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

[Andre4]

Posted: 1/17/22 at 10:48am

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

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

[TaffyDavenport]

Posted: 1/17/22 at 10:49am

First preview is tomorrow.

[BoringBoredBoard40]

Posted: 1/17/22 at 11:38am

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

[gibsons2]

Posted: 1/18/22 at 11:17pm

I went to see the first preview today. Running time was close to 2 hours. I wasn't familiar with the material, just read a summary. The best part of the play was the acting, there's an astounding talent on the stage. I thought Jason Bowen is not quite right for this kind of play. Not enough bitterness and resentment. I loved Robert O'Hara's direction too. The play has a bit of a slow start, but the second part is gripping and very intense. Glad I went to see it. 

[JoeyEvans1206]

Posted: 1/19/22 at 8:17am

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.

[JBroadway]

Posted: 1/19/22 at 9:34am

2 hours??? Holy crap! Every time I learn something new about this production it makes me equally more excited and more perplexed. I have a love-hate relationship with this play, so I'm VERY curious to see how it plays cut down to 2 only hours. That's a full 1h45m shorter than the most recent Broadway production. 

[Tom-497]

Posted: 1/20/22 at 12:44am

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. 

[RippedMan]

Posted: 1/20/22 at 2:09am

I've not seen this, but to make anything "present day" just seem so... why? Like we literally all just lived this.  Why would we want to revisit? 

[ClaudeMjDevinHenry]

Posted: 1/20/22 at 2:20am

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."

[LarryD2]

Posted: 1/26/22 at 9:06am

A range of critical opinion on this production, though there seems to be consistent praise for Marvel's performance.

New York Times (Jesse Green), critics' pick: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/25/theater/long-days-journey-into-night-review.html

Vulture (Helen Shaw): https://www.vulture.com/2022/01/theater-review-long-days-journey-into-night-elizabeth-marvel.html

Time Out New York (Adam Feldman), 3/5 stars: https://www.timeout.com/newyork/theater/long-days-journey-into-night-revival-review-off-broadway-elizabeth-marvel

Theatermania (Pete Hempstead): https://www.theatermania.com/off-broadway/reviews/review-audible-long-days-journey-into-night_93269.html

Exeunt NYC (Cameron Kelsall): http://exeuntnyc.com/reviews/review-long-days-journey-into-night-at-the-minetta-lane-theatre/

Theatrely (Joey Sims): https://www.theatrely.com/post/a-shorter-days-journey-into-night-but-with-no-less-despair-review

New York Stage Review (David Finkle and Frank Scheck), both 2/5 stars:

http://nystagereview.com/2022/01/25/long-days-journey-into-night-eugene-oneills-classic-drastically-declassified/

http://nystagereview.com/2022/01/25/long-days-journey-into-night-a-tragedy-for-all-the-wrong-reasons/

 

[ASOOS04]

Posted: 1/26/22 at 10:31am

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. 

[ErmengardeStopSniveling]

Posted: 1/26/22 at 11:15am

That's a money review from Jesse G. The rest of the critics won't make much of a dent.

[henrikegerman]

Posted: 1/26/22 at 12:15pm

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?

[ErmengardeStopSniveling]

Posted: 1/26/22 at 1:13pm

Yeah, I have great respect for the O'Neill estate for allowing this in a low-stakes environment off-Broadway. As we've seen with the recent WEST SIDE STORY and MACBETH films, reinvention is often helpful to help keep great works relevant...and as we saw in 2016, the play still packs a punch.

Updated On: 1/26/22 at 01:13 PM

[BroadwayGirl107]

Posted: 1/27/22 at 10:37pm

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. 

[GlindatheGood22]

Posted: 1/29/22 at 12:58pm

I bought a ticket for next weekend on the strength of Jesse Green's review. I love the play, so hopefully that alone makes it worth it...

[Synecdoche2]

Posted: 2/1/22 at 10:47pm

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

[JBroadway]

Posted: 2/1/22 at 11:47pm

I agree with a lot of Synecdoche's post, except that I'm not much of a fan of the play itself. 

I thought this was a really strong production, except for the half-assed concepts. The concepts didn't ruin the production for me, but they sure as hell didn't add as much as they should have.

I, for one, would NOT label this play "above reproach." I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it, and I think the cutting of the text was an improvement - mostly, anyway. You do lose a little bit of that sense of immersion, and you can tell that the play wasn't paced for 2 hours, so the short runtime occasionally feels like it's fighting against the structure of the play. 

However, I thought the drama was a lot more potent. The melodramatic bombast and indulgent repetitiveness of O'Neil's original text are hardly visible in this production, and many of the more unintentionally comical moments are either cut, or well-directed.

It was really the 1st time that I found myself struck by the play's central themes. While watching it, I found myself ruminating on the pain, despair, and betrayal that comes with the cycle of addiction. That sense of denial, to stave off the sinking disappointment of repeating the past. These are obviously present in O'Neil's original text, but I've always been too distracted by the schlocky melodrama to care. 

While I've seen some better performances in these roles, this is probably the most cohesively strong cast of the play I've seen. In all the other productions I've seen, I thought there were major weak links.

I really disagree with the posters who disliked Blankson-Wood performance. It's an understated performance, sure, and I did think he was a little wooden in the 1st scene - but once the drama kicked into gear, I thought he was completely present and dropped in, and gave probably the most heartbreaking renditions of the role I've seen to date. 

I was really worried about Elizabeth Marvel, because I'd seen her onstage twice before (in King Lear & Julius Caesar) and I thought she grossly overacted in both performances. And Mary Tyrone is a role that's extremely easy to overact. And yet, I thought her performance was fantastic, and I don't think she overacted at all. Probably my 2nd favorite Mary Tyrone, after Laurie Metcalf.

Bill Camp was phenomenal as always, and Jason Bowen was quite strong too.