About the Play:

Long Day's Journey Into Night was one of Royal National Theatre of Britain's top 100 plays of the 20th century.

Winner of the 1957 Pulitzer Prize in Drama; Winner of the 1957 New York Drama Critics Circle Award; Winner of the 2013 Olivier Award for Best Revival

Long Day's Journey Into Night has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues, Male Monologues, Female/Male Scenes, and Male/Male Scenes (particularly suitable for those over 40 years old).

Long Day's Journey Into Night is a full-length drama by Nobel Laureate and four-time Pulitzer Prize winner Eugene O'Neill. In a single day, we meet the members of the Tyrone family: the blustering actor-father, the opium-addicted mother, the rebellious older brother and the poetic, sickly younger brother. Eugene O'Neill's sprawling Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play explores the self delusions and lack of communication that chain the Tyrones together and threaten to destroy them.

Long Day's Journey Into Night is a semi-autobiographical masterpiece that intimately examines the addictions, regrets, and deceits of the tormented Tyrone family. Through the course of a heart-wrenching day, the members of the family confront one another as their blame, resentment, and animosity explodes. On a fog-bound summer day, regret and recrimination hang in the air as the Tyrone family negotiates the delicate balance between truth and illusion. James Tyrone, a vain, faded matinée idol, presides over a household in ruin – his wife Mary, whose morphine addiction provides escape; son Edmund, tethered to home yet dreaming of life on the open sea; and son Jamie, whose studied cynicism protects him from a lifetime of failure. The family descends into physical and spiritual ruin, even as their lives are bound together by an unbreakable bond of love. Intense and passionate, this is one of the greatest American plays written in the 20th century.

Long Day's Journey Into Night was written in 1941-42, but so closely based on his own family that O'Neill forbade any performance until 25 years after his death. First published in 1956, this autobiographical masterpiece, which the playwright called "a play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood," is regarded as his finest work. O'Neill posthumously received the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Long Day's Journey Into Night. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops, has enjoyed five revivals on Broadway, and remains a staple of regional repertory houses and community theatres.

Cast: 2 female, 3 male

What people say:

"Long Day's Journey Into Night has been worth waiting for. It restores the drama to literature and the theatre to art." — The New York Times

"…a magnificent and shattering play." — New York Post

"It is a stunning theatrical experience." — New York Herald-Tribune

"This is O'Neill's most beautiful play." — New York Daily News

"One of the marvels of Long Day's Journey Into Night — and one reason it so often seems newly born with every revival — is it can accommodate shifts in its center of emotional gravity." — The New York Times

About the Playwright:

Eugene O'Neill (1889-1953), the father of American drama, the author of 49 plays, won four Pulitzer Prizes for drama, and is the only American playwright to have received a Nobel Prize (1936).