Everyman Theatre’s new production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning masterpiece (premiered posthumously in 1956), begins on a bright summer day in the Connecticut home of the Tyrone family. But the play soon sweeps us into an emotionally tortuous night in which the family begins to confront long-buried secrets of drug addiction and dysfunction, and then struggles, despite their love for each other, to cope with the truth.
Joining Tom in the studio to discuss the challenges of bringing this play’s characters and its powerful themes to life, is Everyman resident company actor Deborah Hazlett, who plays the drug-addicted matriarch, Mary Tyrone; and Jonathan K. Waller, Everyman’s managing director. They explore how O’Neill’s dark classic seems especially resonant today, as an epidemic of opioid addiction and abuse tears at the fabric of millions of American families, here in Baltimore and across the country, and how the company is reaching out to address that issue with its audiences and the wider community.
Long Day's Journey Into Night, directed by Donald Hicken, continues at the Everyman Theatre through March 4.
