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All the Drama: Long Day’s Journey into Night, 1957 Winner, Pulitzer Prize for Drama
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All The Drama is hosted by Jan Simpson. It is a series of deep dives into the plays that have won The Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The Pulitzer Prize for Drama: “Long Day’s Journey into Night“1957 Pulitzer winner “Long Day’s Journey into Night”,
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Jan Simpson
The year is 1957 and the world's attention is focused on the Middle east as Egypt reopens the Suez Canal after having seized control of that strategic waterway from the British and the French a year earlier. Meanwhile, America's President Eisenhower pledges U.S. military and economic assistance to countries in the region that resist communism. Back in the US the country begins slipping into a recession even as the post war baby boom continues and growing numbers of families migrate to the suburbs. I'm not sure that any of that had any influence on the Pulitzer board's decision about who should win its drama award that year. But in 1957, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama went to Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, a fiercely autobiographical play that set the standard for the many, many plays that would follow about dysfunctional families disillusioned by the American dream. My name is Jan Simpson. Welcome to all the Drama, a podcast about the plays and musicals that have won American theater's highest accolade the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. This episode marks the fourth anniversary of all the drama. And as I've done in the past three years, I'm celebrating by devoting this anniversary anniversary episode to one of the four plays by Eugene O'Neill that won the Pulitzer Prize. His previous winners were beyond the Horizon in 1920, Anna Christie in 1922 and Strange Interlude in 1928. No other playwright has yet won as many times as O'Neill did, and the two man jury in 1957 insisted that despite its nearly four hour length and its sometimes overly literary language and repetitive speeches, that this one was O'Neill's masterpiece. We believe they wrote that the Pulitzer Award has seldom gone to as great a play as as Long Day's Journey. In tonight I gave a full rundown of Oneills early years in the episode on beyond the Horizon. There's a link to that in the show notes, so I'm only going to highlight some of the major events in his life now. But these events are particularly relevant because so many of them turn up in Long Day's Journey. O'Neill was born on October 16, 1888, to the actor James O'Neill and his wife Mary Ellen, who was known as Ella. An older son named James after his father had been born 10 years earlier. A second son named Edmund was born five years after that, but he died while still a toddler after contracting measles from his older brother. Eugene came a few years later, but his birth was a difficult one for the already fragile Ella, who coped by taking morphine, and that developed into a drug habit that would plague her for decades. Young Gene spent his boyhood in boarding schools while his parents traveled around the country with his father's acting company. The older O'Neill was known for his performances in the Count of Monte Cristo. Playing that role, which he did thousands of times, made him rich, but it also robbed him of fulfilling the promise that many thought might have made him the greatest actor of his generation instead of just a momentarily popular one. All of this would have serious repercussions throughout Oneills life and would end up in his memory play. O'Neill spent most of his early 20s working as a seaman and developing a serious drinking problem that in one way or another would also plague him for the rest of his life. He did manage to make it through a year in George Pierce Baker's pioneering playwriting course at Harvard, but he really came into his own as a writer when he hooked up with the Provincetown Players, a group of radical artists, writers and activists who wanted to create in this country the kind of serious theater that Strindberg, Ibsen and Chekhov had already introduced in Europe. O'Neill quickly became the player's leading dramatist and the most important and influential playwright in America for most of the 20s and 30s, producing such plays as beyond the Horizon, Ana Christie, the Emperor Jones, the Hairy Ape, Desire, under the Elms and Strange Interlude. He won the three Pulitzers along the way. And then in 1936, he became only the second American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. His personal life was less orderly. O'Neill's marriage, his second to the writer Agnes Bolton, was already dying when he met Carlotta Monterey, an actress who was born in San Francisco in 1888 as Hazel Tharsing, the daughter of Danish immigrants. She changed her name to Carlotta Monterey when she went into show business because she felt it sounded more theatrical. Monterey was only a so so actress, but she was a great beauty with a lot of self confidence and a fervent belief in ONeills talent. They married in 1929, a month after his divorce from Bolton. But this third marriage wasn't an easy one either. There were frequent blow ups and occasional separations. Still, Monterey nursed O'Neill through his frequent bouts of depression and alcoholism, and she worked hard to create safe and comfortable places where he could write. Some people said she was overprotective, isolating him from his friends and even from his children. Both of his sons, Eugene Jr. And Shane, would later commit suicide. And although ONeills daughter Una married the comedian Charlie Chaplin and had eight children with him, she would die an alcoholic at the relatively young age of 66. In 1937, using money from his Nobel Prize, O'Neill and Carlotta built and moved into a home in Danville, California, about an hour east of San Francisco. They called it Dao House, after the Chinese philosophy that advocates living in harmony with nature. Two years later, now 50 and in failing health, including experiencing tremors in his hands that would eventually be diagnosed as a form of Parkinson's, O'Neill turned his thoughts to his youth and began working on Long Day's Journey, the last play that he'd written for Broadway. Days Without End, had ended quickly after just 57 performances in 1934. He'd spent the next few years working on a cycle of 11 plays that were supposed to chronicle American history from the colonial period to the present. But he abandoned the project after more or less completing just two of them. A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions. Writing this new play, even though it focused on Just One Day, wasn't easy either. As Monterey, who typed up the pages he wrote in longhand, later told a biographer, he would come out of his study at The End of the Day Gaunt and sometimes weeping, Launday's Journey into Night is set during one long day in the summer of 1912 in a home similar to the one the O'Neill family owned in New London, Connecticut, and which is today owned and operated by the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center. The characters in the play are similar to the O'Neill family too. The father, called James Tyrone, is a famous actor who, like O'Neil's father, was an Irish immigrant who made a fortune playing the same character for decades while simultaneously lamenting his failure to make good on the promise of his early talent. The mother, Mary, like Oneils, is a broken woman whose experiences of having lost one child and suffering a difficult pregnancy with another have left her with an addiction to opium that she's unable to shake. Also, as in the O'Neill family's real life, the couple's elder son Jamie is a ne'er do well and an alcoholic, while the younger Edmund, who For some reason O'Neill named after his dead brother instead of himself, is a would be poet who has recently been diagnosed with tuberculosis, just as O'Neill was in his early childhood 20s. It took O'Neill three years to finish the play. He tried different titles for it, Diary of a Day's Journey and Home Cycle, before settling on Long Day's Journey into Night. He was proud of what he'd written and said he thought it was his best work, but he also felt it cut too close to the bone and revealed too many family secrets. So he had a sealed copy of the manuscript placed in the document vault of his publisher, Random House, with the instructions that it shouldn't be published until 25 years after his death. In the meantime, O'Neill continued putting out plays, including the Iceman Cometh, inspired by his younger drinking days in New York, Dive Bars and Moon for the Misbegotten, a story centered around an incident involving his brother Jamie Iceman, was produced while he was still alive, but it was greeted with mixed reviews. The critic Eric Bentley thought it a triumph, but the writer and sometime theater critic Mary McCarthy wrote that Iceman, which ran for 137 performances in 1947, proved that O'Neill was a bad writer. The return of a playwright who, to be frank, cannot write is a solemn and sentimental occasion, she wrote. It seemed a sad end to what had begun as such a glorious career, and the Parkinson's made it impossible for O'Neill to write anything more during the final decade of his life. He died on November 27, 1953, after a four day struggle with pneumonia. He was 65. Three years later, Monterey overruled his wishes and had Launday's Journey published. O'Neill had given her the play as a present for their 12th anniversary, with an inscription that read, dearest, I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood, a sadly inappropriate gift, it would seem, for a day celebrating happiness. But you will understand I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness, which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play. Write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones. More formally, he had also made his widow the executor of his literary estate, and so Monterey had the power to have the manuscript published. When Random House balked at violating O'Neill's instructions to wait for 25 years, she had it published by Yale University Press, and Monterey also approved a stage production at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Sweden for that February. She chose to make the premiere there because Both she and O'Neill had always appreciated how the Swedes had continued to present his plays even when his popularity began to decline in the US the reviews for that first new O'Neill play in nearly a decade were universal raves, and American producers immediately began competing for the US rights. Monterey opted to go with Circle on the Square co founder Ted Mann and director Jose Quintero. She told them that she'd chosen them because she had admired their recent and now legendary revival of the Iceman Cometh. Her only condition was that they not cut anything of what O'Neil had written. Mann and Quintero knew immediately that they wanted Jason Robarts, the breakout star of their Iceman, to play the dissolute Jamie Tyrone. They also quickly decided that Frederick March, already both a Tony and an Oscar winner, should play the elder James Tyrone. March said he would take the role, but only if they cast his wife, the actress Florence Eldridge as Mary. They reluctantly agreed, but Eldredge delivered Both she and March, along with the Robards, would all be nominated for tonys. Although only March 1, the cast was completed with Bradford Dillman, a young Yale graduate who had also studied at the Actors Studio, to play Edmund and Catherine Ross in the small role of the family maid. The Broadway production of Launday's journey opened on November 7, 1956, at the old Helen Hayes Theater on West 46th street, where it ran for 390 performances. Although the run was interrupted for seven weeks so that the entire production could go to Paris to represent the US at that year's International Drama Festival. In addition to winning the Pulitzer, Lande's Journey also won that year's tony New York Drama Critics Circle and Outer Critics Circle awards, and it not only revived Oneills reputation but consolidated his claim as the country's most significant playwright. Launday's Journey into Night, wrote the New York Times drama critic Brooks Atkinson, restores the drama to literature and the theater to art. Launday's Journey has since been revived on Broadway five times, in at least four major Off Broadway productions and zillions of times elsewhere. It's also been made into films at least half a dozen times, including the latest version that is coming out this spring, with Jessica Lange and Ed Harris as Mary and James Tyrone and Ben Foster and Colin Morgan as their sons. Seeing the 2003 Broadway production, with Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Dennehy as Mary and James, with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Sean Leonard as their sons, remains one of the most memorable theatrical experiences of my life. And so it was a real treat for me to talk with someone who knows the play almost as intimately as O'Neill himself. William Davies King is a professor of theater history and dramaturgy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a past editor of the Eugene O'Neill Review, and the author of four books on O'Neill, including his latest, Finding the Way to Launday's journey into Eugene O'Neill and Carlotta Monterey O'Neill at Dow House. Hello, William Davies King, welcome to all the drama.
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William Davies King
Thank you. I'm glad to be here.
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Jan Simpson
When did you first encounter Eugene O'Neill and what drew you to his work?
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William Davies King
I first encountered him at a very tender age of about 14. It was assigned to me in a literature class, and I began reading it on a Saturday evening, and instead of going out and playing with others, I found myself reading the entire play that evening and then being so moved by it that I read it again on Sunday evening, and it very much changed my life and set me in a different direction. And by the time I was 18, I'd read all of Eugene Oneills plays and a biography or two, and I became at that moment kind of obsessed with him.
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Jan Simpson
And the first play that you read was Long Day's Journey?
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William Davies King
It absolutely was, and that particular book and the COVID of it and the picture of Eugene O'Neill kind of looking off into the distance kind of stuck with me somehow. The idea that a play could touch so directly on painful feelings and make a beautiful work of art out of it that was so impressive to me. And then I found that much of O'Neill's career was committed to that use of art, that application of art, which is not about just making a, you know, kind of a prosperous career, but really it's about touching on some of the deepest things about being human.
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Jan Simpson
Had you read a lot of plays before? Were you just a person who was drawn to theatrical literature, or was this your introduction to reading play?
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William Davies King
I had read very little. I grew up in Ohio in upper middle class sort of family, but we did not go to the theater in Canton, Ohio, very much, and I had been in a couple of school plays. But really this particular course in literature began my fascination with what literature could do, with what drama could do especially. And out of it, I became a professor of drama.
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Jan Simpson
Eventually, as you read about O'Neill and you reread the play, obviously many times, why did Eugene O'Neill write this play? This particular play?
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William Davies King
Well, this has been the subject of my most recent book, which is concerning the last phase of his career when he moved to California. This was after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature and was widely acclaimed for many, many of his plays. And he was the foremost playwright of the 1920s and 30s in many ways. But by the time he reached the age of 50, he realized that his health was breaking down. He was not going to have many more years to be a writer. And so this became the moment when he decided that he needed to turn to two personal plays. And one of them was Long Day's Journey Into Night, and the other was the Iceman Cometh, and that's the project that he set out for himself and he completed in 1939-1941.
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Jan Simpson
Laundet's journey, though, is even more so than the Iceman, a very, very personal play. And I wonder, was he trying to correct things that had happened in his past, say things to his mother, father, brother that he wished he had said?
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William Davies King
Well, both of those plays take him back to 1912, to the moment before he had written even one play. And very much the events that he recounts in Long Day's Journey. Tonight unveil the story of his family background, which enabled him to become a playwright, which almost, in a sense, necessitated him becoming a playwright. He came from a theatrical family. His father was a very famous actor. His brother was on the road to being an actor as well. And he was a shyer man and somebody who was influenced by modernist thinking and modernist poetry, modernist philosophy. And he was never going to go down the road of being an actor. But he saw the combination of experiences and really, in a sense, tragic experiences of that moment kind of gave him a window onto how maybe art could. Could be an outlet for some feelings and. And maybe connect to others. And, yes, I do think he was, in a sense, coming to terms with his family. His father died in 1920. His mother died in 22, his brother in 1923. So they were all long gone. And so this was, in a sense, his dealing with ghosts. And that metaphor of ghosts is very directly in the way he talks about the play, the way he writes the dedication, and very much in the spirit of what's happening. He was, in a sense, haunted by this. And what I write in this recent book is that he was writing it in this house in California called Dow House that he and his wife built. And in a sense, he had finally arrived at a home which was configured in a way that enabled him to face his dead at last. And that's an expression that he uses in his dedication. So the house, in many ways, enabled the play.
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Jan Simpson
What was it about the house?
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William Davies King
Well, to some degree, I think it had a little bit to do with Taoism itself. The house is named for that religious belief. And Daoism is a philosophy of religion, you could call it, that feeds into the whole notion of how you should live your life in balance and live your life in a recognition that duality is not crippling. Instead, it is just fundamental to the way one should live. And the word dao means way. And so really, Daoism is all about finding the way, the way for a flow. And so in some ways, Daoism lays the groundwork for the approach to design, interior design, that we call Feng shui. And the house was configured that way so that you enter it through a garden courtyard that is very deliberately laid out in a way to encourage the flow of good energy into the house. And. And then you. You know, I developed this argument at some length, but ultimately, as you go into the house, you go upstairs into the innermost place of the house. And that's where he had his study. And there he was, in a sense, able to be shielded from all these kind of malign influences that afflicted him in a certain way, which included the kind of commercial pressures of Broadway and the commercial pressures of publishing and other people sort of needing him to do things for them. And so this was a moment when he could do something that was really very much for himself.
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Jan Simpson
That's what I was going to ask then, this being such a personal play where he was looking back at his life. Why did he decide not to have it published, not to have it produced during his lifetime?
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William Davies King
This is a controversial issue. It was a very personal play. And he realized that he was exposing some family secrets to the world. And so there was an editor he had worked with through much of his career who I think, felt and kind of gave him the sense that maybe this is too intimate a play. And so he decided to withhold it from publication for 25 years after his death. And. And actually, in. In one letter, he seems to suggest that it should never be produced. But part of what enabled it to come forth in that house was the marriage to Carlotta Monterey. And he'd been married to her for about a decade at that point. And she was very much the person who created the design of the house, who protected that environment out of which the play could be born. And so, ultimately, she was the one who reversed that decision and had the play published three years after his death and produced that same year.
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Jan Simpson
Why did she then, though, go against the wishes of the man that she had worked so hard to protect?
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William Davies King
Well, she felt that some of the reasons that had been brought up, one of which was that he had a son who was a professor at Yale, classics professor, and perhaps said that if this play were to come out, it would damage his career. It would be too. You know, it exposed too much of the ugly history of his family. And so he might have been the one to suggest that it should be withheld. But I think in many ways, he felt that the theater wasn't ready for it yet. And that that moment, right during World War II when he was writing the play was a moment when the American audience wouldn't be able to receive it anyway. And also, he had a great mistrust of the acting world. And I think he did not believe that actors could do justice to his play. And so I think that contributed to it as well. And as it turned out, I think that was a good reason. And I think it was Carlotta who. Who realized in the mid-1950s that there were actors at that point who could achieve the. You know, who could carry off that play. She had seen a revival of the Iceman Cometh, directed by Jose Quintero, including Jason Robards in the cast, and she saw that they had, in a sense, brought that play back to life, and she believed that that could happen as well. She did believe that, and she was despairing that O'Neill's name was becoming forgotten, that he was thought of as a playwright of the past. And she wanted to sort of spur a revival of interest in his work, which she very much did. And that moment of the late 50s and going into the 60s was a great moment for the theater to kind of embrace American tragedy. And, you know, the plays of Williams and Miller and Inge and other very significant American playwrights had proved that there's a very strong audience for tragedy and that there is the kind of talent out there to carry off those plays.
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Jan Simpson
How many productions of the play have you seen?
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William Davies King
I've seen about 14, and everything from an amateur kind of community theater production of it in Canton, Ohio, when I was a teenager. And I remember that as just such a vividly wonderful production that just swept me away. So it can be done at all levels. And then at the other end, I saw the production featuring Vanessa Redgrave and the Jessica Lange production. And so, you know, I've seen some very outstanding casts as well.
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Jan Simpson
Do you have a favorite. Is it still that Canton production?
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William Davies King
Maybe it might be, actually, because it. It. It really was the first one I saw, although I had seen the film version, the Sydney Lumet version with Katharine Hepburn and Ralph Richardson. And every time I watch that, that is always just persuades me again. I understand there's a new version coming out on film with Jessica Lange and Ed Harris, and I've read about it. I haven't seen it yet.
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Jan Simpson
After having spent so long studying O'Neill and reading his plays, where do you place Long Day's Journey in his body of work?
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William Davies King
You know, I know so much about O'Neill that I feel that it's like, do you like your fingers better than your liver? Or something? So it's vital. And it is a play that I keep coming back to, especially because it teaches so well. Every time I teach it, I find that there are maybe one or two students who are so moved by it that it kind of grips them in a way that I analogize to my own experience when I was 14.
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Jan Simpson
So it doesn't come across as dated to your current students?
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William Davies King
Oh, to some of them it does, of course. But, you know, the theater demands the imagination, and. And there are always students in my classes, fortunately, who have that imagination and can make the leap into the world of a great artist.
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Jan Simpson
And now I have to ask you the question that I ask in all of these conversations. Why do you think the Pulitzer board awarded its award to this play? O'Neill had already won three Pulitzers. He was no longer alive, no longer active. What was it about this play that they wanted to highlight?
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William Davies King
You Know, I have not completely reviewed the other plays of 1956 to see, you know, what they were comparing it to. But it. It was a play that kind of instantly was recognized as an American classic, as, in a way, a play that speaks so directly to what the theater is in America because it does portray kind of what it is to be in the world of an actor who. Who made his whole career with the Count of Monte Cristo and. And yet. And yet had despair in his life. So in. In many ways, I think it's a play that holds a mirror up to the American theater. And so maybe in some ways, they were struck by its. Its relevance, in a sense. And then beyond that, I. I think, you know, it was actually had its world premiere in Sweden, and Harlotta had this sense that the Swedes had done greater justice to oneills plays than the Broadway theater had. And so she allowed it to be premiered at the Royal Theater there. And so in some ways, I think maybe the Pulitzer committee wanted to sort of reclaim it as an American play.
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Jan Simpson
Well, her decision to go against his wishes and to allow it to be both published and produced, I think confirmed, certified his position perhaps as America's, if not greatest dramatist, sort of founding father of the American theater.
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William Davies King
Yeah, the word father applied to him is complicated.
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Jan Simpson
Yes.
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William Davies King
I mean, his relationship, relationship to his own father and his experience of being a father, both of those are highly problematic. But, yes, I do think that in some ways he carved a pathway that. That needed to be carved so that the American theater wouldn't just be a perpetuation of, you know, minstrel shows and junk like that. And so I do think he is a highly respectable figure who in some ways defined what American theater could be, and others have taken the ball and of course, continued that.
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Jan Simpson
Well, thank you for taking the time to talk with us both about O'Neill and this play that has played such a major role in your own life and career. Thank you very much.
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William Davies King
Thank you. I appreciate it.
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Jan Simpson
And thank you for listening. I hope you'll come back next time. And if you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please send them to me at janbreadroyradio.com.
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