Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill
Notes from the Director Jean-Marie Apostolides

Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) wrote Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1941. The play is dedicated to Carlotta, his second wife. The author meant it "as a tribute to [her] love and tenderness which gave [him] the faith in love that enabled [him] to face [his] dead at last". He wrote it "with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones. " O’Neill wanted the play to be published 25 years after his death and never produced. However, as the author’s widow, Carlotta had the play published and produced in 1956, only three years after the playwright’s death. Since 1956, this text has been performed all over the world and is regularly shown in the USA. It is generally considered one of the author’s greatest plays and a classic drama of the American repertoire.  

This play is usually seen as autobiographical and realistic. The first point is evident even if one should be cautious when reducing the text to its biographical components. Autobiography is a risky enterprise and O’Neill cannot be totally associated with Edmund, his double. Each character represents some elements of the author’s unconscious, creating a dialogue between the different elements of his rather complex and tortuous personality. The second point, that of the play’s realism, is even less obvious. Reducing Long Day’s Journey to a realistic representation of an uncharacteristic American family in 1912 makes it easy to forget many other aspects encompassed in this text. Beyond being a representation of O’Neill’s family, it is also a conscious rewriting of Hamlet and of Ghost Sonata, a famous play by Strindberg which was first performed in America in 1924, by the Provincetown Players, under the direction of O’Neill himself. The references to ghosts are so numerous in Long Day’s Journey that they force us to confront them. 

I chose to underline the play’s many connections to the symbolic theatre which influenced the young O’Neill so much. By doing so, I hope that the unconscious structure of the play will be visible and its multiple layers of signification will become more evident.

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