NEW LONDON, Conn. — Change a few words and dress the characters in modern outfits, and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” Nobel Prize-winning playwright Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical masterpiece, could be about any of the dozens of local families today torn apart by opioid addiction.
“It’s very relevant,” Jessica Lange, who last week won a Tony Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of the morphine-addicted mother Mary Tyrone in the current Broadway production, said in a recent radio interview on the Leonard Lopate Show. “Every night I get on stage and I start ranting about doctors … and it feels very, very current.”
Robert Dowling, a New London resident who wrote a critically acclaimed 2014 biography of O’Neill, believes the play offers some valuable insights that can help this community understand and, perhaps, better confront the current epidemic of addiction to prescription opioids and its cheaper illegal cousin, heroin.
Its most obvious message is that this is not a new problem, both Dowling and Richter said, and to recognize that finger-pointing and denial have never made things better.
“It’s the family’s pathological secrecy that denied Mary Tyrone her justifiable place as a victim and not a perpetrator,” said Dowling, an English professor at Central Connecticut State University who consulted on the current Broadway show, answering historical background questions for the cast.
“It’s very important for families not to bury themselves in shame and recognize that it’s a disease that can be cured,” he said. “But if you make it into a pathology, it will only get worse.”
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