By Eugene O'Neill

Kathryn Fuller and Burton Cooper

Most people live in several planes of existence. There is the plane of impulse, in which we respond spontaneously and without reflection. There is the plane of society, in which we treat with, impress, and/or deceive other people. There is the plane of compromise, in which we tolerate the undesirable rather than risk a correction. There is the plane of contemplation, in which we search hopefully for the truth of what we are. And there is the plane of escape and dreams.

There is a breadth to Long Day’s Journey Into Night that may make it the most universal piece of stage realism ever turned out by an American playwright. For doesn’t it expose the forces that work both to unite and to tear asunder all human groups? What family does not have its private disgraces, its nasty recriminations, its unforgotten grievances? What family is not obliged to put up with some sort of unreasonable behavior from its breadwinner, some self-centeredness from its dominant figure? What brothers or sisters do not posses a pinch of jealously that pollutes their love of each other? What wife is not doomed to spend much time in the company of hired help or neighbors or associates that bore her? What family is not faced with some compulsive behavior which it must ignore, coddle, or excuse in order to avoid rupture? All these things O’Neill had put into this play, badly and directly. The terror it inspires comes not from the day’s events, but from the gradual intensification of its torment and violence as night moves in.
Long Days Journey Into Night is not so much a "play" as a continuously absorbing interpretation of Mary Tyrone’s line, "The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us."