(FOUR STARS)
Harold Clurmana great actor, director and theater critic, considered that in all the pieces of Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953), there is a constant theme: the loss of faith. He further maintained that “Long day’s journey into the night”, released after his death, it was not only the tragic dissection of an American family, but an example of the “loss of the spiritual coherence that makes men and societies complete.”
American playwright, award Nobel Prize for literaturedrew on his own experience to create this macabre score for four performers, in which he tells us about the collapse of the Tyrone in a single day, from the morning
towards the night. In the plot, James Tyrone (Arturo Puig), a stingy actor who sacrificed his dream of becoming a great Shakespearean performer, made a fortune with dull plays and invested it in different properties that he mortgaged to increase his assets.
For more than thirty years he has been married to Mary (German Jungle), a fragile woman, anchored to the past, who still
She remembers her first romantic encounter with this greedy man. When she gave birth to the sickly Edmond (Lautaro Delgado Tymruk), the second child, James hired a doctor who prescribed morphine to ease the pain and she became addicted to the opiate. The cynical elder scion (Diego Gentile), rejects his father’s grandiloquence, cannot stand his mother’s addiction and spends his days among alcohol and prostitutes as a way to escape from reality.
O’Neill, almost at the beginning of the work, explains to us the situation of pain and anguish of these beings and what emerges is an investigation into the souls and minds of the characters. The rarefied atmospherenot only because of the fog that penetrates the house, the dim lights and the crumbling walls, are the perfect environment for a endless chain of reproaches and accusations.
Such a text, a true classic, requires actors capable of transmitting desolation and anxiety until reaching the final chord, full of love and compassion. German, he precisely traces his creature’s degrading descent into hell, from initial joy to the addict’s deep compulsive loneliness. Puig intensely captures the helplessness and desperation to approach Mary and is moved when her voice is filled with painful resignation.
Well guided by Luciano Suardi, both achieve moving work. The talented Gentile and Delgado Tymruk are not far behind them.