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<DIV align=center><FONT face=Arial> <BR><STRONG><FONT color=#ff0000>LAST 4
SHOWS<BR>Thurs., Nov. 11 at 7:30 p.m.<BR>Fri., Nov. 12 at 8 p.m.<BR>Sat., Nov.
13 at 2:30 p.m.<BR>Sat., Nov. 13 at 8
p.m.<BR><BR></FONT></STRONG> Weathervane Playhouse’s<BR>‘Long Day’s Journey
Into Night’ Depicts<BR>a Searing Portrait of an American
Family<BR> <BR>Eugene O’Neill’s Dramatic Masterpiece Plays in Weathervane’s
Intimate John L. Dietz Theater<BR> <BR>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.
<BR> <BR>Celebrated American playwright Eugene O’Neill dissects his own
family to create an autobiographical portrait of a dysfunctional American
family.<BR> <BR>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.<BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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.<BR> <BR>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.<BR> <BR>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.<BR> <BR>The Long Day’s Journey Into Night Cast and their Ohio
Hometowns<BR> <BR>Brian M. Bartels (of Rocky River) … James
Tyrone<BR> <BR>Mary Jane Nottage (of Solon) … Mary Cavan
Tyrone<BR> <BR>Aaron Calafato (of Broadview Heights) … James Tyrone,
Jr.<BR> <BR>Joseph Dunn (of Kent) …Edmund Tyrone<BR> <BR>Amelia
Britton (of Akron) … Cathleen<BR> <BR>About the Director of Long Day’s
Journey Into Night <BR> <BR>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). <BR> <BR>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).<BR> <BR>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.<BR> <BR>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). <BR> <BR>The Long Day’s
Journey Into Night Backstage Team<BR>and their Ohio Hometowns<BR> <BR>Stage
Manager – John S. Catlos (of Akron)<BR> <BR>Costume Designer – Jasen J.
Smith (of Akron)<BR> <BR>Sound Designer – David Ruggles (of Cuyahoga
Falls)<BR> <BR>Properties Designer and Assistant Technical Director – Kathy
Kohl (of Akron)<BR> <BR>Scenic Designer and Technical Director – Alan Scott
Ferrall (of Cuyahoga Falls)<BR> <BR>Lighting Designer – Mark D. Stoffer (of
Cuyahoga Falls)<BR> <BR>Ticket and Performance
Information<BR> <BR>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.)<BR> <BR>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. <BR> <BR>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.<BR> <BR>Tickets for all performances of the play are $18 each. The
48-seat Dietz Theater features general-admission seating
only.<BR> <BR>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.)<BR> <BR>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.<BR> <BR>About the Play and
the Playwright<BR> <BR>About the Play’s Production
History<BR> <BR>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.”<BR> <BR>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.<BR> <BR>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.”<BR> <BR>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.)<BR> <BR>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.<BR> <BR>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).<BR> <BR>Notable film and
television adaptations of the play include:<BR> <BR><FONT
face=ZDingbats>n</FONT> In 1962, Ralph Richardson
and Katherine Hepburn headlined director Sidney Lumet's motion-picture
adaptation. Jason Robards, Jr., reprised his Broadway role as
Jamie.<BR> <BR><FONT face=ZDingbats>n</FONT>
In 1973, an ABC-TV production starred Laurence Olivier as James Tyrone,
Sr.<BR> <BR><FONT face=ZDingbats>n</FONT> 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.<BR> <BR><FONT
face=ZDingbats>n</FONT> 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. <BR> <BR>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.<BR> <BR>About the
Playwright<BR> <BR>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.)<BR> <BR>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.”<BR> <BR>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.)<BR> <BR>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.<BR> <BR>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.<BR> <BR>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.<BR> <BR>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). <BR> <BR>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.<BR> <BR>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.<BR> <BR>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).<BR> <BR>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.)<BR> <BR>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.<BR> <BR> <BR>* * *<BR> <BR>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.<BR> <BR>The Ohio Arts
Council helped fund this program with state tax dollars to encourage economic
growth, education excellence and cultural enrichment for all
Ohioans.<BR> <BR>Additional 2010-2011 season sponsors<BR>89.7
WSKU-FM<BR>The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company<BR>Omnova Solutions
Foundation<BR>Sisler McFawn Foundation<BR>Akron Community Foundation<BR>Kenneth
L. Calhoun Charitable Trust<BR>The Margaret Clark Morgan Foundation<BR>Mary S.
and David C. Corbin Foundation<BR> <BR> <BR> <BR> <BR>Janis
Harcar<BR>Director of Advancement<BR>Weathervane Playhouse<BR>330-836-2323
X16<BR>www.weathervaneplayhouse.com</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>