Long Day's Journey Into Night

This autobiographical play depicts one long, summer day in the life of the fictional Tyrone family, a dysfunctional household based on O’Neill’s immediate family during his early years. James Tyrone is a vain actor and penny pincher, as was O’Neill’s father James. Mary Tyrone struggles with a morphine addiction, as did his mother Ellen. The fictional son Jamie Tyrone is an alcoholic, as was O’Neill’s brother Jamie. And the Tyrones’ younger son Edmund is deathly ill with tuberculosis. (O’Neill himself suffered and recovered from a mild case of tuberculosis.)  It’s a story of love, hate, betrayal, addiction, blame, and the fragility of family bonds—particularly between fathers and sons. O’Neill took two years to write it, essentially reliving his own painful past as he wrote about it. In the play, he bares his soul and essentially tells the world what it was like to grow up in his own house. He…