02/24/2017
Congrats to the Center Stage team at Midland Center for the Arts on a successful opening weekend with great reviews! Only two more shows left this upcoming Saturday/Sunday. Grab your tickets at www.mcfta.org. Don't miss your chance to experience O'Neill's cornerstone masterpiece of American theatre!
Review and photographs by Janet I. Martineau
For 36 years the marriage of James and Mary Tyrone has been hanging by a mere thread.
And on this night it will implode.
Welcome to the world of Eugene O'Neill semi-autobiographical "Long Day's Journey Into Night" -- set on a single night in 1912, written in 1940, the winner of both Tony and Pulitzer awards, and an absolute bitch to carry off successfully given its small cast and LONG length.
So pardon us if we were at one of the dress rehearsals for the Center Stage version of it at the Midland Center for the Arts, sobbing at intermission (the show runs this Saturday and Sunday and next Saturday and Sunday).
it is THAT good, this production that is all local -- director, cast, outstanding support crew. We were sobbing because once again the intensity of its script and elegance of its language was hitting home...and because, oh my god, these are people we know carrying it off, grandly.
And we are saying this given the fact that in 1996 we saw one of the most definitive productions of it ever at the Stratford Festival in Ontario.
What is causing this family to implode after all these years is that the husband of the wife and their two adult sons thought mom had finally licked her morphine addiction problem...only to realize as the day wears on, at their cheap Connecticut seaside home, she has not.
It becomes the last straw, and the acrimony and anger and frustration long kept under control EXPLODES in a torrent of words amid them still struggling to care for one another.
What we love about Matt Hutchinson's sensitive direction is that many times all four characters are spread across entire width of the stage each by themselves, signaling their distance. And the next minute they're hugging or patting hands.
Mary Tyrone (Ann Russell-Lutenske) is not the only family member with issues. Dad James (Dexter Brigham) drinks too much and is a miserable miser. Oldest son Jamie (Shawn M. Finney) is an alcoholic and pl***oy. And youngest son Edmund (Isaac Wood) also drinks too much and is suffering from tuberculosis.
Sounds like a real downer of a show. But that's the trick in directing it....making the complex characters sympathetic, making the audience care about them, making the show resonate about the human experience.
The words are there in O'Neill's compassionate script, with each character getting a long segment explaining why they are the way they are. But the director and the actors need to bring them to life convincingly.
Glances, body English, timber of the words, stellar diction and projection, little inflections, never rushing the words....it is all there, especially with Russell-Lutenske and Brigham. And watching Russell-Lutenske scene by scene fall deeper into the clutches of her morphine use throughout the day .... which she denies doing.... is goosebumpy.
"Long Day's" is considered a masterpiece of American theater, one that paved the way for more realistic family dramas. And it is rarely, very rarely, done by small community theaters. How thrilling to witness one of those rare such productions.
