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Mary Tyrone in Eugene
O’Neill’s Long Day's Journey into Night is one of three roles I
longed to play until witnessing Vanessa Redgrave embody the part in the
current revival at the Plymouth Theatre on Broadway. I had of course
seen Katharine Hepburn's film rendition of Mary opposite Ralph
Richardson (produced in 1962); and there have been other Marys to view
on video as in the Laurence Olivier and the Jack Lemon versions of the
play; plus there is a good production by the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation. None of these Marys ever dampened my desire to interpret
the role. But now it can be said that Vanessa Redgrave has taken
possession of Mary Tyrone, in the way that Marlon Brando took possession
of Stanley Kowalski, and one is tempted to leave the role to her, even
if she did not originate it. That honor went to Florence Eldridge in
1957 as the first Mary, a performance unknown to me and unavailable to
posterity.
I recently heard R&B
singer Smokey Robinson quip that his concert audiences think they’re
coming to see him but in fact he goes on stage to see them. It is
similar to the situation of the audience at Long Day’s Journey
who likely think they’re coming to see Vanessa Redgrave but in truth
Vanessa Redgrave is bringing Mary Tyrone to them.
Vanessa Redgrave’s
performance enables us to understand, at last, that Mary Tyrone occupies
the center of the play. It is her play and it is her morphine addiction
that makes the journey long from breakfast to midnight. The play opens
on the morning after Mary has suffered a relapse, although the members
of her family (husband James Tyrone and sons Jamie and Edmund) are not
yet aware of her fall from abstinence, except that elder son Jamie, the
realist and cynic, is suspicious. Once Mary’s relapse becomes apparent,
their reactions to her as “hophead” shape the drama, including their
reactions to each other’s reactions to her. Mary as betraying and loving
mother and wife ignites the emotional core of the play, which is pain:
the pain of disappointment, disillusion, abandonment and despair.
O’Neill inscribed the
play as “written in tears and blood” and somewhere I read that according
to his wife Carlotta, when writing the play O’Neill would come out from
his study bleeding through his pores. As critic John Gassner said: “Much
of his work seemed wrung from him rather than contrived or calculated,”
and it is this same wringing that ideally we want to feel from the
actors. At the high-drama moments, we do feel this in the acting of
Vanessa Redgrave and the effect is excruciating to experience.
The script informs us
through husband Tyrone that Mary had been a beautiful and sensual young
woman. At 54 she remains appealing even with stark white hair, a pallid
complexion, and arthritic hands. The opening line of the play is
Tyrone’s: “You’re a fine armful now, Mary,” and here the Broadway
production honestly portrays the physical attraction between Tyrone and
Mary. (In other productions James and Mary relate more like pals than
lovers.) With pleasure at the top of the show, Brian Dennehy as Tyrone
holds, pets, kisses and otherwise encircles Vanessa Redgrave and she
receives him not without ardor. Since Dennehy’s gestures are sexually
styled we are better able, later on, to appreciate the extent of
Tyrone’s suffering. He is losing not just his wife to morphine and not
just the woman he loves but also his sexual partner. When Mary shoots
up, she goes to the spare room and there she stays the night, forsaking
her bedmate.
Harold Clurman, who
directed Long Day’s Journey in Tokyo in 1965 with an all American
cast, liked to tell the story of a drama critic complaining that
O’Neill had been obsessed with sex, to which Harold replied that he
could think of perhaps three things in life worth being obsessed about
and sex was surely one of them. The director of the current production,
Robert Falls, has not shied away from exciting the sexual bond between
Tyrone and Mary.
But sexuality is only
one side of O’Neill. What one wants to see enacted in an O’Neill play is
the split within the character: the dilemma. Mary Tyrone is an exciting
woman and diffident girl divided within her self. She wanted to become a
concert pianist or a nun; instead she married a matinee idol. Vanessa
Redgrave delivers the division. When she is agitated beyond her capacity
for calm and then hears Edmund’s footsteps on the stairs, she picks up a
book, retires to a chair and assumes a picture of serenity. She hides
and she exposes. At the end of the first act, alone on stage, she drums
her arthritic hands on the tabletop: it is her neurosis leaking out and
it is as if she were playing the piano. She attacks and she withdraws.
She rails at her husband for his miserliness:
Oh
I’m so sick and tired of pretending this is a home! You won’t help me!
You won’t put yourself out the least bit! You don’t know how to act in a
home! . . . You should have remained a bachelor and lived in second-rate
hotels and entertained your friends in barrooms.
And she hits him but her fists flail
rather than land. She smacks Jamie’s face for impertinence and collapses
under the gesture. She blames her husband, she blames her sons, and she
retracts the blame. Tightening her body, she wants them gone; extending
her body, she wants them with her. Fundamentally Mary Tyrone is divided
between a desire to leave the world (enter the convent, enter morphine)
and a desire to have an impact upon the world (make music, make a home).
Vanessa/Mary teeters in between, split.
It’s a treat for the spectator that
Mary’s inner conflict plays upon Vanessa Redgrave’s face. Her sculptural
form was meant for the stage. Her visage is so open, the planes of her
countenance so angled, that Mary’s behavior and expressions travel to
the rear of the mezzanine. The audience appreciates Ms. Redgrave’s
artistry. When she emerges at the curtain call the applause swells and
soars. The sorrow of Mary Tyrone in the hands of Vanessa Redgrave brings
joy to the audience. Her performance makes me so happy that I’m willing
to see her take possession of the other roles I long to play. |
