Review: Lange Shines in 'Long Day's Journey Into Night'

"Long Day's Journey Into Night" is often considered Eugene O'Neill's masterwork. Set in a summer house by the sea in Connecticut over the course of a single day, it starts off as a tale of a loving family — and slides into despair as it becomes clear that the family can't handle the addiction in their midst.

Jessica Lange, in one of the meatiest roles the theater has for older women, plays Mary Cavan Tyrone, a morphine addict based on O'Neill's own mother. (The play wasn't produced until after his death in 1953.) Lange is masterful here. She starts out frail, fluttery and sunny, having recently kicked the habit at a sanitarium. But as the day progresses and she gives into the craving, she uses her powerful vocal range to show us anger and fear, and a kind of wheedling neediness. She just wants her family to leave her alone, so she can fade away in peace.

When she's onstage, no one's as compelling. When she's not, however, the show drags — and since it's almost four hours, that's a lot of dragging. That's not to say there aren't other good performances. Michael Shannon is charismatic as her older, alcoholic son Jamie, and Gabriel Byrne plays patriarch James Tyrone as a vulnerable, sad man who looks back on his choices with regret. Colby Minifie is sassy as the maid. But John Gallagher, Jr. is miscast as O'Neill's tubercular stand-in, Edmund. He ghosts around the edges of scenes, never fully connecting with anyone else on stage.

That lack of connection is actually a problem for more cast members than Gallagher. Under Jonathan Ken's direction, this show, particularly in the second act, feels more like an excuse for showboat acting than an organic portrait of a family in decline. It is as if the other actors are circling Lange wanly, like isolated planets, too caught up in her gravitational pull to relate to each other.