Lesley Manville in Long Day’s Journey Into Night at BAM

In one scene in the excellent BAM’s Harvey Theater production of Eugene O’Neill’s epic-length, Long Day’s Journey into Night, you see Lesley Manville as Mary Tyrone preening in front of a mirror, as if she were in the fitting room of the movie, The Phantom Thread. The British actress was nominated for an Oscar for her role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie. Here in this play, it is an animated moment when Mary Tyrone shows the girlish whims she once had, and it is startling, commanding the Connecticut sitting room, taking center stage from the alcoholic men, her husband James, a miserly matinee idol played to perfection by Jeremy Irons, and their two sons, James, Jr. and Edmund (Rory Keenan and Matthew Beard). Her plight, after all, wrenches this drama, written in the 1940’s and hewn so close to the playwright’s life it was not produced till after his death, into the Zeitgeist: conjuring #MeToo moments, not to mention the opioid epidemic. You get her immediately; forced to go on tour with her husband, waiting in fleabag hotels and “one-night stands,” losing a child, and treated by doctors with morphine; this is not a role for sissies.

The last production I saw starred Jessica Lange as Mary Tyrone. That was 2016 on Broadway, and Lange by comparison was an angelic, ghostly presence, especially descending the stairs in the play’s final act. I’d be hard pressed to say which was more powerful, the frail Lange who occasionally offered a glimmer of her former strength, or Manville in this production, a British import directed by Richard Eyre. Mary Tyrone is a riveting woman, a great character for actresses in a superb play that is also a reminder of a time when women were expected to traipse after their husbands, no matter where and to what peril. When the characters utter the archaic slur “dope fiend,” it harkens back to eras of blaming the victim. O'Neill triumphs in ennobling her.

Regina Weinreich

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