2024-04-09 17:14:33
The morning sun shines through the curtained windows. However, as the day progresses, it weakens, until at night the stage is plunged into an ominous gloom, only occasionally illuminated by lighting. Similarly, the atmosphere between a mother, a father and their two grown-up sons changes in the production of the play A long journey from day to night, which is newly presented by Prague’s Divadlo v Dlouhé. Outwardly problem-free coexistence is burdened by trauma and addictions.
James is an aging actor obsessed with money, regardless of the pain he causes others through his miserliness. His older son, Jamie, is a mixture of inept imitation of his father, empty defiance and alcoholism. The hopeless reality is slowly falling on the younger offspring. And the mother, who has always softened the father’s hardness, is looking for a place to escape from reality. Feelings of dominance, passivity, guilt or, on the contrary, integrity spill over between them. However, the defining emotion of their existence is anxiety, which everyone fights in their own way – some with alcohol, others with morphine.
American playwright Eugene O’Neill’s magnum opus was first performed in 1956, not long after the Nobel Prize winner for literature had passed away. It heralded the trend of postwar psychological-realist drama in the US and posthumously earned him his fourth Pulitzer Prize.
It has now been staged in Dlouhá by the politically and aesthetically distinguished director Ivan Buraj, who will take over the artistic direction of this stage in autumn 2025. She has been searching for an identity for several years now, after the longtime boss Hana Burešová left. The subsequent engagement of the directing duo Skutr was cut short by the premature departure of this tandem to the National Theatre. And thanks to that, Buraj got the opportunity to outline the concept with which he will start in Dlouhá in more than a year. In it, he works with the motive of the so-called new sincerity, simply put, a return from superficiality to compassion and confrontation with complicated questions and emotions brought about by today’s reality.
Analysis connects the thirty-six-year-old director known from Brno’s HaDivadl with Eugene O’Neill. In his strongly autobiographical text, the American explores the breakdown of personality and the toxicity of family relationships based on unhealthy conditions of cohabitation.
In his theater work to date, Buraj has dealt with a strongly individualistic society dominated by feelings of meaninglessness, transience and emptiness of life. He most often reached for modernist pieces growing out of the realist tradition, which the director, like the present, explores, subverts or redefines in various ways. Often with the help of multimedia means and various acting aesthetics.
Barbara Lukešová in the role of Mary struggles with addiction. On the right is Jan Vondráček as James. | Photo: Martin Špelda
The work with time is specific for Buraj, the effort to achieve extreme slowness in the action on stage, which, however, was accentuated by Eugene O’Neill in this play set in a single day in August 1912. His biographer, Normand Berlin, describes Long Day into Night as “a journey from day to night, a journey through time, forwards and backwards – a search for causes, a journey through life, from 8:30 in the morning to midnight, a long, endless, painful day in the life of the Tyrone family “.
Antonín Šilar’s scene is detailed and realistic. It represents the living room at the Tyrones’ summer home. In addition to the central sofa set, work table and wicker chair on both sides of the stage, it offers two other partially hidden game plans – a staircase leading to the floor where the bedrooms are located, and a rear entrance to the kitchen and out to the garden. This is where the servant Cathleen comes from in particular. She complements the four central characters and brings the earthiness of a representative of a different social class, distance and a certain insight into unpleasant family situations.
The dialogues between the Tyrones capture a complex tangle of psychological motivations and subsequent, especially verbal, actions. It is interesting that it was O’Neill who did not trust actors throughout his theatrical career, and yet wrote a play that depended on them.
When directing them, director Buraj follows Stanislavsky’s method, which requires the actor’s full psychological identification with the role, so that he can empathize with the characters and be able to justify his behavior on stage. The psychological-realistic procedure defined by the Soviet dramatist Konstantin Sergeevich Stanislavsky was first used by the Moscow Art Theater, known by the abbreviation MCHT, and later also by the prestigious Actors’ Studio school, founded after the Second World War in New York. It is with her that all post-war American psychological drama is connected. It is acting that is almost unheard of in current Czech conditions and requires a completely different approach from the performers than what they are used to.
Also in the context of Dlouhá’s previous work, this emphasis on actor’s theater is exceptional. Buraj and dramaturg Terezá Marečková, who will appear on the Prague stage with him, cast Jan Vondráček, Samuel Toman and Štěpánka Fingerhutová in the production from the existing ensemble. She alternates in the role of maid with the director’s long-time collaborator from HaDivadl, the completely accurate and charming Tána Malíková at the premiere.
Matyáš Řezníček plays the older son Jamie, who, like his father, took up acting. The younger Edmund, played by Samuel Toman, is waiting for a diagnosis from the doctor. | Photo: Martin Špelda
In addition to them, Barbara Lukešová as Mary and Matyáš Řezníček as her older son act in the news. In 2019, he already collaborated with Buraj on the production of Kosmos by Witold Gombrowicz at the New Stage of the National Theater in Prague, to which Řezníček belonged until recently.
The younger protagonists do a little better in the demanding and highly focused roles of the members of the Tyrone family. The positions offered by Lukešová in the role of mother are not always believable, but in her case it is one of the most exposed characters.
The actors are equipped with microports that complete the civility of the intimate moments, accompanied by pre-recorded audio tracks of their inner voices, which is a distinctive feature of Buraj’s direction. But in the course of more than three hours of production, there are very few of his kind. The situations on the stage are interrupted only by light cuts, an irritating hum is heard in the soundtrack.
The director breaks into the template most radically in the second third, when the traumas of the participants are already named and exposed. Here, he introduces a so-called “therapy dream” into the production, when the actors begin to confide in the professional therapist Daniel Wagner on behalf of their characters. With this image, Buraj seems to indicate from which perspective he reads the material and what is relevant to him in it. The topic of mental health and a certain fragility of the teenage generation cannot be ignored in the contemporary public space.
With respect to Buraj’s previous directing work, in connection with the principle he chose for The Long Day to Night Journey, a comparison is offered with the production of the play Small Townsmen by Maxim Gorký, which he staged in 2018 at the HaDivadle in Brno. A realistic social drama from the beginning of the 20th century, also depicting a split in a family, he invested in a “hyper-realistic” scenography including several table and floor lamps as sources of intimate lighting and atmospheric mood changes.
In Brno, however, external realism constantly ran into stylized acting, when the protagonists uttered their lines with anxious rootedness, even a kind of numbness reminiscent of a modern person who remained trapped in the backdrop of the past, prejudices and meaningless ideals. In the end, they became completely estranged and distanced themselves from the previous events. This does not happen in Dlouhá – after the intervention of the therapist, they remain in their roles and finish the rest of O’Neill’s text.
For many of Buraj’s supporters, The Long Day to Night Journey may be insufficiently vigorous, quite possibly antiquated. The consistent adherence to psychological-realistic acting makes it, on the contrary, neo-avant-garde in the contemporary context. In this case, more than ever, it depends with what experience and also the degree of tolerance the viewer will view and evaluate it.
Theatre
Eugene O’Neill: Long Day’s Journey into Night
Directed by: Ivan Buraj
Theater in Dlouhé, Prague, premiere March 23, next reruns April 30 and May 6.