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CAEDMON (a 4 record album) TRS 350

EUGENE O’NEILL’S LONG DAY’S JOURNEY

INTO NIGHT with

JAMES NAUGHTON PADDY CROFT

EDGAR LANSBURY/JAY H. FUCHS / STUART DUNCAN / JOSEPH BERUH

present

Directed by

ARVIN BROWN

ROBERT RYAN

STACY REACH

ERALDINE FITZGERALD

EDGAR LANSBURY/ JAY H. FUCHS / STUART DUNCAN / JOSEPH BERUH present

ROBERT RYAN STACY REACH GERALDINE FITZGERALD

EUGENE ONEILL’s LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO

with

JAMES NAUGHTON PADDY CROFT

Directed by ARVIN BROWN

NIGHT

Setting Designed by Elmon Webb & Virginia Dancy Costumes Designed by Whitney Blausen

Lighting Designed by Ronald Wallace Production Stage Manager Gail Bell

CAEDMON TRS 350

(a 4 record album)

SIDE 1 TIMING Act I Scene 1, beginning 23:59

Living room of the Tyrones' summer home, 8:30 A.M. of a day in August, 1912

SIDE 2 Act I Scene 1, conclusion 8:18 Act II Scene 1 15:17

The same, around 12:45 P.M.

SIDE 3 Act II, Scene 2 24:35

The same, about a half hour later

SIDE 4 Act III Scene 1, beginning

The same, around 6:30 that evening

SIDE 5 Act III, Scene 1, conclusion

SIDE 6 Act IV, Scene 1, beginning

The same, around midnight

SIDE 7 Act IV Scene 1, continued

SIDE 8 Act IV Scene 1, conclusion

TIMING 11:38 THE CAST (in order of appearance)

17:00 Mary Tyrone GERALDINE FITZGERALD

James Tyrone ROBERT RYAN 21:03 James Tyrone Jr. STACY REACH

Edmund Tyrone JAMES NAUGHTON 21:55

28:07

Cathleen PADDY CROFT

“A man,” the Bible said with Freudian insight several thousand years before Freud, “shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife.” Unfortunately for O’Neill the man, but fortunately for O’Neill the writer, he never really “left” his parents. An eternal son, forever obsessed with familial relations, particularly those between child and parent, he found his predominant, most fruitful theme at home, a theme that tapped the deepest springs of his talent. The evidence is to be found again and again in his writings, ultimately most clearly, most hauntingly in the posthumously released Long Day's Journey Into Night, one of his two masterpieces (the other being The Iceman Cometh).

The most important single fact of his history is that his birth proved disastrous to his family. Although things were not right with the O’Neills even before Eugene was born, they were far worse afterward. The story of what happened, the quintessential story, is told in Long Day’s Journey, which he ha’s described as his “play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood.” O’Neill was born in 1888, the play is set in 1912, yet its principals—the author himself, his mother, his father, his brother—are still tormented by his birth, by something his birth set in motion.

The mother: 1 was so healthy before Edmund was born . . . But bearing Edmund was th& last straw.

The father:.// was in her long sickness after bringing him into the world that she first— That she first took morphine. Long Day’s Journey is a play the author placed under lock and

seal as soon as he had written it, a play he wanted Kept secret till twenty-five years after his death. In it he revealed his mother as one of the most tortured of drug addicts, a shy, devout soul whose Catholicism served but to deepen her shame and sense of degradation. His father he portrayed as miserly, his brother as a cynical alcoholic, corrupt and corrupting. The play was written, according to the author’s foreword, with “deep pity and understanding and forgiveness.” But his words are refuted by the play itself, an inextricable tangle of love and hostility, of accusation and apology, of compassion and bitterness, of self-pity and self-hatred; the play itself discloses that the wounds inflicted on him by the family relations remained raw and bleeding all his life. Here at last we have the matrix of his tragic outlook on life: he was an emotional hemophiliac whose wounds would never heal. This was a primary source of the anguished protest and pounding force in his plays, as well as the lifelong price he had to pay for his genius.

Several years after his death, Carlotta Monterey O’Neill, his widow, recalled the inception of Long Day’s Journey and his agony while writing it. “We were living in California at the time,” she said. “Whenever Gene was very upset about something or nervous, he would come to my bedroom or call me to his and talk himself out. This night he told me he was going to write a play about his family. It was a thing that haunted him. He was bedevilled into writing it, it was something that came from his very guts, he had to get it out of his system, he had to forgive whatever it was that caused this tragedy between himself and his mother and father.”

Recalling his childhood, Eugene O’Neill once confided to his second wife, Agnes Boulton, that his mother “used to drift around the house like a ghost. I didn’t know what was wrong and kept trying to reach her.”

The central and damning fact in the O’Neill family’s existence was Ella’s addiction, and what made it all the more torture was that each member had a special reason for feeling guilty about it: Ella, obviously, because she had succumbed; Mr. O’Neill because he had chosen the doctor, even if no “quack,” who had prescribed the drug; Jamie because he was directly responsible for his brother Edmund’s fatal illness, a loss that had led the parents to have a third child; Eugene, who seems to have had the worst conscience of all, because his birth had sealed his mother’s fate.

One of the major turning points in his life came when he was about fifteen. At that time, he later told a friend, he began to drink, indicating that he meant the hard stuff in quantity, not a schoolboy’s beer or two. It was also at this time that he, to his parents’ great distress, renounced his Catholic faith. And, significantly enough, all this happened—his taking to drink, his starting his life-long quarrel with God—shortly after he learned about his mother’s addiction and about his role in her tragedy. His state of innocence ended one night in New London, Connecticut, when his mother ran out of the family’s summer place (the nearest thing to a home the O’Neills ever had, also the setting of Long Day’s Journey) and tried to drown herself in the nearby river.

It was right after that, O’Neill says through Edmund in Journey, Papa and Jamie decided they couldn’t hide it from me any more. Jamie told me. I called him a liar! I tried to punch him in the nose. But I knew he wasn’t lying. (His voice trembles, his eyes begin to fill with tears.) God, it made everything in life seem rotten!

Before he found in writing plays an outlet for his inner tumult, O’Neill, loaded with guilt feelings and trying to escape himself, went to sea, sank into the depths of Buenos Aires and New York along with, as he has said, “waterfront riffraff, gangsters, down and outers, drifters from the ends of the earth,” and at one point attempted suicide. As a playwright he constantly dealt with characters hounded both by fate, in the form of outer circumstances, and by the furies within. A rebel, an individualist in his personal life, he became an innovator and iconoclast in the theatre.

But in writing Long Day’s Journey Into Night he abstained from all novelty and showy effects, everything that smacked of theatricality, to present his family’s portrait as cleanly and honestly as possible. He wanted to show with the utmost clarity the familial forces that had shaped him. There is no story here to speak of. It appears that the playwright son simply took some crucial, revelatory hours from his family’s history and divided them into scenes and acts; his play, a sterling example of the art that conceals art, gives an impression of being the raw, unadulterated stuff of life itself.

Formally, the play has only five characters, the Tyrones and a servant girl who occupies a peripheral spot; but there is an unseen presence here looming over all and constituting in effect a sixth member of the household: the Past. It is invoked so often it becomes almost tangible. Every one of the family is haunted by what has gone before, by vain regrets for what might have been. When Tyrone reproaches his wife for raking up old grievances and urges her to forget the past, she replies: How can I? The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us.

Set on a single day in August, 1912, and ranging from morning till about midnight, Long Day’s Journey traces the impact on the family of two developments: first, Mary Tyrone, recently back from being cured of her addiction, falls again, and second, Edmund learns that he has con¬ sumption and must enter a sanatorium (just as O’Neill was obliged to do in 1912).Edmund’s ill- ness leads to a bitter showdown with his father, for Tyrone wants him to enter a state farm that largely accommodates charity case’s (in life it was the state institution at Shelton, Connecticut). After his son assails him in the most scathing terms, Tyrone launches into an account of his miserable childhood, and ends: (With grim humor) It was in those days I learned to be a miser. A dollar was worth so much then.

Here in the son’s outburst and the father’s reply, one can see defined O’Neill’s central problem with Long Day’s Journey; despite his foreword about writing the play with “deep pity and under¬ standing and forgiveness,” what he actually wrote was at once an indictment and a defense of his family. The need to justify himself and his dark outlook on life drove him to picture his parents and brother in all their frailties and offenses, but at the same time he was declaring that they were not to blame, that they couldn’t help themselves. In a passage that more or less sums up his view, he has the mother say: 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.

Throughout the play the shadows continue to darken around the Tyrones; despite the love among them, they cannot help tormenting one another. At the end Edmund wonders whether he will die shortly of consumption, while his mother, deep in morphine, has retreated far into the past and imagines that she is still a convent schoolgirl. However, life wrote a more positive epilogue to the play. As everyone knows, the real-life counterpart of Edmund Tyrone became America’s outstanding playwright. Moreover, several years after the time of Journey, Ella O’Neill finally over¬ came her “curse” through a stay in a convent; she apparently felt that undergoing a cure in its hallowed confines would be like a commitment to her faith, a pact with God. Her convent stay marked the end, after more than a quarter-century, of her suffering the tortures of the damned.

—Louis Sheaffer

Louis Sheaffer is the author of O’Neill, Son and Playwright, which won the George Freedley Award of the Theater Library Association as the best theatre book of its year. For his work on O’Neill he has been awarded Guggenheim Fellowships, grants by the American Council of Learned Societies, and a grant by the NaLionai Endowment for the Humanities. Mr. Sheaffer is presently working on O’Neill, Son and Artist, the second and concluding volume of his biography.

Copyright © 1971 Caedmon Records, Inc. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-752570 Cover design by Charles Churchward

On the cover: Photograph of Eugene O’Neill. Copyright 1955 by Carlotta Monterey O’Neill. Reproduced by permission of Yale University Press from Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill.

WARNING: It is expressly forbidden to copy or reproduce this recording or any portion thereof in any manner or form, whether for profit, amateur, institutional, or educational use. Permission for broadcast, telecast or public per- -~ P«r««U inn.flwan.lB M V inniB nrintariin ---

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With JAMES NAUGHTON PADDY CROFT

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