REVIEW OF LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT- Joe Igoe

 by Joe Igoe

A Long Day's Journey into Night indeed.  A spewing forth of home truths, shallowly submerged, brought up with regularity and then conveniently pushed down below the surface yet again.  Gone, but not forgotten, even momentarily. 

The wrongs and open secrets of the Tyrone family are not, at least to me, tragic in a Greek or Shakespearean sense.  Avarice, insecurity, dependence and meanness are all too common.  What makes them, again to me, truly tragic is when they are mixed in with personal traits or positions of greatness that have import beyond the familiar and familial. I somehow just didn't get this from O'Neill's play.

Based on his own family history, I can see why he didn't want it published until long after his death.  It may be a reckoning with his ghosts and demons, but somehow the specific didn't translate into more universal insight.  Granted the scenes are at times visceral and impassioned, but I found no connection to make them more than shocking or sad.  They and the play don't ascend to a higher plane.  There is no greater truth or insight behind the words and action for me.

Just another fucked up family.

REVIEW OF LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT Tom Wells

 Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill

O’Neill (the Nobel Prize winner Eugene, not Joseph of Netherland, just to avoid confusion) wrote this three-hour family shouting match between 1939 and 1941 with instructions that it not be published until 25 years after his death. His wife ignored his wishes and it premiered less than three years after O’Neill shuffled off to Tir Tairngire. It went on to win the Tony for Best Play of 1956 and a Pulitzer Prize in 1957. Moreover, per Wikipedia, “The tragedy Long Day's Journey into Night is often included on lists of the finest U.S. plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.”  

Heady company, especially when you consider the scathing reviews of a healthy JFDI majority, which found it unrelentingly depressing, repetitive and “yet another story about angry Irish drunks.” And it is certainly all three of those. But it is also a showcase for wide acting range, as characters regularly go from incandescent anger to maudlin self-pity to gentle understanding, often in just three lines of speech. 

I first saw this play on ABC television in 1975 with an all-British cast that included Lawrence Olivier, Constance Cummings and a very young Ronald Pickup. My reaction then was that the acting was superb, and I was shocked that the mother—anyone’s mother—could be a “dope fiend” before the 1950s. This time around, I watched the version with Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey and Peter Gallagher, mainly because a friend had seen it on Broadway back in 1987 and I wanted to discuss it with him. It is meant as a vehicle for Lemmon, but he is woefully miscast, while Peter Gallagher surprises with some real acting chops. 

Which just goes to show that, with few exceptions (see “The Ferryman”) plays should be seen and not read. In particular, they should be seen live, because it is only in the theatre that you can feel the emotional effort that is essential to evoking empathy, especially for the seriously flawed characters in this exhausting work.

****

REVIEW OF NETHERLAND Tom Wells

 Netherland by Joseph O’Neill

I chose this book after a confluence of random events. A very good friend died too young at age 52 of a brain tumour. His wife was clearing out their possessions, which included her book collection, which included such well-known titles as “The Time Traveller’s Wife,” “The Book Seller of Kabul” and “Trout Fishing in the Yemen.” This novel seemed to be an outlier, and so it was. 

The first chapter introduced a first-person narrator/protagonist who is an international banker who plays cricket in New York City and has just learned that the body of an ex-pat Trinidadian friend, with the hybrid name of Chuck Ramkissoon, has been found decomposing in a NYC canal. It was at that point that I stopped reading, thinking this would be the perfect choice for a JFDI selection. International banker. Expat. Cricket. Murder mystery. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. And it was a Richard and Judy Book Selection, meaning it must be a page-turner. Turns out, it is a meticulously written, thematically complicated tale about what James Pollock incisively described as “displacement and replacement.”

The narrator, Hans van den Broek, is the product of a safe Dutch life (“The pleasantness of my Holland was related to the slightness of its mysteries”) now working in the city formerly known as New Amsterdam. He has expertise in a niche area of global investment and an aptitude for that mostly un-Dutch and decidedly un-American sport of cricket. He also has a wife Rachel and a young son Jake. 

Major plots and sublots are as follows:

• Hans first meets Chuck in a cricket match in which Hans is a player and Chuck an umpire. Hans marvels at Chuck’s ability to defuse a disagreement that absurdly threatens to become deadly.

• The comfortable quarters in which Hans and Family reside are gutted by fire, and the three move into the metaphor-laden Chelsea Hotel (“The floors were linked by a baronial staircase, which by virtue of the void at its centre had the effect of installing a precipice at the heart of the building”). 

• Hans decides he needs driving lessons, which Chuck is only too ready to provide.

• Family relations splinter over life in America, as Rachel declaims, “It’s a question of not raising Jake in an ideologically diseased country whose leaders suffer from delusions that exempt it from the rules of the civilized behaviour it seeks to enforce on others.”  Rachel returns with Jake to England. 

• Hans tries to maintain family ties with bi-weekly (or so) trips to the UK. Job performance suffers. 

• Hans has an awkward one-night stand, while Rachel embarks on an affair that fizzles in six months.

• Hans continues with driving lessons from Chuck, eventually realising he (Hans) is providing cover for a numbers game and its brutal payment enforcement, which Chuck describes as normal business and business practice in his former homeland.

Displacement and replacement, indeed. The expat delusion that you can have it both ways.  But to that, I would add “reconciliation,” at least in the case of this book. For in the end Hans, Rachel and Jake remain a family. As Hans writes. “Rachel saw our reunion as a continuation. I felt differently: that she and I had gone our separate ways and subsequently had fallen for third parties to whom, fortuitously, we were married.”

****½

#78 LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT Eugene O'Neill

 LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT

Eugene O'Neill

Grim trajectory of an Irish-American family of failed actors (father and son) , addiction (mother), consumption (the other son, and not the retail kind). The antithesis of the American dream.

Substitute oxycontin for morphine, Aids/COVID for TB, and some other addiction for Irish whiskey, and you see things haven't changed much since the 1920s.