Has anyone seen “Long Day’s Journey into Night” with Elizabeth Marvel et al.?

This somehow flew under the radar for me and am curious, certainly love her:

https://longdaysoffbroadway.com/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIibL12JC59QIV3jizAB0AYwHeEAAYASAAEgJlJvD_BwE

So intersted to see this and how they managed to cut the play down to 100 minutes

Also curious about the cut and how O'Hara made the play inspired by events of 2020? Waiting to hear if this production is as misbegotten as it sounds or surprisingly inspired.

SPOILERS THROUGHOUT





I saw this evening's performance (second preview, I think). Even apart from the normal weaknesses of an early preview, I found it quite bad.

The update to August 2020 is extremely unconvincing. The jump forward more than 100 years from the original setting leads to such absurdities as a 21st-century New Yorker going on about visiting a whorehouse where one of the prostitutes plays piano in the parlor. Similarly (if my math is right), in this production Mary Tyrone would have been born in the mid to late 1960s, and yet she notes how -- in what would have been the late 1970s or early 1980s -- actors were rather poorly thought of in society. In fact, Mary's whole deeply Catholic character, nostalgic for a more innocent, spiritual girlhood in a convent, becomes nonsensical in this new context.

I can think of almost nothing positive to say about this production, but it did at least make me realize how successfully, and with what particularity, O'Neill recreated the concerns and patterns of speech of one family on a summer day in 1912 -- the dialog seldom rings even remotely true when placed in 2020. And, at around 2 hours, the show feels twice as long. (Which I guess could be intentional, given the title, but I doubt it.)

Next, for the sake of "relevancy," add in Covid, and you get, along with a lot of other foolishness, what to me was by far the worst moment of the production. When the tubercular Edmund starts hacking away, his father screams, "Stop coughing!" and leaps terrified from his seat to the far side of the stage. And Edmund then puts on a mask. This struck me as idiotic in itself and even more ridiculous given that -- in the depths of the pandemic -- the father and both sons have been out barhopping (on Long Island, rather than in Connecticut, it seemed to me, given the copy of Newsday that appears at one point).

Other bad, ham-fisted, and/or pointless aspects of this production:

- we see Mary actually shooting up (4 separate times, if I recall)

- we get quaintly psychedelic projections to indicate that Mary is high

- we also get one set of projections that reminded me a lot of the Haunted House ride at Disneyland (to be fair, these actually looked pretty attractive)

- the times of day are projected (not too large or obtrusively); the first one says something like, "8:30 a.m." and the last very helpfully says, "Night."

To end on a more positive note:

- Early on, Elizabeth Marvel plays Mary convincingly as warm and pleasantly teasing (rather than taking the bitchily passive-aggressive Jessica Lange approach). By being so genuinely attractive at the start of the play, she makes more believable her family's sense of loss and disappointment when she turns back to drugs again.

Showtime's first movie musical, "Reefer Madness," is directed by Andy Fickman, and written by Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney, based on their stage success. Christian Campbell, who plays all-American teenager Jimmy Harper, has been with the project since it started onstage in Los Angeles. "We ran for a year-and-a-half," says Campbell. Its Off-Broadway run, at the Variety Arts, was not as long, "because of 9/11." The movie, he states, "is something we've been working on for a long time."

This was the absolute WORST night of theatre I have seen this season and I have spent many brain cells trying to remember the last time I have seen something so truly misguided and awful.

Ato Blankson-Wood delivers the most one note performance that has about 2 unearned flashes of overwrought tension. Elizabeth Marvel is a caricature of a Mary Tyrone devolving into an inexplicable Wicked Witch of the West with a British accent delivery of the final monologue where if I did not pay close attention to the text I would have just heard a constant stream of "I'm MEEELLLLTTTIINNGGG". Bowen's performance is akin to a C+ presentation in an undergrad scene study class.

If I didn't have to work today, I could write a record breaking post on how heavy handed this direction and design is. The summation: NONE OF IT WORKS! Particularly the inexplicable CNN clips of Jake Tapper, Don Lemon and D.T. himself that provide us with a healthy dose of "you don't say" context (we have already seen the masks, the sanitizer, the amazon packages).

A total waste of time and money. Maybe this will play better on audible. Though I can't imagine keeping my eyes open whenever Blankson-Wood opens their mouth.

Achronisms are a convention of present or modern day settings of classics. If we can accept Macbeth or Julius Caesar or Richard III in contemporary dress, can we similarly accept the Tyrones? And if not, why not?

I saw this tonight, and at two hours, it still felt too long. The updates don’t entirely work—if Edmund has COVID—especially early in the pandemic when Trump is still president, why is he not quarantined and instead talking maskless into his families faces? It was weird.



I honestly think—for whatever the merits of this play are—I just don’t enjoy it as a piece of theater, even though the modernization attempt seems like the only real reason to put a show like this up right now.



Elizabeth Marvel was absolutely fantastic however, and thank god for her. She’s the only reason to go, but given her absence in much of the second half of the show, I’m not sure even that is worth it.

I probably liked this more than most of the posters here, but I think this is a great example of why "concept" productions feel trendy and not genuinely important. Obviously there are elements in Long Day's Journey Into Night that are relevant to the "world we live in today" — themes of isolation, mourning, addiction, and illness will stick out immediately to a modern audience watching this play. But by making the production explicitly about Covid and explicitly set in the modern day, you rob the audience of their ability to make those intelligent connections themselves.

I would have loved to have seen this same cast perform the same version of the text, but with a simple and understated production set in the year the play takes place. Lines like "stop coughing" or Mary's protestations of her isolation would feel more powerful if we were able to feel that relevancy ourself instead of having it shoved in our face. Honestly, modern concept directors must just think that audiences are too stupid to remember that theatre happens in the present even when it is set in the past.

Regarding an earlier point about anachronisms in classic plays, I'm bothered by it all the time. Some directors just simply don't care about what the characters are actually (actually actually) saying, which is a shame because theatre is about listening.

Ugh. I hate having so many complaints about this production because honestly I mostly enjoyed it, especially Bill Camp and Elizabeth Marvel. And the play is of course above reproach: this is one of the first genuinely literate productions I've seen since theatre has returned, and it's nice to be back in a space that requires you to really pay attention to the words.

Updated On: 2/1/22 at 10:47 PM