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Summary: Depressive
Review: It's a gloom play with conversations full of anger, rage and sarcasm, grief and sorrow. It's the story of a family whose members have lost every connections between each other, four characters that desperately seek a last vestige of love to be confronted only with disappointment in the end. It's an autobiographical play, too. I read the book late at night, sometime after midnight had passed, along with a couple of cigarettes and some wine. And it really got me. The feeling of being detached from everything else, to be utterly alone with yourself and the thoughts of your mind, it crept more and more on me with every page I turned. These are genuine wounds that bloom before our eyes like the flowers of torment and sometimes I meant to even hear the echo of the cries of the hurt when my heart beat faster. But if one doesn't want to open up to the sinister and absolutely melancholic atmosphere of the book I can well understand that...
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Summary: O'Neil highlights the basics human nature.
Review: It's a wonderfully sad story about the struggles of a family's struggles. In each of the characters you can feel a hint of yourself, and you feel the true pain of each of them. O'Neill's writing makes you feel like you are really there, which might might not be the place that you want to be. It's extremely sad and depressing, but abolutely wonderful.
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Summary: pathetic, miserable, and beautiful
Review: Long Day's Journey into Night draws a crystal clear picture of what happens when people who love each other try to fix people rather than problems, or when they perceive each other as doing so. Everyone has problems, but the Tyrones' problems, drink, morphine, tuberculosis, are especially difficult. Everyone is afraid to fix them because in fixing them they fear to be blamed for them. They pass blame like a hot potato, and they love each other dearly, and they're miserable. They can't stop hurting each other. Like the People's Front of Judea from Monty Python's LIFE OF BRIAN, they sit around and talk about problems, but the problem never goes away. What the world needs is not the absence of problems but the absence of judgment. Better to light a candle than curse the darkness. The Tyrones continue to curse the darkness throughout the play. The entire play does nothing but curse darkness. It's pitiful. Extremely emotional and well-written.
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Summary: O'Neill at his best
Review: Long Day's Journey into Night is the play in which Eugene O'Neill, as he says in the dedication, had to "face [his] dead at last" by writing about the tragic dysfunctions of James, Mary, Jamie, and Edmund Tyrone, characters based respectively on O'Neill's father, mother, and brother, and O'Neill himself. It is set entirely at the O'Neill residence and takes place over the course of the day on which the family doctor confirms that 23 year-old Edmund has tuberculosis and must go to a sanatorium. There is relatively little action in the play aside from that; most of the dialogue relates to the other members of the Tyrone family facing the various problems that haunt them every day of their lives: Mary is addicted to morphine; Jamie is an alcoholic and at 33 seems unlikely to amount to anything; and James also has an alcohol problem but more importantly is still bitter about his childhood, which was cut short when he was obliged to go to work at a machine shop at the age of 10 because of the departure of his father. The whole Tyrone family is in a state of despair, and it's hard to think of an author better at capturing despair than O'Neill (in no small part, one suspects, because he came of age in the sort of environment depicted in this play). O'Neill was certainly bitter about his past, but, importantly, he doesn't lose perspective. Although the way the Tyrones treat each other ranges from neutral to downright cruel, O'Neill does a splendid job of balancing this against the fact that they all love each other deeply and feel very unnerved whenever they realize that they're treating each other unfairly. Despite all the problems he faced as a young adult, O'Neill always viewed his family with a good deal of love and reverence, and that comes through in the play. As Mary puts it, "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." The tragedy of Long Day's Journey into Night lies in the fact that these great individuals have lost their true selves due to the various demons that haunt their lives. Some of O'Neill's works could reasonably be criticized for featuring relatively one-dimensional characters and formulaic plots. In the case of Long Day's Journey, though, because O'Neill was able to rely on his own experiences, all four main characters are exceptionally deep and balanced, and the plot is distinctly unpredictable. Though I've very much enjoyed all the O'Neill plays I've read, it seems that in Long Day's Journey he finally put together all his talents and produced his crowning achievement.
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Summary: This was my introduction to O'Neil
Review: Love it. What else can I say. The play almost reads as a novel. A course all of the characters are tragic, which makes for interesting college studies.
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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.
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Summary: One of the treasures of 20th century American drama.
Review: No other play I can think of has a more profound and emotional impact upon its readers. What makes it so effective, I think, is that O' Neill introduces us to four equally intelligent, perceptive, and agonized characters who trade desperate verbal stabs like swordsmen without shields.
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Summary: Spare me the singing cats
Review: O'Neil is an American Master and Long Day's Journey is powerful by its words alone. That this O'Neil autobiographical play has been dimissed in favor of prancing, carpet bearing, feline people amazes me.
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Summary: A Young Man's Purification through family love
Review: Reading this play was fun. O'Neill's style of dialogue and stream of consciousness has even made it easier to be followed. The Tyrone's are a middle class family and they have all been the scapegoats of James Tyrone. While he had a childhood with poverty , he cannot get rid of the past ghosts . Therefore , miser as he is , he gives the hell to the whole Tyrone family. Yet, one must think, upto which point should we blame our parents for our own failures? That is what Eugene O'Neill has done in this book. He has finally managed to forgive both his family and himself. The Tyrones have once more become the origin of re-birth of the playwright. The invisible love attachments of the family members in this play has deeply affected me.
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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
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