Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962)
Posted on 10 April 2008 by Gary Karbon
Eugene O'Neill was arguably one of the greatest American playwrights of the 1920-1950 era.
Long Day's Journey Into Night is one of his more mature works and in my judgment has already earned its place as one of the handful of great American dramas written within the last hundred years.
(The others that immediately come to mind are Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams.)
LDJIN is the tragedy of Tyrone family – mom (Mary), dad (James), and two grown up boys (Edmund and Jamie). Four flawed characters with crippling shortcomings.
An angry penny-pinching father who is haunted by the memories of his poverty-stricken childhood.
A morphine-addict mother who in the past tried to become a nun, and then a pianist.
An elder brother who is torn apart by feelings of unworthiness and who spends all his (or dad's?) money on alcohol and prostitutes.
A younger brother who is suffering from "consumption" (tuberculosis) but cannot get a decent treatment because of his dad's tight-fisted ways and his mom's refusal to acknowledge the fact.
There is also the ghost of a yet another brother who died young. Mom feels he died because of her neglect.
The story takes place back in 1912, at the Tyrone residence but it could easily have taken place even today, in any average American household since it's a story of broken dreams and recriminations and an unending family feud over things that can never be mended by trying to decide who is right and who is wrong. That never works. It only gets worse.
The play is also significant from a purely technical point of view.
If as a writer you'd like to learn how to write "beats" in a fast moving dialog, probably this is as good as any dramatic work to study.
A "beat," the way I understand it, is anything in a dramatic narrative that changes the "overall emotional value" of an exchange.
For example, when a character enters a restaurant and asks the owner "what's up?" if the answer is "not much," there is no emotional shift there. It's still the same beat.
But imagine the answer to the same question is an aggressive "How many times I've told you not to come here you #@@!%$#"... then we certainly have jumped to a new beat.
If each beat were an electric charge, O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night would be a roaring river of alternating current.
There are so many twists and turns of emotional energy that one cannot even count.
And the sparks flying are not mere pyrotechnics either since they are commensurate with the guilt-ridden and quick-to-the-trigger personalities of all the main characters (perhaps with the exception of younger brother Edmund).
Tyrone family is one that desperately seeks Love but maims it in the process. Sounds familiar?
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