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Ah, Shipley!
Long Day’s Journey into Night, plus The Story
BY STEVE VINEBERG

For three of its four acts, Gloucester Stage Company’s production of Long Day’s Journey into Night (through September 18) — Eugene O’Neill’s immense and relentless family drama, a test for any regional theater — triumphs over the shortcomings of an uneven ensemble and barely adequate set and costume designs (by Jenna McFarland and Shanna Parks, respectively). Director Eric C. Engel has done careful work in shaping the scenes, and two of the four principal actors are strong enough to unleash both the text’s lyricism and its whiplash power.

Sandra Shipley has the legendary role of Mary Tyrone, the morphine-addicted matriarch of the family O’Neill modeled on his own. It’s a perilous part for an actress — tender and delicate on the one hand, on the other unyielding, walled against the efforts of the three Tyrone men, husband James and sons Jamie and Edmund, to get through to her, living on the feeble hope that if she sinks low enough, the Virgin Mary will take pity on her and restore her lost faith. Mary has been played with an aristocratic theatricality (by Katharine Hepburn in the 1962 film version), as a diminished, spectral presence (by Colleen Dewhurst at Yale Rep in the late ’80s), and with an almost monstrous strength and brutality (by Vanessa Redgrave in the Broadway revival two seasons ago). Shipley’s Mary seems more ordinary than any of those women, despite her Midwestern convent-school snobbery about consorting with her actor husband’s professional cronies. She’s the first Mary I’ve seen who suggests what Essie Miller, the mother in O’Neill’s pipe-dream version of his family in the sentimental comedy Ah, Wilderness!, might be like if a difficult pregnancy and an ignorant doctor had made her a dope addict. The performance itself is hardly ordinary: it’s poetic, varied, accomplished. Her best moments, like her acknowledgment of her loneliness when her men have left her for the afternoon at the end of act two, and her way of waving away remnants of the past she no longer wants to linger on (especially in her scene with the maid, Cathleen, in act three), are memorable.

And Joe Pacheco brings a rough-hewn, all-American tragic aura to Jamie, the elder son, who at 33 is already entrenched in an ugly, self-deploring alcoholism. Pacheco doesn’t ride the crest of O’Neill’s language, the way Jason Robards did in the movie — a smart choice, since Robards had that approach pretty much sewn up. But he isn’t a slobby, beefy drunk either, as Philip Seymour Hoffman was opposite Redgrave. He’s a streetwise, vernacular Jamie, with the melancholic, doomed beauty of a ’30s movie gangster.

Paul O’Brien is certainly handsome enough to play Tyrone Sr., a matinee idol who threw away a promising career as a classical actor to fit up a stage vehicle that was so popular it made him rich — and incapable of playing anything else. (The real James O’Neill toured in The Count of Monte Cristo for decades.) O’Brien works hard, and he isn’t bad. But Tyrone is also a miser, scarred for life by childhood poverty, as helpless to throw off the bitter lessons of his early life — even if it means shelling out for the best medical treatment for his consumptive son, Edmund — as Mary and Jamie are to unshackle themselves of their addictions. And O’Brien simply doesn’t have the tragic weight to drag the character into those depths.

As Edmund, Michael Tennant is disastrously miscast, not just physically — he isn’t delicate enough to play a tubercular poet — but in terms of his abilities. Edmund is the playwright as a young man, but Tennant has no feel for the rhythm of his lines (he tends to chatter), and he pouts and snarls. Occasionally he does something funny, like the way he says "Nietzsche" with exaggerated slowness, sending up his brother’s unconvincing proletarian stance when Jamie claims he can’t pronounce the name of Edmund’s favorite philosopher; but it’s a dead-ended performance. And though Cathleen the maid is a minor role, Anais Koivisto’s sashaying, flirtatious scene stealing is a mistake Engel should have prevented.

The production almost sinks at the end because two-thirds of act four consists of a long scene between Tyrone and Edmund that the actors aren’t up to, and by the time Pacheco makes his final entrance for Jamie’s big drunk scene, you’ve been pulled loose from the play’s iron grasp. And then, when Mary staggers down the stairs, stoned out of her head, dragging the wedding gown she’s excavated from some trunk in the attic, Engel throws in a piece of cheesy expressionism: the men freeze downstage while fog shrouds Shipley behind an upstage scrim wall and some unidentified crackling noise heralds her appearance. The actress is splendid enough to rescue the finale, but you wonder what Engel could have been thinking when he devised this crowning effect for the most celebrated example of American realism in the repertoire.

Nothing rescues The Story, the Boston premiere of Tracey Scott Wilson’s play that Zeitgeist Stage Company is staging at the Boston Center for the Arts (through September 24). It’s a slender 85 minutes — less than half the length of Long Day’s Journey into Night — but it feels a lot longer. An ambitious young black journalist (Nydia Calón) lands a job at a city paper through the auspices of the white editor (Gabriel Field), who happens to be her boy friend, but the outlook section, where she’s placed (along with every other African-American on the paper), frustrates her attempts to write hard news. She feels she’s getting simple-minded assignments by her editor (Michelle Dowd) and being forced to give every article she writes a phony black-community-role-model uplift. Then, at a community center, she finds a black teenage girl (Chantel Nicole Bibb) with a true intellectual gift. And the kid confides that her gang was responsible for the neighborhood shooting of the young white teacher whose death has hogged the metro-section headlines.

With its attendant twists and turns (neither the journalist nor the girl turns out to be what she claims), the plot might make a good Law & Order episode. But Wilson seems to think it’s more revealing about race than it is — too many better writers got to these ideas before she did — and she refuses to tell it straight. Much of it is rendered in overlapping conversations that, I assume, are meant to underscore the notion that every story is spun by its teller. The technique is distracting, and it doesn’t add anything to the play; we’d get the point without it.

It’s unlikely that The Story would look like much in any context, but if there were a play in there worth doing, David J. Miller’s production would have mangled it beyond recognition anyway. It’s very poorly staged — most of the action consists of performers rambling around a table placed center stage — and not one of the many short scenes has any shape. The acting — over-animated, over-gesticulated, and flat at the core — seems better suited for an instructional video than a stage play. You can spot talent in some of the cast, especially Field and Dowd; Keedar Whittle (as another reporter in the outlook section who wrestles Yvonne for the story) has a wry delivery on some of his lines; and Kaili Turner, in several small roles, demonstrates versatility and imagination. But they’re badly directed, along with the other five members of the ensemble. One actress — Caryn Andrea Lindsey as the teacher’s pregnant widow — cries in every single scene, and Calón, as Yvonne, cries through most of the last half-hour. That’s a lot of histrionics for a space the size of the BCA Plaza Black Box Theatre.


Issue Date: September 9 - 15, 2005
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