A Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a play by Eugene O’Neill. The play is about Mary, Tyrone, Jamie, and Edmund. These four characters are very smart and seem very wealthy. The father, Tyrone, is extremely cheap and stingy, he is a businessman that buys land and rents it out, but he gets scammed a lot by in his mind, a friend, and he is into the theater and Shakespeare. The mother, Mary, has a bunch of things that happen to her. She is very caring, but she has a troubling past of mental and drug problems. She starts showing signs again in the play of mental illness and the characters become worried for her. The older brother, Jamie, is a very interesting character. He is kind of like the mentor to Edmund and he sleeps with prostitutes and drinks a lot of alcohol. He shows a lot of signs of jealousy at Edmund, he also seems very angry. The younger brother, Edmund, is kind of like the baby in the story. He talks a lot about philosophy, writers of philosophy, poetry, poets, and he also drinks a long with Jamie. He is sick in the play and the mother worries about him, but he seems content with his sickness. Edmund has signs of being very pretentious and stuck up.
I think that the idea in this play is very good and unique. I think that the stage directions in this play is extremely well thought out and great. The stage directions throughout the play definitely add a very strong feel to the play and gives a good punch to the story. They are very detailed.
I like the idea of the story and the play is very well thought out and put together well, but I did have some problems with the story. I think that the author had so many ideas for each character that he felt he should put in, that it seems more of a grocery list of problems and characteristics. It all kind of jumbles together and dos not necessarily work with the effect that the play has ultimately. The plot is very slow and it does not seem to build up for me. It was lacking action or even intense moments in the play. When a character revealed a big thing that happened, it’s more glossed over and there seems to be no reaction or turmoil from what they revealed. The big reveals of the mom, Edmund, and Jamie did not have a big effect of a big reveal of what was happening because too many hints and reveals was scattered throughout the play. The reveal didn’t have an effect that it should have had because all of the reveal was scattered throughout. I understand that the mom is very crazy and many of the characters seem crazy, but in this play, so many things were repeated more than once. At times a character would say something to another character that they already told another character, but it was done multiple times and that specific strategy even got repetitive.
The play has a great story and it is well put together, I just feel that it lacks excitement.
