Long Day's Journey into Night – The Mad Person play

A ghost wihtin a ghost within a variation of O’Neill’s fourth act

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Our Mad Woman Play is an adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical masterpiece, rearranged and choreographed with noh styling. O’Neill himself had a strong interest in Asian performance art, especially mask work, and owned several Japanese noh masks.

The appearance of ghosts requiring exorcism is possibly the most familiar (if not an inevitable) feature of noh drama, and Long Day’s Journey into Night is all about ghosts. Aside from the fact that the characters represent O’Neill’s own deceased family members, they are individually possessed by visions of their youthful selves and sometimes refer to themselves or each other as ghosts. The dominant “ghost” in this production is Mary, James Tyrone’s morphine-addicted wife, but Tyrone and his son Edmund, too, use the hieratic gestures of noh to reveal the dreams and memories that haunt them, and Jamie’s warning to his brother arises unnervingly from a kyogen (comic) interlude.

Ships and the sea figure heavily in this play, as in Dark/Silent. The ambivalent relation between brothers evokes comparison with Letters from a Small House. The agitation of Mary, who defines herself as victim of circumstance, is in striking contrast with the serenity of Helen in Dark/Silent.

synopsis by Edith Reisner Newton