events, he began to stage his own modest productions, incorporating poetry, literature and scene selections from the works of Seamus Heaney, William Butler Yeats, Brian Friel and Sebastian Barry and also drawing on the works of other writers such as Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes. Lynch favors authors who depict feelings of isolation, circumstances of homelessness and other painful aspects of the human condition, and who write with compassion and humor that reaches out to the community of the disenfranchised, those with “a bit of a want” in them. But he always returns to Long Day’s Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten, as if reuniting, in his words, with a “first love” (26 July 2004) because these were the first plays of O’Neill that he experienced and because he believes that they provide a key to opening the best dialogue on the effects of addiction. In Lynch’s view,

O’Neill did something rare by bringing the repetition of a family’s behavior patterns as they result from drugs and alcohol to our attention. It’s really unadorned. What makes Long Day’s Journey particularly unique about the story of addiction is that O’Neill does not tell it from one person’s story. There is no one protagonist in that play. You could have people get together forever and have people say who’s the real protagonist? Is it James, Mary, Jamie or Edmund? The only one that people would agree on is that it’s not Kathleen. And that’s what to me changes the dialogue about addiction. As much as O’Neill talks about blame—I’d love to have somebody count how many times the word “blame” is used in that play—it’s not about blame. And I think that if a production goes wrong or if Mary comes across as if she is always blaming, then the production doesn’t work. The play is about understanding. It’s what O’Neill says in his dedication to Carlotta [“deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones”]. (2004)

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Because experiencing one of Lynch’s theater/therapy events assists in understanding his methods, what follows documents one such evening I attended on 27 May 1998 on Stage II at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theater.

Four actors, one woman and three men, enter a bare, black box theater and seat themselves on folding chairs placed downstage left. They face the audience directly. A narrator follows behind the performers and positions himself at a podium placed stage right. At the rear of the performance space, framed by a black brick wall, is a single, unlit ghost light, which seems to indicate that the spirit of Eugene O’Neill is present. A presentation of selected scenes from two of the great writer’s plays will soon begin. Act 1 will include selections from Long Days Journey into Night. Act 2 will be devoted exclusively to the climactic confessional scene in A Moon for the Misbegotten. The Long Wharf Theater has often given the New Haven community exquisitely mounted major revivals of the great American playwright’s works. This particular evening’s staging of O’Neill will be simple and unadorned using only basic blocking to suit the clinical and stylized presentation of the texts to be performed. Yet, as did previous productions of O’Neill’s plays staged at Long Wharf, the event will demand its audience to grasp the nature of tragedy. And, historically speaking, performances of tragedy have always had one artistic goal—to achieve a catharsis that will heal a community.

The fact that a group from New Haven’s ALSO-Cornerstone, Inc. is gathered together at Long Wharf Theater to listen to readings from plays by Eugene O’Neill is not unusual. For this particular group, spending an evening together in such a manner is a form of therapy. Many self-help based twelve steps groups affected by disorders and diseases like alcoholism and mental illness come together in a similar way to share their “experience, strength and hope to solve their common problem.”⁶ The audience seated in Stage II is gathered together in the way it knows best. As usual one of the group’s members will share his story. He will tell how he turned a family history of despair into a life of productivity. At tonight’s event, the main speaker will be Eugene O’Neill.

Like the chairperson at an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting or a Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meeting, Peter Lynch, the evening’s host, begins the proceedings by introducing his guests. He does this by taking on his role as a social worker. Crossing upstage of the seated actors, he introduces them to the audience as the Tyrone family. Next, Lynch begins to acquaint the audience with the case history of each family member. He tells us that Mary Tyrone (Jean Lane) became addicted to morphine after the birth of her third son Edmund and that her husband James (Jim Chase), although known as a famous American actor in the nineteenth century, was also a heavy drinker and womanizer. We are informed that their two still living sons, Jamie (Raymond W. Wiederhold) and Edmund (Tom Penny) are in the throes of active alcoholism. The audience will learn that Jamie will die of the disease and that Edmund, the Eugene O’Neill prototype, will contract tuberculosis as a result of his dissipation.

While circling the Tyrones and looking down upon them, Lynch observes that theirs is an interesting case and that he wishes he could have had them in family therapy. He adds that Eugene O’Neill wishes us to know that he believes theatrical critics of his plays often overlooked the most fundamental part of his playwriting, that he is Irish. Lynch’s own Irish accent highlights his comment. Lynch then tells us that the family’s name of Tyrone comes from a county by that name in Ireland and that it means “the Kingdom of Eugene.” He then quotes Nietzsche, “What is memorable is always most associated with what is painful.” Telling the audience that the Tyrone family is actually based on Eugene O’Neill’s own family Lynch refers them to a chart included in their programs. The genogram shows the O’Neill family tree. It documents the number of family members who were addicted to drugs or who died of alcoholism and suicide. And then, as in a twelve step-meeting format, Lynch ends his comments by allowing his guest speakers, the Tyrone family, to lead the discussion.

As the staged readings from Long Days Journey into Night begin, familiar scenes from this very well known play appear in a psychological and therapeutic context, as well as a theatrical one. When James and Mary are alone and talking, Mary’s denial is apparent. When their sons interrupt and enter the room, their fear that she has regressed with a “slip” becomes palpable. When the boys argue and Jamie accuses his mother of betraying him, a family damaged by suspicion and disappointment is revealed. The distemper spills into the audience. During the scene in which Mary begins to fret about Edmund’s health, a man, an ALSO-Cornerstone client, abruptly stands and walks right across the auditorium. Visually caught between the audience and the performers, he seems to be in the play. The client looks agitated and is likely on medication. This brief but noticeable moment is unsettling. One wonders whether the subject matter of the scenes has upset the man and whether other audience members may also find the scene presentation too difficult to endure.

As scenes continue another dimension of the Tyrone family emerges. They love each other. But the way they love each other is hurtful. When Edmund and his mother are alone we see that their passion for each other is deep but that their sense of isolation is crippling. As the scenes progress, they spiral in rounds of accusation, betrayal and despair. When, at last, Mary enters holding her wedding gown as if it is the dead body of someone she doesn’t even know, it is apparent that she has emotionally abandoned her husband and sons. She doesn’t even care. The audience witnesses the destruction of a family because the core figure, the wife and mother, lapses into drug addiction.

As the lights dim at the closing of the first act, Peter Lynch invites the
audience to discuss its feelings about the first act while sharing food and coffee during the intermission. In the lobby, cast members mingle with the audience who timidly come forth to talk. The actor playing Jamie, Ray Wiederhold is also a police officer. During the intermission he recognizes a man in the crowd whom he once arrested. The man approaches to shake Wiederhold’s hand and says that he is in recovery now and that he is enjoying the performance. The actor playing James Sr., Jim Chase, is amazed by the number of people who come up to him and address him as if he really were the head of the family. They tell him that his family is like theirs. They say they could identify with the way the disease infects every family member. Chase, whose actual profession is public defender, is pleased at their kind and thoughtful responses. Their reactions are unlike those he normally experiences in his daily work at “Drug Court,” a special unit in the court system Case established to administer drug and alcohol related offenses.

As the crowd begins to return to the auditorium for the second act, people continue talking in whispers about their personal experiences. It is an unusual kind of mid-play conversation. Exchanges occur which are not normally heard in a theater lobby. Instead of talking about the quality of the production, or instead of talking about careers, money and other achievements, people are talking about their most painful life experiences.

As act 2 begins, Peter Lynch gives the audience background on the circumstances behind A Moon for the Misbegotten. The audience learns that the situations Jim Tyrone describes in his confessional scene are true and based on Jamie O’Neill’s life. They hear that Jamie lived in a time when there was no AA program and that since he had no foundation he became overly dependent on his mother. They are told that Jamie and his mother had a relationship that was unhealthy, parasitically symbiotic. When she recovered from her addition, he recovered too. When she lay dying of old age, he despaired and went back to drinking. The audience audibly groans when it learns that having abandoned his mother during her death and funeral, a guilty Jamie continued drinking only to die shortly after his parent during a fit of DTs.

Next, the actor playing Jamie (Charlie) and the actress playing Josie (Sandra Hanrahan) enter and sit on a low set of stairs simply draped with a gray cloth. While playing the excruciatingly painful but compelling confession scene in which Jamie tells all of his sins to a forgiving Josie, the audience seems to enter a state of meditative quiet. In an almost religious sense, the audience uses the actors to contemplate its own transgressions. Later, an audience member tells Ms. Hanrahan how much she appreciated the way the actress had so lovingly embraced Jamie and caressed him. Sandra admitted that it was difficult to do throughout the rehearsal period because of Jamie’s reprehensible behaviors. She acknowledged that an audience, like the ones present watching the performance at Long Wharf, compelled her to absolve Jamie. Her willingness to meet the demands of the play was tested by the fact that people who had similar life experiences were only a few breaths away.

To capsulate the evening, an after-the-show discussion occurs between audience members and three additional guest speakers: Jerry Ross, Executive Director of ALSO-Cornerstone, Jennifer Blemings, a Program Director at ALSO-Cornerstone, and Dr. Larry Davidson, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine and Director of the Psychosis Program at the Connecticut Mental Health Center in New Haven.

Jerry Ross refers to Freud as saying that a sign of mental health lies in the ability to love and to work. In Long Days Journey into Night all of the characters feel they are failures at both. Mary struggles with her vocation, James Sr. has sold out his craft, Jamie is a mediocre actor, and Edmund is a would-be poet. Unable to find love and acceptance from each other the characters are “stunted in their emotional responses.” Mary Tyrone seals their fate when she says, “the past is the present [. . .] It’s the future, too” (765). She indicates to her family that there is no hope. Ross notes the overlapping influences of Irish culture and social systems in O’Neill’s play saying that Irish culture is matriarchal. If the mother is not strong she is perceived as a failure. Depleted by drugs, Mary is ineffective as a parent and a wife and, therefore, the family feels betrayed.

Jennifer Blemings notes that in A Moon for the Misbegotten Jamie acts as a “treatment resistant patient.” Josie struggles to change Jamie. Caseworkers experience the same struggle. Blemings states the need to break the silence and end the stigma associated with mental illness.

Dr. Larry Davidson speaks poignantly and humbly about the fact that the play reminds him of how much suffering his clients experience. Mental diseases bring on recrimination and rejection from family members. He speaks of providers’ and caretakers’ pain, saying that the vocabulary of psychiatry is inadequate to express what O’Neill portrays so poetically and truthfully. Dr. Davidson, a psychologist, adds that recovery happens not in hospitals and treatment rooms but in life, in social situations in which people genuinely care for each other.

As is usual in AA and NA meetings, the evening concludes with responses from audience members. As the shared discussion winds down and the event moves towards its conclusion, many participants speak to the fact that the evening dignified their own personal stories and lives.

In conclusion

An outsized theater poster from the 1988 New Haven production of Long Day’s Journey into Night hangs in a central hallway in the simple brick building that houses ALSO-Cornerstone. Jason Robards as James Tyrone and Colleen Dewhurst as his wife Mary are displayed like icons in king and queen­sized portraits. Behind one of the hallway’s closed doors is the room Peter Lynch uses for his therapy sessions, which contains comfortable chairs and bookshelves lined with copies of Eugene O’Neill’s later plays. When Peter Lynch is alone with a client in the privacy of a therapy session and that client is, in his estimation, in denial, he asks her or him to read a quote by Mary Tyrone from his copy of Long Day ’s Journey into Night. Aloud, in the quiet of Lynch’s office, the client reads,

How could you believe me—when I can’t believe myself? I’ve become such a liar. I never lied about anything once upon a time. Now I have to lie, especially to myself. But how can you understand, when I don’t myself. I’ve never understood anything about it, except that one day long ago I found I could no longer call my soul my own. (769-70)

According to Lynch, “I have the client read that—it’s not to say he or she is a liar too—but rather, what is it about that? So I use those pieces and clients see the O’Neill books on the shelf and the O’Neill posters on the wall and they ask ‘what is it about that?’ And so I tell them” (2004).

As of this writing, Peter Lynch continues to link art and therapy and relies largely on O’Neill to reach individuals who desire understanding. And, although his approach to performance is unconventional, his manner of interpreting Eugene O’Neill’s life and plays is one the playwright himself might applaud. Certainly, by the conclusion of one of Peter Lynch’s uniquely orchestrated O’Neill events, it is apparent that Eugene O’Neill’s plays can be seen as a bridge for lost souls, a means to assist those who are seeking to cross over and escape from the agony of their isolation on their journey toward hope.

NOTES

1. Manhattan Plaza offers rent subsidies to retired actors. Dewhurst also advocated for the Actor’s Fund. As is often true with O’Neill, a life/art coincidence occurred during the Dewhurst/Lynch performance when one of the retired actors living at the Manhattan Plaza who attended the event turned out to be James Earl Jones’s father. Robert Earl Jones had performed the role of Joe Mott in the legendary 1956 production of The Iceman Cometh at the Circle in the Square in Greenwich Village and had also performed the title role in a production of The Emperor Jones. During questions and discussion amongst those attending he proudly attested to a further personal connection with O’Neill by reminding those present that his son James had performed the role of Hickey at the Broadway Circle in the Square Theater in 1973.