A journey into madness

I chose the play Long days journey into night by Eugene O'neil as my play to read for this assignment. It is the kind of play I would have rather watch on a theatre than read it myself, I think I would have been able to enjoy it way more than I actually did.

The play is about a very tragic, depressing and stresful day on the life of a very particular family, the Tyrone's, in which nothing seems to be alright. We go through the day of the mother, Mary Tyrone, a drug user who has long been fighting her addiction and who decided that that day was the perfect day for a relapse. The day of the father, James Tyrone, a men who used to be a famous actor and that now lives out of buying properties and the income they may bring, trying to spend as little money as possible to reach his goals and solve his and his family's needs. The day of Jamie Tyrone, the eldest son of the couple, a known alcoholic and whore addict with no aspirations. The day of Edmund Tyrone, the youngest son, who is very weak and ill, and has to face the diagnosis of a sickness that could kill him. 

The day starts with a conversation, the first of many, in which Mary pretends that she has not started taking morphine again while her husband and sons suspect that she has, and this is pretty much how the whole play will work. All the juicy parts, such as the trip to town, the doctor's appointment that Edmund has to attend, Mary taking drugs, etc, happens behind the courtain and we are not there to enjoy it, we just get all the nagging and fighting that happens on pretty much all their conversations.

In a world where we all expect to read about are happy succesful families, reading this play is really an adventure into madness. The writer is a genious when it comes to making us feel what the characters are feeling. For example when, after a long day, Edmund and James come back from their trip to the town and meet Mary, and start talking about her going to the drugstore with Catleen and says:

Mary:

Her face hardenng stubbornly

Know what? That I suffer from rheumatism in my hands and have to take medicine to kill te pain? Why should be ashamed of that?

She then goes ahead and blames her addiction on Edmund being born, to what Tyron replies...

Tyron:

Don't mind her, lad. It does not mean anything. When she gets to the stage when she gives the old crazy

excuse about her hands she's gone far away from us.

At that point of the play I was screaming for Mary to get a grip and admit that she has started to take morphine again, Tyrone must have been so frustrated, because even though we could see a lot of fighting and pointing fingers, the love he felt for her I believe was deep, noone who does not love endures as much as him, same goes for her children, they expected her to get get better, but I guess they'll have to keep waiting.

As part of the adventure we are in while reading the play we realize that the Tyrone family is far away from being the image we all expect about what a family living the american dream would be. 

As Laurence Farlengetti writes on his poem

The poet’ 

s eye obscenely seeing

sees the surface of the round world

          with its drunk rooftops

          and wooden oiseaux on clothesliens

          and its clay males and females

          with hot legs and rosebud breasts

          in roll away beds

and its trees full of mysteries

and its Sunday parks and speechless statues

and its America

         with its ghost towns and empty Ellis Islands

and it's surrealist landscape of

                          mindless prairies

                          supermarket suburbs

                          steamheated cemeteries

                          cinerama holy days

                          and protesting cathedrals

a kissproof world of plastic toiletseats tampax and taxis

         drugged store cowboys and las vegas virgins

         disowned indians and cinemad matrons

         unroman senators and conscientious non-objectors

and all other fatal shorn-up fragments

of the immigrant's dream come too true

    and mislaid

               among the sunbathers

Life in America is not only about big mansions and expensive top of the class cars, there are other realities, there are Tyrone families all over the place where the wife was not married to a rich guy to be the perfect housewife of, but married for love to an actor, which by then was not well seen by the society of the time.

There are people like James Tyron who are so cheap that rather send his son to the worst hospital there is, and pay for the cheapest accommodations as long as he is able to save money, no matter the cost. Not everyone lived a  life made of plastic, ask Edmund about it!.