Is it Worth The Read? Long Day’s Journey into Night
Image Courtesy of nytimes.com
By Caroline Morris
People need to read more plays.
I cannot argue with the statement that plays are meant to be watched. They are written to be seen and performed. But I will say that I do not think anyone can catch everything a play is doing just by watching a production, especially considering how much of a live play relies on the interpretation of actors and directors.
Reading a play, however, lets you get to the heart of the work, far less influenced by the vision of a director. It also allows you to take a more literary, analytical approach to the piece of work.
One of the best canonical plays to read is Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night follows the Tyrone family across one day in their summer home in August of 1912. The family consists of parents James and Mary Tyrone and their two sons Jamie and Edmund, all of whom have individual and shared tragic flaws.
This play is a welcoming entry into reading dramatic work because of its structure and language. If your high school had you read any plays, it was likely something by Shakespeare or The Crucible by Arthur Miller. Though Shakespeare is clearly an inimitable genius and The Crucible is morbidly fascinating—witch trials and extramarital affairs draw readers in—they are not the easiest pieces to consume. The language is not natural to a modern eye or ear, and these plays often have large casts of characters, locations, and times in which a reader can easily get lost. O’Neill’s play, being written in 1942 and set in the early 1900s, uses a linguistic style that still feels familiar to today’s reader so that the language itself is not a roadblock to understanding even the base story.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night also follows Aristotliean “classical unities.” According to this dramatic theory, any tragedy should have three unities: unity of action, unity of time, and unity of place. This means that any tragedy should have one main tragic conflict that occurs in one place within 24 hours. Though this form has been broken many times and, in doing so, has produced many wonderful pieces of literature, the simplicity of this structure makes for an easy entryway into play-reading.
This play clearly is set in one place and one day, and while it does have multiple intricately interwoven subplots, they all contribute to the main conflict: Mary Tyrone’s relapse into substance abuse and the subsequent decomposition of the family.
The plot of Long Day’s Journey Into Night is poignant, pulling at the viewer’s heartstrings as they watch a family that is simultaneously incredibly intimate and deeply malignant. Though it is not universal that every family has these extreme issues with substance abuse, the men of the family habitually turning to drink as the mother turns to drugs, the play does touch on the ubiquitous experience of the tension between loving one’s family and having to deal with the negative realities of being flawed human beings. Even though all of these characters can be poisonous to the others in some form, the reader still wants them to recover, because they see pieces of their own family in the Tyrones.
But the greatest aspect of O’Neill’s piece that makes it worth a read is the revelation of inevitability. We, as viewer or reader, are entering this family dynamic blind, so it is new to us. As the plot unfolds, we are experiencing the relapse for the first time, so the initial horror of this tragedy is fresh. But as the play progresses, we realize that this is not the first time the Tyrones have lived through this.
We are viewing one of a thousand versions of this story, which becomes incredibly clear as the characters inhabit their roles in this breakdown with frustrated and saddened familiarity and even code-switch when the truth of the situation begins to be said aloud to maintain the facade that the family is fine. It is horrifying to slowly undergo the revelation that every word the Tyrones say has been said before, that they know this, and change nothing as the inevitable barrels toward them. The sense of active complicity in deep denial makes a viewer’s stomach go cold.
The descent of this family and their morbidly fascinating psychology is enthralling. It makes it impossible to stop reading through the last scene, which, without spoiling, is emotionally devastating.
So if you are looking to start reading plays, Long Day’s Journey Into Night is the one with which to start. It is accessible, powerful, and rife with intelligent themes that can be best understood with time to mull over the words sitting in front of you. Then give it a watch. That is how plays are meant to be consumed, after all.
