‘A Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ @ Bucket List Productions/ Lewisville Playhouse

Photos by Alex Rain Photography

—Jan Farrington

Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it?

Eugene O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey Into Night is not to be taken lightly. It’s a workout, both for the actors (on stage for nearly three hours), and the audience in the seats.

Bucket List Productions’ Journey, created in collaboration with the Lewisville Playhouse, is worth the physical and emotional “ask” the play makes of us—its best asset being an impressive cast of five, with theater credits from across North Texas and well beyond. These actors understand the assignment: to take the troubled day-to-day dross of a family’s life and spin it into something so terribly human we can’t forget it.

This is Eugene O’Neill’s most autobiographical play, a tough and truth-telling look at his own birth family. He struggled to write it for decades, and left it behind for his widow to publish posthumously in 1956. The words were, to O’Neill, almost unbearable, unspeakable—but also unstoppable. He had to write this play.

We are spending a long, long day in the summer of 1912 with the Tyrone family: father, mother, two grown sons, the “hired girl.” More than once, we want to smother them with a pillow as the endless family talks go on and on. They rehash memories and quarrels, chew over griefs and grievances piled up through the years. They circle one another in words, trying to connect but always veering away too soon, into the layers of snark and bitterness they can’t break through.

And yet by the end, as the lights of this dark journey begin to go down, the play’s last words will leave us breathless and broken-hearted.

Did these conversations happen in real life? O’Neill never gave us a clue—but they feel like a distillation of “almosts”—talks he and his family never quite had, the love and regret they never expressed.

The story builds slowly, and the actors’ vivid characterizations grow with each new scene. Director Van Quattro plays the worn, flinty, flamboyant actor James Tyrone, the father whose obsession with his impoverished Irish childhood leads him to bury his genuine theatrical talent in a “vehicle” show he takes on tour (and hates) for decades. His sons loathe his miserly ways and sharp tongue. Older son Jamie (Danny O’Connor) can be genial, but exists in a permanent “fight” mode with his father, who calls him a failure and embarrassment. Jamie drinks and prowls, but saves a soft spot for sensitive and frail younger brother Edmund (Zachary Cantrell), who (his father says) might have “the makings of a poet.”

And then there’s well-mannered mother Mary (Karen Raehpour), freshly returned from treatment for a doctor-induced drug addiction she hasn’t been able to shake. Her husband and sons love her, but she no longer functions as the center of the family. The Tyrones are at sea, as the between-scenes soundscape of the play might indicate. Mary speaks more bits and pieces of her truth to blunt housemaid Cathleen (Nikki Hinson) than to the family; with them, she preserves a bland serenity. Raehpour creates a vivid moment when (as the family exits and leaves her alone) she leans forward, hands on the arm of the sofa, and exhales a long, sharp breath, her facial expression suddenly bleak and cold.

O’Neill writes duets for these characters that tell us a lot. James and Jamie can hardly make it through one minute of talk before bitter quarreling breaks out. James and Mary, somehow still in love—eternally the matinee idol and the convent girl— ping-pong between romantic moments and blame games. Edmund and his father, over a sporadic game of cards, come to know each other better—but the moment ends with James returning to his ever-present anger over light bulbs and money.

To our surprise, we realize along the way that the family’s sweetest love song is being sung between the two brothers. O’Neill’s older brother James, Jr. was, in many ways, the true love of his life—the caring, troubled, alcoholic sibling he was desperate to save, but couldn’t. (Another tender, devastating portrait of James O’Neill is found in O’Neill’s play A Moon For the Misbegotten.) Jamie bravely, admirably tells Edmund to “watch out” for him—and gives good reasons for the warning.

Sad to know that the American playwrights who revealed so much to us about families—O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams—found little joy or peace in their own. O’Neill’s two sons committed suicide; his teenage daughter Oona left home to marry Charlie Chaplin—36 years her senior. They had eight children together, and the marriage lasted (mostly happily, it seems) until Chaplin’s death.

The alchemy of theater—watching hay spun into gold before our eyes—works in mysterious ways. The everyday can becomes something else, something different, in the course of an hour, or two—or three. It can happen in unexpected places, in small playhouses facing the wrong way from Main Street, from companies that hadn’t been on your radar before, but are now. It’s a bit of a mystery…but a good one.

WHEN: July 28-August 11, 2024
WHERE: Lewisville Playhouse, 160 W. Main Street (entrance behind the lineup of buildings, thru a courtyard), Lewisville TX
WEB: lewisvilleplayhouse.org/bucket-list