[NEohioPAL] Final weekend - Long Day's Journey Into Night

Wed Nov 10 07:47:54 PST 2010

LAST 4 SHOWS
Thurs., Nov. 11 at 7:30 p.m.
Fri., Nov. 12 at 8 p.m.
Sat., Nov. 13 at 2:30 p.m.
Sat., Nov. 13 at 8 p.m.

 Weathervane Playhouse's
'Long Day's Journey Into Night' Depicts
a Searing Portrait of an American Family

Eugene O'Neill's Dramatic Masterpiece Plays in Weathervane's Intimate John L. Dietz Theater

Weathervane Playhouse's 2010-2011 Dietz Theater series opens with the landmark dramatic masterpiece, Long Day's Journey Into Night - live on stage from Oct. 28 to Nov. 13, 2010. 

Celebrated American playwright Eugene O'Neill dissects his own family to create an autobiographical portrait of a dysfunctional American family.

The production is directed by Jerrold Scott, an associate professor of directing, acting and speech at Case Western Reserve University. The production is sponsored by Margaret J. Dietz.

Long Day's Journey Into Night unfolds on a single day in August 1912 between 8:30 a.m. and midnight in the living room of the Tyrone family's summer home. In this domestic setting, a husband, his wife and their two sons attempt to make peace with a painful past while struggling to reconcile the equally tormented conflicts of the present. 

Head-of-the-household James is an acclaimed actor. Although well off financially, James nurses a cruel, miserly streak. Mary, his wife, has recently returned from a sanitarium for her persistent addiction to morphine, but she may not yet be cured of her habit. Elder son Jamie is the ne'er-do-well, rakish brother who squanders his money and his time, presenting a cynical front to the world. The sensitive, intellectual Edmund (Jamie's younger brother) has most likely contracted tuberculosis after traveling the world at sea. Meanwhile, all three of the Tyrone males struggle with an addiction of their own to alcohol.

Armed with an emotional arsenal of regret, accusations, concealment, blame, resentment and denial, the Tyrone family members are quick to re-visit old arguments and to re-open old wounds. In Long Day's Journey Into Night, O'Neill examines the question of whether a family can live happily in the present when faced with such bitter grudges of the past.

Published and produced on the stage only after his death in 1953, Long Day's Journey Into Night enshrined O'Neill's legacy as a literary lion, and the original Broadway production won the 1957 Tony Award for Best Play. Posthumously, O'Neill also received the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for this play.

The Long Day's Journey Into Night Cast and their Ohio Hometowns

Brian M. Bartels (of Rocky River) . James Tyrone

Mary Jane Nottage (of Solon) . Mary Cavan Tyrone

Aaron Calafato (of Broadview Heights) . James Tyrone, Jr.

Joseph Dunn (of Kent) .Edmund Tyrone

Amelia Britton (of Akron) . Cathleen

About the Director of Long Day's Journey Into Night 

JERROLD SCOTT is an associate professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland who holds an M.F.A. from the University of South Carolina. He is a director, actor, and speech consultant. At CWRU, he held the inaugural Climo Junior Professorship from 2004 to 2006, until his subsequent promotion to associate professor with tenure. Prior to his CWRU appointments, he was a lecturer at Catholic University of America and instructor in the Acting Conservatory of The Studio Theatre. He has also taught at The Ohio State University and George Mason University. As a fellow at The Shakespeare Theatre, Jerrold studied classical theatre performance under the direction of Michael Kahn. He also completed certification at The Summer School at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London (RADA). 

He serves as artistic director of the Eldred Theater at CWRU. In addition to the many shows he has directed at Eldred, he has also staged a number of shows at the Potomac Theatre Company, where he also held the position of artistic director. Other selected directing assignments and venues include Heartbreak House and The Real Thing with the Case/Cleveland Play House MFA Ensemble; As You Like It for the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival; A Doll's House, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Polish Joke for the Beck Center for the Arts; Quilters, I Do! I Do!, and Deathtrap at the Fredericksburg Theatre Company; and Private Lives at the Little Theatre of Alexandria (for which he won "Best Director" and "Outstanding Production" at the LTA Awards in 1999). He has served as an assistant director at many theaters, including RADA and the Actors' Theatre of Louisville under Obie Award-winning Lisa Peterson, and is an associate member of Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC).

During his eight years in Washington, D.C., he performed at The Shakespeare Theatre, Theater of the First Amendment, The National Theatre, the Source Theatre, and the Washington Stage Guild. Other regional performance venues include The Cleveland Play House; The Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival in Pittsburgh; the Contemporary American Theatre Company in Columbus, Ohio; and Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in Charleston, South Carolina. He is a proud member of the Actors' Equity Association (AEA) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), and is still active in commercial performance/voice-over work.

In addition to his work on various CWRU department committees, he serves as the faculty advisor for IMPROVment at CWRU, serves on the Graduate Committee of the College of Arts and Sciences, and is a member of the Farm Management Committee for Squire Valleevue Farm. He served as chair of the University Undergraduate Faculty's Committee on Undergraduate Admissions from 2005 to 2007. On the national level, he is the Focus Group Representative for the Directing Program of the Association for Theater in Higher Education (ATHE). 

The Long Day's Journey Into Night Backstage Team
and their Ohio Hometowns

Stage Manager - John S. Catlos (of Akron)

Costume Designer - Jasen J. Smith (of Akron)

Sound Designer - David Ruggles (of Cuyahoga Falls)

Properties Designer and Assistant Technical Director - Kathy Kohl (of Akron)

Scenic Designer and Technical Director - Alan Scott Ferrall (of Cuyahoga Falls)

Lighting Designer - Mark D. Stoffer (of Cuyahoga Falls)

Ticket and Performance Information

Long Day's Journey Into Night plays in Weathervane Playhouse's John L. Dietz Theater between Oct. 28 and Nov. 13, 2010. (The Dietz Theater is Weathervane Playhouse's intimate, 48-seat "second stage" within its Weathervane Lane facility.)

The preview performance is Thursday, Oct. 28 at 7:30 p.m.; the official opening-night performance is Friday, Oct. 29 at 8 p.m. 

Between Oct. 28 and Nov. 13, 2010, performance days and times are Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. Two additional performances include a 10 a.m. performance for school groups on Wednesday, Nov. 10 and a 2:30 p.m. performance on Saturday, Nov. 13.

Tickets for all performances of the play are $18 each. The 48-seat Dietz Theater features general-admission seating only.

Discounted tickets for school groups are available for the 10 a.m. performance on Wednesday, Nov. 10. (School groups should contact the Weathervane Box Office to arrange for a booking to this daytime matinee.)

Long Day's Journey Into Night is recommended for ages 13 and older. For tickets, call the Weathervane Box Office at (330) 836-2626 or connect online to www.weathervaneplayhouse.com.

About the Play and the Playwright

About the Play's Production History

Long Day's Journey Into Night was never produced or published during Eugene O'Neill's lifetime. He presented the play as a gift to his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, on the occasion of their twelfth wedding anniversary in July of 1941. O'Neill described this gift to his wife as a "play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood. A sadly inappropriate gift, it would seem, for a day celebrating happiness."

In 1942, O'Neill placed a sealed copy of the play in the document vault of his publisher, Random House. His instructions directed his publishers and heirs to not publish the play until 25 years after his death, and O'Neill formalized this arrangement in a 1945 contract.

After O'Neill died in 1953, Carlotta turned over her rights to the play by donating it to Yale University, thus getting around the 1945 contract that O'Neill had initiated. In 1956, Yale published Long Day's Journey Into Night in book form, and its copywright page stipulated the conditions of the gift from O'Neill's widow: "All royalties from the sale of the Yale editions of this book go to Yale University for the benefit of the Eugene O'Neill Collection, for the purchase of books in the field of drama, and for the establishment of Eugene O'Neill Scholarships in the Yale School of Drama."

The publication of O'Neill's "missing play" proved to be irresistible to the theater world; a fully staged production was inevitable. Stockholm, Sweden, was the location for the first stage production of Long Day's Journey Into Night, where it premiered Feb. 2, 1956, at the Royal Dramatic Theatre. (During his lifetime, the Swedish people had produced and celebrated the plays of O'Neill with a fervor and appreciation unmatched in his American homeland - owing perhaps, as some literary critics have noted, to O'Neill's professed admiration of the "literary debt" he owed to Swedish playwright August Strindberg, who influenced his writing greatly.)

For the first American production of the play, director Jose Quintero assembled a cast that included Frederic March as James Tyrone, Sr., Florence Eldridge as Mary, Jason Robards, Jr., as Jamie, Bradford Dillman as Edmund, and Catherine Ross as Cathleen. After a pre-New York try-out at the Shubert Theater in New Haven, Connecticut, the production opened on Broadway at the Helen Hayes Theatre on November 7, 1956, where it played for 390 performances before closing on March 29, 1958. A critical success, the production won the Tony Award for Best Play and the best-play award from the New York Drama Critics Circle. O'Neill received the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Drama posthumously.

In the years since its first New York production, Long Day's Journey Into Night has been revived on Broadway four times: in 1962 (a Swedish-language production), in 1986 (with Jack Lemmon as James Tyrone), in 1988 (with Jason Robards as James Tyrone, Sr., and Colleen Dewhurst as Mary Tyrone) and in 2003 (with Brian Dennehy as James Tyrone, Sr., and Vanessa Redgrave as Mary Tyrone).

Notable film and television adaptations of the play include:

n      In 1962, Ralph Richardson and Katherine Hepburn headlined director Sidney Lumet's motion-picture adaptation. Jason Robards, Jr., reprised his Broadway role as Jamie.

n      In 1973, an ABC-TV production starred Laurence Olivier as James Tyrone, Sr.

n      In 1982, an all-black cast (starring Earle Hyman as James Tyrone, Sr., and Ruby Dee as Mary Tyrone) aired on ABC-TV in 1982.

n      In 1987, cable-TV network Showtime aired a new adaptation with Jack Lemmon as James Tyrone, Sr., Kevin Spacey as Jamie and Peter Gallagher as Edmund. 

Weathervane Playhouse first produced Long Day's Journey Into Night during its 1963-1964 season (at the Playhouse's former home on Copley Road in West Akron). Robert Belfance directed the production.

About the Playwright

EUGENE GLADSTONE O'NEILL was born Oct. 16, 1888 in New York City. Because his father (James O'Neill) was an actor, young Eugene spent his early childhood years traveling the country by train, living out of hotel rooms and hanging around backstage. Owing to the nomadic life of a stage performer, James and his wife, Ella, decided that boarding schools were a better fit for Eugene and his older brother, James, Jr. Eugene was educated at Mount Saint Vincent, a strict Catholic school in the Bronx borough of New York City, and also at Stamford, Connecticut's Betts Academy, a secular school. Summers were spent at the family's summer home near the Thames River, in New London, Connecticut. (Nicknamed Monte Cristo Cottage, after his father's most famous and lucrative stage role, the house later became the model for the Tyrone family's summer house in Long Day's Journey Into Night.)

When it came time for college, O'Neill chose Princeton University, where he studied for only one year before departing in 1907 in search of what he later called "life experience." According to one biographer, he had also begun to spend a great deal of time with his heavy-drinking brother, James, who "made sin easy for him," as O'Neill later proclaimed. Another biographer notes that O'Neill's three main concerns at this time were "books, alcohol, and women."

During the next six years, O'Neill found plenty of experience in a variety of places. He fell in love and married the first of his three wives, Kathleen Jenkins. Soon thereafter, however, O'Neill left his wife and traveled to Honduras, where he worked in a gold mine. ("Found no gold but contracted malarial fever," O'Neill later wrote of these years.)

Even after the birth of their son, Eugene, Jr., in 1910, O'Neill returned to work at sea, with stops in Buenos Aires and England along the way. By 1912, with his marriage ended in divorce, O'Neill continued to drink heavily, attempted suicide and developed a bad case of tuberculosis.

He moved back home to his parents' house only to find his father depressed and his mother addicted to morphine (circumstances that inspired his eventual play, Long Day's Journey Into Night). Back in New London, he found work as a reporter for the local newspaper, but he continued to struggle with ill health. After a six-month stint in a sanitarium to recover from his tuberculosis, O'Neill decided to become a playwright, and he began to write persistently.

He published five of his one-act plays in 1914 (with the help of his father's money). He enrolled in a playwriting class at Harvard University but his studies and writing competed with his continuing urge to drink and carouse. Next, he joined the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod in Massachusetts and here he staged a number of his plays successfully. The troupe also performed several of his plays in New York City at its second theater in Greenwich Village, and many of these later moved "up town" to Broadway theaters. This period marked the beginning of O'Neill's theatrical and literary ascent.

In 1918, he married his second wife, Agnes Boulton; the two later welcomed a son, Shane, and a daughter, Oona. His 1920 play, Beyond the Horizon, earned O'Neill his first Pulitzer Prize. The 1920s marked a period of prodigious output and favorable productions for O'Neill. Among the many plays he wrote during this decade were Anna Christie (which earned him a second Pulitzer Prize in 1922), The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, All God's Chillun Got Wings, Desire Under the Elms and Strange Interlude (which earned him a third Pulitzer Prize in 1928). In spite of his professional triumphs, the 1920s were also a period of great personal pain for O'Neill. In a four-year span, his mother, father and brother died. And his marriage to Agnes ended in divorce after his affair with Carlotta Monterey (whom O'Neill married less than a month after his divorce with Agnes was finalized in 1929). 

In 1929, Carlotta and Eugene moved to France but they returned to America in the 1930s, settling first in Georgia but ending up in Danville, California, where the couple remained until 1944 in a place they called Tao House (and which today is operated as the Eugene O'Neill National Historic Site.) In describing O'Neill's marriage to his third wife, many literary biographers claim that Carlotta helped to organize O'Neill's life so that he could dedicate his energies to writing. But the marriage, many biographers note, came with its own set of troubles, as Carlotta became addicted to potassium bromide (which, at the time, was widely used as a sedative and an anti-convulsant drug). The two separated several times but never divorced.

O'Neill's ties with his children were equally tenuous. He was not close with either Eugene, Jr. (who struggled with alcoholism and committed suicide in 1950) or Shane (who struggled with an addiction to heroin and also took his own life in 1977). In 1943, 18-year-old Oona married the 54-year-old film actor/director/producer Charles Chaplin. Oona's famous husband was roughly the same age as her equally famous father - and O'Neill, who disapproved of the coupling, disowned his daughter and never spoke to her again.

Between 1934 and his death in 1953, O'Neill published only two new plays: The Iceman Cometh (published in 1940 and first performed in 1946) and A Moon for the Misbegotten (completed in 1943 and first performed in 1947).

After a lifetime of illness and infirmity - not to mention his struggles with depression and alcoholism - O'Neill spent the final decade of his life with a shaky, Parkinson's-like tremor in his hands that crippled his ability to write. At the age of 65, he died on November 27, 1953 in a hotel room in Boston. (According to a report published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2000, O'Neill's actual cause of death was not alcoholism or Parkinson's disease but rather a disorder known as late-onset cerebellar cortical atrophy. The 2000 report contends that this likely inherited condition was the most likely cause of his death.)

Among his many honors, O'Neill is the only American dramatist to ever receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1936) and he remains the only four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

* * *

Weathervane Playhouse and its dedicated volunteers offer vital performing arts resources for the people of Northeastern Ohio. We create exciting and thought-provoking shows with impressive production values. Through educational programs and volunteer opportunities for people of all ages and backgrounds, Weathervane serves the theater community, our patrons and our volunteers.

The Ohio Arts Council helped fund this program with state tax dollars to encourage economic growth, education excellence and cultural enrichment for all Ohioans.

Additional 2010-2011 season sponsors
89.7 WSKU-FM
The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company
Omnova Solutions Foundation
Sisler McFawn Foundation
Akron Community Foundation
Kenneth L. Calhoun Charitable Trust
The Margaret Clark Morgan Foundation
Mary S. and David C. Corbin Foundation

Janis Harcar
Director of Advancement
Weathervane Playhouse
330-836-2323 X16
www.weathervaneplayhouse.com
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