Introduction

Here on Compact Disc - a full-cast recording starring Robert Ryan, Stacy Keach, and Geraldine Fitzgerald - Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night.

O'Neill's painful view of his own life forms the core of Long Day's Journey Into Night, one of the greatest of all American plays. The Tyrone family (father James, mother Mary, and sons Edmund and Jamie) of the play is a surrogate for O'Neill's own family and, through them, the playwright wrestles with his past demons.

Covering a single day and night, O'Neill's play traces the impact on the family relapse into a drug addiction and younger son Edmund's being institutionalized for consumption. These events reopen old wounds and resentments and initiate a harrowing series of accusations and recriminations that threaten to tear apart the family.

At turns haunting, riveting, and emotionally lacerating, Long Day's Journey Into Night is one of O'Neill's greatest plays.

Directed by Arvin Brown, starring Robert Ryan, Stacy Keach, Geraldine Fitzgerald with James Naughton and Paddy Croft

Editorial Review

This work is interesting enough for its history. Completed in 1940, Long Day's Journey Into Night is an autobiographical play Eugene O'Neill wrote that--because of the highly personal writing about his family--was not to be released until 25 years after his death, which occurred in 1953. But since O'Neill's immediate family had died in the early 1920s, his wife allowed publication of the play in 1956. Besides the history alone, the play is fascinating in its own right. It tells of the "Tyrones"--a fictional name for what is clearly the O'Neills. Theirs is not a happy tale: The youngest son (Edmond) is sent to a sanitarium to recover from tuberculosis; he despises his father for sending him; his mother is wrecked by narcotics; and his older brother by drink. In real-life these factors conspired to turn O'Neill into who he was--a tormented individual and a brilliant playwright.

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