Sorry to everyone for the lame title and lateness of this
post. I know I can’t get credit for it anymore at this point, but I would feel
bad if my opinion surrounding this play weren’t thrown into the abyss of
cyberspace so…
One thing I immediately noticed about Long Day’s Journey
Into Night is the fact that the Tyrone family is a family of theater actors
being played by actors in a theater. How delightfully self-referential, right?
And the great thing about it is that it’s not meta for no reason. I think it
actually mirrors the play’s themes in a really cool way while tying into the
themes we’ve been discussing in class of generational tension, progress, and
our relationship to the past.
After all, the Tyrone family is a family that seems to feel
stuck in the past. Fingers are constantly being pointed in regards to what
examples were set and what paths were defined for people by those who came
before them (i.e. the idea of a son feeling pushed into the same career as his
father or a father blaming an older son for setting a bad example for the
younger son).
This, in my mind, makes the author’s decision to make the
family full of actors a wise one. After all, what is the family doing if not
making a casting complaint? They are frustrated that over generations, the same
play is being performed and each seems to feel that they are a helpless victim,
stuck reading a script they didn’t write for themselves.
On top of this, I think there’s an additional
self-referential element introduced in the form of surveillance. On page 17,
Mary says, “You really must not watch me all the time, James. I mean, it makes
me self-conscious.” Bad news, Mary, but you’re being watched by an audience
constantly. And so are all the other characters who seem incredibly concerned
with who sees what, who’s making jokes about whom, and who is privy to what
information all while laying out their insecurities and bad behavior in a
neatly defined narrative arc for a different set of strangers every night. It’s
funny stuff.
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