Rating: 
Summary: The light at the end of the tunnel...
Review: ...does not exist. That seems to be the message of this dark, depressing -- and yet, enthralling and mysteriously beautiful drama. As bleak as it is, its essential humanity has rendered an immortal classic. O'Neill, of course, was not just the first major figure in American drama: he practically made it, giving it a legitimacy and relevancy for the first time. As with many subsequent American plays -- think of Death of a Salesman or most of Tennessee William's better-known plays -- it centers on a family. In this particular case, the family happens to be a close reflection of O'Neill's own; the character of Edmund is his alter ego. In fact, the play was so autobiographical that O'Neill would not have it performed until after his death. It recounts a day in the life of the family by offering interactions between every possible combination of the four members of the family. The play is stunning and stark in its brutal depiction of the Tyrone family, a series of frightfully honest vignettes that destroys the hallowed ideal image of the close, contented American family. All members of the Tyrone family have their demons and their reasons for the inhumanity that they show toward each other. O'Neill does not judge them: he merely presents them as they are, without pretense or adornment. Hardly even a glimmer of light appears in the play, and the ending comes and goes without leaving even a single shred of hope. With subject matter like this, why, then, has the play remained popular for half a century, and why does it retain its power? For one thing, its sheer, unabated emotion touches a deep, almost primal, human chord. It speaks to us in the brutally honest way that a television sitcom never could. Most people probably see more of themselves in the Tyrone than they would like to admit, even to themselves. Their quarrels are probably not as striking and unfamiliar as most people would like to think. The play touches the heart even as it touches the soul, leaving the reader (or the viewer) drenched in an overwhelming sea of emotion at play's end. It is a stunning play that cuts straight to the core of a large part of the darker side of the American experience. Unlike many great plays, it also reads very well and very smoothly on the page. Anyone interested in classic drama or American literature will find a dark goldmine here.
Rating:
Summary: Superb Theatre
Review: As professor Harold Bloom asserts in his excellent forward: "Eugene O'Neill is single handidly responsible for creating a vibrant and important American Theatre". LONG DAY'S JOURNEY caps a brilliant artistic life with an autobiographical work that is difficult, complex, tragic, heartbreaking and filled with stunning poetry. O'Neill's greatest gift was, arguably, his uncanny knack for spinning a poetic phrase. In a bold stroke, he populates the family Tyrone with a menagerie of fragile beings who find strength in language and discourse. It is little wonder that O'Neill demanded that LONG DAY's remain unproduced until after his death. He his boldly facing every personal and familial demon. With crashing honesty and a touch of jet-black humor, he leaves no stone uncovered as he weaves a horrifying tale of the ultimate dysfunctional family. LONG DAY'S JOURNEY into night is not for the weak of back or the faint of heart. It is depressing to be sure. But among the rubble of these tortured lives, O'Neill finds the spiritual strength in these flawed and fallen angels and creates true linguistic magic. A certain must own for any theatre fan or practitoner. Simply suberb theatre.
Rating:
Summary: An Aching Cry From the Heart
Review: Before dysfunctional families became talk show circus acts, they were used as morality tales to warn us about the wages of sin. When that dysfunctional family is a playwright's own, and when that playwright is as gifted as Eugene O'Neill, we get a work of genius that makes other morality plays look like cartoons.
Firstly, a warning: this is an utterly depressing work. It doesn't contain anything upbeat. The characters start at bleak and chart a passage to despairing. If you are the kind of person who can't stand angst, then this play is not for you. Long Day's Journey works on countless levels and addresses themes of surpassing worth, but pretty it is not. I can understand why some people would hate it. What I don't understand is why they would read it in the first place.
Now for the good stuff. This is a play that addresses sins like vanity, pride and self-deceit, but in a way that does not preach, beat its breast, or feel contrived. How characters of such obvious intelligence come to such a pass is what fascinates. Through the course of the play, we come to see that talent, brains and social standing are insufficient to life's sustenance; the vital ingredient is sternness of character, and each of the protagonists in Long Day's Journey suffer from failings of character to a greater or lesser degree.
The title is a poetic metaphor that echoes the course of the family's lives. Substitute 'suffering' for 'day' and 'hell' for 'night' and you will get a clear picture of the play's progression. It observes not only the classical unities of time, action and place, but strives for the Shakespearean in its elocution. O'Neill's language is magnificent--he achieves a spare eloquence that meets the tenets of open verse. This re-infusion of poetry back into the playwright's craft is not the least of his achievements.
Many existential plays achieve their thematic objectives by indulging in theatricality. Even good plays like "Death of a Salesman" or "A Streetcar Named Desire" suffer from a sense of artifice. But "Long Day's Journey" feels genuine to its core. This is not a product of the imagination, but a story from a master storyteller who is baring his own soul. These are his own demons on display and the pain we feel stems from the fact that two of those demons are his mother and his father.
I don't know what it took for him to write this work. This is more a confession than a catharsis and one suspects that O'Neill derived no comfort or spiritual release from giving us this gift. We are the sole beneficiaries of his largesse, and this knowledge imparts a special sense of poignancy to the sympathy we already feel for its bent and wounded incumbents.
Rating:
Summary: excellent edition of classic play
Review: Bloom's introduction frames this American masterpiece with precision and insight. In my opinion, O'Neill's best play, Long Day's Journey Into Night is better read than performed as the nuance and poetry of his stage direction and descriptions of gestures are what make this play extraordinary. A dark and depressing book, it accurately depicts the ravages of addiction and its impact on the family.
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Summary: Timeless themes revolving around the dysfunctional Tyrones!
Review: I haven't actually read a play since college and I picked this up because I am going to see the Broadway production of "Long Day's Journey Into Night", starring Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Dennhey,and I always find that I appreciate shows like that more if I am familiar with the play itself. It was an enjoyable genre change for me! What makes this play particularly interesting is the autobiographical nature of the plot (so disturbingly autobiographical, in fact, that O'Neill would not allow its publication and production until after his death!). O'Neill dedicated the play to his wife, basically stating that writing this was his way of coming to grips with his own past and the "4 haunted Tryrones" of his life. I imagine that when this first appeared in the theaters in the 1950s, it struck a sensitive and somewhat controversial chord amongst the public since issues such as drug addiction and alcoholism were not common topics in popular entertainment at the time. I also enjoyed all the literary references to the likes of Shakespeare, Baudelaire and Swineburne (and so forth!). It made me want to acquaint myself with such literary talents once again! This is another example of a piece of literature that reaches across the decades with timeless themes such as familial love, loyalty, jealousy, guilt and betrayal, as well as depression, addiction and greed. While I pitied and even despised some of the qualities I saw in these characters, I couldn't help empathizing with Mary's nervous addiction as well as James' feeling of disappointment in his past failures. In other words, these characters are all so human, that I couldn't help being drawn into the realistic pathos of their lives.
Rating:
Summary: Depresessing, Enthralling...Beautiful.
Review: If one needs the ultimate example of a classic American play, I would have to say the play about the most un-classic, untypical (or is it?) American family...Eugene O'Neill's "Long Days Journey Into Night." Set in the chlostrophobic New England summer house of the Tyrone's, and spanning over the course of one day, the Tyrone family--the stingy, retired actor James, the lonely opium addicted wife Mary, drunken Jamie, and sensitive, ill Edmund--avoids, denys, confronts and retreats from all their demons, until it is finally night, and they no longer can. Depressing, huh? Well, of course it is...but within it is something so powerful, so strangely beautiful, that the reader (or viewer) is enthralled. One sees seemingly strong James, ashamed of himself for selling out his acting abilities for financial security. Mary, lonely from James' years of touring, has turned to an opium addiction that she can not seem to confront. Jamie, from hate of his father's stinginess and his own self-blame, loses himself in alcohol and whores. And sweet, artistic, tubulcular Edmund (O'Neill's alter ego) plays witness in the deteration of his family's web of pain, denial and lies. All they want is for morning to come, another day to let the fog come in around them so they can forget again. In a way, isn't that what we all want to do sometimes? Just forget what's going on around us, even for a while. I would recommend this play as absolutly essential to read--for the fan of the theatre, literature, or a layman. Anyone can relate to the pure, raw emotion and guilt O'Neill conveys. Buy it now, you'll thank me later.
Rating: 
Summary: 1 great quote and that's all there is
Review: Mary says: "None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever."
What a brilliant aphorism. And it's just a shame that the entirety of the rest of the play is pure unadulterated banality. Frankly, I'm amazed at all the positive reviews. Dr. Big Balls hates it because the characters are so argumentative. Which is a good reason to hate it but not the best reason. I hate it because the characters are cartoon bores who insisted on boring me to tears with all of that painfully boring dialog. Have I mentioned that it's boring?. And how about that ludicrous shtick where Mary falls into a dope-fiend trance at the drop of a hat. I suppose it works as unintentional comedy. But I don't think that's what Eugene had in mind.
Rating:
Summary: Pain of Humanity: Perhaps the Best 20th Century Drama
Review: The great bulk of Eugene O'Neill's work was done between about 1914 and 1933, a period which saw him win Pulitzer Prizes for Beyond The Horizon, Anna Christie, and Strange Interlude as well as create The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, Desire Under the Elms, The Great God Brown, and Mourning Becomes Electra. But around 1933 O'Neill--who struggled against physical ailments, alcoholism, and a host of personal demons--fell silent. Although O'Neill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936, he would remain silent for some ten years, leaving most to believe he had written himself out, was burned out, that his career was over. But in spite of tremendous personal issues, O'Neill continued to write in private, and during this period he would generate a string of powerful plays, many of which would not be released for performance until after his death in 1953. The legendary Long Day's Journey Into Night, closely based on his own family life, was written in the early 1940s. It was first performed in 1956--some three years after his death--at which time it too won the Pulitzer Prize. The play presents the story of the Tyrone family. James Tyrone is a famous stage actor, now aging; his wife Mary is a delicately beautiful but sadly worn woman named Mary. Their two sons are studies in contrast: Jamie, in his late 30s, is wild--fond of wine, women, and song--and seen as a bad influence on younger Edmund, who is physically frail but intellectually sharp. The action takes place at their summer home, and begins in the morning; the family seems happy enough--but clearly there is something we do not know, something working under the surface that gives an unnatural quality to their interaction. Over the four acts and next four hours the morning passes into afternoon, the afternoon into night. And we will learn the truth: the history of money grubbing, the alcoholism, the drugs, the personal failures, the seemingly endless cycle of self-defeating, self-destructive behavior in which the four are locked beyond hope of redemption. And as it progresses the play gathers itself into an almost unendurable scream of agony, a scream of truly cosmic proportions. Why, you might ask, would someone wish to read--much less sit through--such a play? A work so painful that it often becomes difficult to continue reading or to look at the stage? I myself asked this question when I first encountered it. Over the years I have done quite a bit of theatre. In the early 1980s I played the role of Edmund; in the late 1990s I played the role of Jamie. On both occasions I found the play horrifically painful to perform. On both occasions I wondered if such a painful play could find an audience in small-town America. On both occasions Long Day's Journey Into Night sold out and not a person left the theatre before each performance ended. Because, I think, the play taps into something that is universal but which is extremely difficult to express in simple terms. As O'Neill might say himself, it has a touch of the poet--but of a failed poet. Somehow, in some unique way, it speaks to the self-knowledge we all have of the hidden dreams that never came true, the little accommodations, the big and small failures that have stung us and changed us and over time made us--for better or worse--the beings that we are. It has humanity. It makes us see our own humanity. It makes us acknowledge the humanity of those around us. Many, myself among them, regard this as O'Neill's finest play--and considering the great power that many of his works have, that is saying a great deal. It is also in some respects one of his most accessible plays: shorn of the experimentalism to which O'Neill was frequently drawn and beautifully simple, beautifully direct, even those unaccustomed to reading playscripts will find it a rapid and powerful read. For this reason it is really the only O'Neill script I recommend to casual readers. And I recommend it very, very strongly indeed. A great drama, both on the page and on the stage. GFT, Amazon Reviewer
Rating:
Summary: Masterpiece
Review: There are many themes in this story - drug addiction, alcoholism, depression, egoism, and blame. What makes the play so powerful is its ability to show us a family with horrible problems and horrible habits, but still make that family likeable. We still hope for them. A heroin-addicted mother torments herself with the past. Her egomaniac husband, a washed-up actor, postures and struts to cover his feelings of responsibility. Their sons battle depression and alcoholism, and neither ever feel good about themselves. A cycle of blame makes its way continually through the house, a run-down affair often shrouded in fog. This fantastic (if depressing) play is a meaty, moody work that is almost as good to read as it is to watch.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful But Joyless to Me
Review: This is Eugene O'Neill's fictionalized autobiography. It is technically flawless and incredibly engaging, with tremendous depth to the characters. It is also bleak, depressing, and very dark. It has many parallels to the film "Ordinary People" which is another wonderful done masterpiece of a story, with a tremendous dose of despair thrown in. Except, in "Ordinary People" there are faint glimmers of hope. Some can find glimpses of joy in "Long Day's Journey into Night" but I could not.
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