'Journey into Night' exposes dark secrets

Addiction is America's disease, and playwright Eugene O'Neill has gone down in history as writing the great American stagework about addiction.

O'Neill's mother was a morphine addict. His Pulitzer Prize-winning epic "Long Day's Journey into Night" tells her difficult and painful story. It reminds us that addiction, in America, is truly a family disease.

Locally, the Pear Avenue Theater has mounted a polished community theater production of the show in Mountain View.

Set on one particular day in 1912, in a backwater coastal Connecticut town, "Long Day's Journey into Night" tells of an affluent and self-made, but dysfunctional, Irish-American family.

The Tyrones, as they are called in the play, live in a toxic and radioactive matrix of family addiction and illusion, with a big disconnect from reality. This is a nuclear family comprised of three drunks and a dope fiend.

In addition to the morphine-addicted mother, there is an alcoholic father and two alcoholic sons. Trapped in their disease, the family wants to love and tries to love, but addiction gets in the way.

Instead, they live to push each other's buttons and to blame each other. The play's first two acts set up past and present issues. A third act blows family deceptions and deceit out of the water.

Director Jeanie Forte's Mountain View production is well cast and well staged. She gets solid performances from all five actors.

Tom Ammon is the alcoholic family patriarch James Tyrone, a successful former stage actor turned pathological cheapskate and small-town Connecticut gentry land investor, relentlessly critical of his two rudderless, alcoholic sons.

John S. Russell is a convincing Edmund, the family's younger son, its white hope, and a budding journalist. He is the alter ego for playwright O'Neill.

Eric Rice pulls a strong oar as the lazy, gambling older son Jamie, who himself is a jaded third-rate Broadway actor still living largely off his father. Jamie confesses to loving his young brother and wanting him to succeed, but hopes to destroy him at the same time. This is not a comedy.

Diane Tasca plays the morphine-addicted mother Mary Tyrone. Fragile, brittle, lonely and inwardly vanishing, she slowly turns into a ghost.

Sarah Eismann has a distinctive smaller role as a saucy and rebellious family serving girl.

In the course of three hours, "Long Day's Journey into Night" unravels from the present moment back into the traumas and obsessions of the family's past, and causes everyone to point fingers at everyone else.

In a poetic final act, father James and son Edmund find enough grace to open up to each other about deeply held hopes, fears and dreams.

"Long Day's Journey into Night" is about the iron grip of co-dependent family denial. If these family members pretend that they don't have problems, then they don't. Instead, blame is the glue that keeps them all together.

Oddly enough, this masterpiece of world literature has a Bay Area connection. O'Neill wrote the play between 1939 and 1941, barricaded up in his hilltop retreat named Tao House, across the San Francisco Bay in Danville, amidst the rolling brown hillsides of Contra Costa County.

O'Neill, however, embargoed the play as unproducable during his lifetime because of its excruciatingly intimate family story. After O'Neill's death in 1953, his wife Carlotta released the play, which was produced on Broadway, and shot actor Jason Robards Jr. to stardom in the role of son Jamie.

Addiction is America's disease. And exhibit No. 1 is "Long Day's Journey into Night."

Rating: Three stars

E-mail John Angell Grant at jagplays@dailynewsgroup.com.

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