at Actors Repertory Theatre through Oct. 9
In director Michael Weaver’s production of Eugene O’Neill’s *Long Day’s Journey Into Night* (at Actors Rep through Oct. 9), a mostly lackluster first two acts are redeemed by a powerful finale and buoyed by the performance of Karen Nelsen as Mary Tyrone, the drug addict who couldn’t handle the truth even before she started shooting up. With Wes Deitrick offering a weak performance as the patriarch, however, a lot of O’Neill’s emotional impact is dulled. As the two sons — drunken, self-hating Jamie and the sickly poet Edmund — Carter J. Davis and Damon C. Mentzer are good throughout but have their most searing scenes at the end, meaning that the ARt *Journey* delays its deepest impact until its third and final hour.
*Long Day’s Journey,* set nearly a century ago, offers dated phrases like “you’re a fine lunkhead” as insults actually meant to sting. But if you substitute your own particular form of addiction for the Tyrones’ whiskey and morphine, Journey morphs into a contemporary play. The play hammers away at our denials, our unwillingness to face the truth, our eagerness to blame circumstances and other people and the past — anything but ourselves.
It’s three hours of denial junkies raging at one another, lashing each other with the very things they least want to hear about themselves. The gloom and tension is evident even in the happy-family-over-breakfast façade of the opening scene, and it worsens into crescendo of self-hatred in the third hour.
Long before then, though, we have Nelsen’s carefully wrought performance to contemplate. With fingers fluttering upwards for continual adjustments to her hair, she conveys the paranoia of a guilt-ridden woman. She plays the nervous coquette out of dimly-remembered habit; her chin dips when she apologizes, but then she quickly squints to see how her apology is playing with the three men who know her best and know her secrets. Small lies catch in her throat; bigger lies lead to outright denials, with Nelsen capturing how the lady is protesting far too much.
She blames her husband and son for leaving her alone and then, with no sense of self-contradiction, for not leaving her alone. Nelsen makes it appear that Mary holds two contradictory ideas in her mind at once — they caused her to sink into drugs, she’s brought the misery of drug addiction upon herself — showing us the mark of F. Scott Fitzgerald called a first-rate intelligence (and first-rate acting) all at once.
In the role of James Tyrone — a portrait of the whiskey-swilling, penny-pinching, washed-up-but-proud Irish actor who was Eugene O’Neill’s father — Wes Deitrick is no David Ogden Stiers. It’s not fair, of course, to criticize the production that might have been, only the one that’s being presented. What Deitrick presents us with, however, is a weak vocal delivery and a hesitant physical presence. There’s none of the stentorian actor who’s made his living for years by swashing and buckling in a hackneyed stage romance (as the elder O’Neill really did in *The Count of Monte Cristo*). There’s none of the charisma and blarney that make Tyrone capable of being ingratiating. Instead, there’s the snarling insecurity of the man who fought his way out of poverty only to see his wife and sons turn out to be even greater disappointments than he was to himself. In that, Deitrick’s performance is good as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough. Deitrick’s not up to a towering role like Tyrone; few actors are.
Each of *Journey*'s characters is in denial about some important part of their family life, yet each of them acts as a truth-teller, exposing whatever the others least want to hear. They love one another even as they lash out with hateful accusations. They’re filled with rage at the gap between how their lives could have been and how much cheaper they turned out. And they turn to forgetfulness in whatever form’s at hand: sleep, an idealized past, blame directed outward (but almost never the reverse), alcohol, drugs, denial.
While the Actors Rep production is flawed, the cumulative effect of three hours spent with such self-deluded, fallible, yearning human beings is of having been told a corrective tale. We all have our little addictions — the ones that help us forget the lies we tell about ourselves, to ourselves.
**
For a revised and extended version of this review, please pick up a copy of the Thursday, Sept. 27, *Pacific Northwest Inlander* for comments on the performances of Mentzer and Davis; on further aspects of Deitrick’s performance as James Tyrone, both bad and good; on how being in denial is embedded in the fabric of O’Neill’s play; and on the designs of John Hofland (set), Justin Schmidt (lighting) and Patrick Treadway (sound).
