On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage TRAGIC MISALLIANCES BY LEO SAUVAGE Of the three prominent revivals that opened on Broadway this spring, only Long Day's Journey into Night could be called a truly memorable theatrical...
...We learn of the years he spent reading Baudelaire on ships and haunting seaport bars...
...The result will be a woolly and overlong production that invariably taxes the stamina of the audience...
...Lemmon captures these nuances with intelligent understatement...
...he can justly be called a "stinking old miser" by his sonEdmund...
...Jamie possesses a genuine affection for Edmund, yet seems intent on corrupting him...
...They are called upon to realize a haunted family, riddled with love-hate emotions and driven by buried passions...
...Let's see...
...In the case of Journey, though, O'Neill loaded the script with incredibly detailed directions that are frequently irrelevant and even contradictory...
...Nobody, though, could pull off such a story in 1986, save as a parody, which it isn't...
...When she drops the tiny hearing aid she wears, Bananas, being used to having handfuls of tranquilizers shoved down her throat by Artie, mistakes it for a box of pills and dutifully eats the loose transistors...
...or Jamie...
...She is visiting with the Shaughnessy's while awaiting Billy before they are to take off for Australia...
...Little expenditures "within reason" are fine, especially if they go for whisky and (unexamined) pieces of land...
...He added confidently that "the mass and weight of O'Neill's tragedies often overwhelm things that look like faults in manuscript...
...Debbie Allen tries to be as good as Gwen Verdon was 20 years ago, and she almost succeeds...
...I came to the theater with reservations about Jack Lemmon in the role of James Tyrone—this seemed as dubious as Dus-tin Hoffman playing Willy Loman...
...I rest my case...
...The hopelessness that now plagues him is exacerbated by the influence of his aimless older brother, who drinks as much as the father...
...In earlier scenes, Leslie looks simply too delicate, too graceful and fresh for a woman with Mary's history...
...Bob Fosse's dynamic and imaginative choreography is diverting enough, but Neil Simon's book, never a great piece of writing, today appears so drowned in its own syrup that it couldn't sell soap on TV, much less be acceptable on stage...
...Deep inside, though, James Tyrone is not proud to have spent his life as a touring Count of Monte Cristo...
...Goading him on is his inelegantly named mistress, Bunny Flingus (Stockard Channing), who sleeps with Artie but will not cook for him until his wife is in the bin...
...Edmund is at age 23 a former merchant seaman (as was the playwright...
...Rome...
...Now he is not only an inveterate drunkard...
...At the Beaumont, by contrast, just about everyone seems to be utterly enchanted by it...
...ittle needs to be said about the revived 1966 musical Sweet Charity...
...A director who slavishly adheres to these instructions in his anxiousness to respect the script is sure to reproduce its "faults...
...Ifhecan get ridofhis unbalanced yet far from crazy wife, he will be able to quit Queens for Hollywood, where his old school chum Billy Einhom (Danny Aiello) is a mogul...
...What else...
...Thus rescued from the smothering veneration of the playwright's instructions, Journey is without a doubt O'Neill's most affecting work...
...O'Neill himself also learned the consumption that killed his grandfather had struck him, and that he must retire to a sanitorium with only a slim hope of a cure...
...Ellen Quinlan, the playwright's mother, becomes Mary Cavan, and Eugene himself become Edmund...
...It ends with Artie strangling Bananas...
...On Stage TRAGIC MISALLIANCES BY LEO SAUVAGE Of the three prominent revivals that opened on Broadway this spring, only Long Day's Journey into Night could be called a truly memorable theatrical event...
...James Tyrone's fear of ruin is as sincere as it is neurotic, for it is fueled by memories of a hungry childhood...
...That's where zookeeper Art Shaughnessy (John Mahoney) wants to send his wife, Bananas (Swoosie Kurtz...
...Some first names are even retained...
...The House of Blue Leaves also offers "jokes" about Vietnam, Hiroshima and people being pushed into concentration camp ovens...
...The son is then transferred to a U.S...
...But James' love for his family does not temper his tightfistedness when it comes to their needs...
...Brisk pacing, achieved by a massive elimination of pauses and occasional overlapping of spoken lines, radically reduces Journey's playing time without, I believe, actually cutting anything...
...More important, Miller's rhythmic articulation brings those passages that are crucial to the play's meaning into high relief...
...I say this fully aware that the production of Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical classic presented at the Broadhurst Theater—before going on a tour that will take it to London, Tel Aviv and then Los Angeles—elicited ambivalent and even unfavorable reviews from some major critics...
...After the difficult birth of Jamie, he procured for his wife the cheapest available doctor, who found it easiest to treat her by feeding her morphine, thereby causing the addiction...
...in addition, he specified an enormous number of pauses...
...A special agreement between O'Neill's widow, Carlotta Monterey, and Yale University Press permitted the American publication of Journey's text the week of the Stockholm opening...
...Miller's direction makes it clearer than ever before that it is James who is the root of this family's troubles...
...For the audience the play is demanding in a different way...
...Bethel Leslie, as the mother, is splendid in the final scene where, in her drugged imagination, she is once more a young girl dreaming of a life as a nun or a concert pianist...
...Less than the subtlest touch can make these tortured characters seem simply disagreeable, causingO'Neill's epic tragedy to degenerate into unrelieved grimness...
...When O'Neill died in 1953, he left a request that the Journey script not be made public in the United States for 25 years...
...the Tyrones had a son named Eugene who died as a baby...
...Like his real life counterpart, James Tyrone has made a fortune as the celebrated hero of a popular play...
...Billy has a girlfriend, too, one Cor-rinna Stroller (Julie Hagerty...
...The play's 1956 world premiere took place in Stockholm to unanimous raves...
...In the Forward to the 1972 edition of the play, the author, with disarming modesty, poses this question: "Why shouldn't Strindberg and Feydeau get married, or at least live together, and The House of Blue Leaves be their child...
...Yet under Miller's direction, Lemmon is excellent...
...She is blown up forthwith along with two of the nuns...
...Peter Gallagher plays the part of the suffering Edmund exactly as one imagines Eugene O'Neill himself lived it...
...Army base in...
...After all, he reasons, if Laurence Olivier could appear back-to-back in Dance of Death and A Flea in Her Ear, then there must be some affinity between the naturalistic drama of the tormented Swede and the Frenchman's light farce...
...Hilarious...
...Three nuns—eager to watch the Pontiff on TV, drink beer and pray—manage to enter Artie's apartment by climbing through a window...
...Or are we to believe that drugs have a less ravaging effect on one's face and figure than alcohol...
...The father is James, for example, and the elder son is James Jr...
...Artie's son, absent without leave from the Army, wants to assassinate the Pope...
...Jonathan Miller has the intelligence to be faithful to O'Neill's intentions rather than his directions...
...Consequently, he works a near miracle...
...Corrinna thus becomes the deaf comic stereotype who answers the questions she can't hear with absurd non sequiturs...
...No attempt is made to disguise the fact that the Tyrone family in the script is really the playwright's own...
...The third and most acclaimed revival is John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves, directed by Jerry Zaks on the finally reopened Vivian Beaumont Theater's semicircular proscenium...
...The "long day" in August 1912 encompassing the play's action indeed marked a turning point in the author's own life...
...Similarly, when the father learns Edmund is consumptive, he plumps for sending him to a state sanitarium, pleading that the costs of private care would drive him, the rich landowner, to the poorhouse...
...by the end of the year it had been produced in New York despite O'Neill's wishes and the critic's prediction...
...One critic even found it" a j oyful affirmation of life...
...The play certainly does present formidable challenges to the cast, which no doubt explains why it has always attracted the best dramatic actors...
...When Edmund's despair erupts into irrepressible anger, he bitterly yells at Mary, telling her how hard it is to have a "dope fiend for a mother...
...On that day O'Neill's mother, who had apparently overcome her addiction to morphine, once again succumbed to the drug...
...The latter is a transposition: A son of the O'Neill's, whom they had christened Edmund (after Edmond Dan-tcs, the hero of The Count of Monte Crista, performed on stage by James O'Neill over 6,(XX) times) died in infancy...
...Artie believes himself to beaborn songwriter...
...Although as powerfully addicted to penny-pinching as his wife is to morphine, he is not a classic miser in the mold of Moliere's Harpa-gon...
...He could have used the opportunity of portraying a former matinee idol-turned-old ham to do some hamming it up of his own...
...Well, it happens to be the day of Pope Paul VI's visit to New York...
...Deprived of the chance to heave his bomb because he can't get a ticket to Shea stadium, he fobs it off on Corrinna when the Military Police arrive to take him in...
...The other two presentations, Sweet Charity at the Mins-koff and The House of Blue Leaves at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater, have received considerable praise...
...Guare did note that the 1971 Truck and Warehouse Theater production of his would-be hybrid struck some as being "cruel or unfeeling...
...His face and body have grown more expressive of the Irish bottle than of Dumas pere's noble Frenchman...
...Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, in a generally laudatory review of the text the week of the Stockholm premiere, noted that some parts seemed "prolix and repetitious...
...One admiring local critic, carried away by his esteem for Stockholm's Royal Theater Company as well as for the Swedish capital's Strindberg-weaned audience, declared it "unlikely that one will ever see Long Day's Journey into Night on any other stage because it is so demanding on the actors and spectators...
...Billy, quick to forgive, calls a general he knows in the Pentagon to obtain this terrorist murderer's release from prison...
...By my lights, however—and criticism, of course, remains an expression of reasoned yet personal opinion—what British director Jonathan Miller has done with Journey represents not merely the best effort among the trio but the outstanding achievement of the 1985-86 season: He has converted our intellectual, psychological and sociological interest in O'Neill's four-and-a-half-hour work into three hours of dramatic fascination...
...The poetically invoked house of the title is actually a lunatic asylum...
...Kevin Spacey is also superb as Jamie...
Vol. 69 • May 1986 • No. 8
