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Long Day's Journey Into Night

Before her Broadway appearance in Shadowlands, actress Jane Alexander told me that she requires six weeks of performances to ease into a role.

“Wow,” I thought. “She’ll never work in Buffalo!”

In this city, with audiences of limitless enthusiasm but limited numbers, theaters do not have the luxury of weeks of preview performances. Here, an actor must hit the ground running, often nailing a role for the first time in the presence of the opening night audience after a three-week rehearsal period. Sometimes the entire rehearsal period and run of a show in Buffalo will be shorter than Miss Alexander’s required break-in period.

As a theater community, we compensate for this, in large part, by the fact that, in many ways, our theater community is an extended city-wide acting ensemble. Buffalo actors work so very frequently, creating multiple roles in a year’s time, and they so often get to work with each other. This enables productions to come together more quickly, as actors, familiar with each other’s work, with the stages on which they are working, and with the directors for whom they are working, develop a kind of short-hand among themselves. A feeling of ensemble is often an expectation from the start of a Buffalo theater rehearsal process.

This ensemble sensibility is so thoroughly embedded in the culture of the Buffalo theater community that when I asked Kathleen Gaffney, new artistic director of Studio Arena, if she hoped to become familiar with local actors, I laughed when she assured me that she had been “auditioning” them. Buffalo actors do not know how to audition the way actors in New York or Chicago do. To know the work of Buffalo’s actors, directors must see them perform. Actors here do audition, but directors know the local talent pool and so the process involves taking a look at subtle shadings in a person’s talent, or in putting various actors together to see how they look, or in seeing how a new actor plays with a known actor. Actors do not generally prepare audition pieces—except for musical roles. Sometimes casting takes place by phone call.

Working in this environment can be a challenge for a visiting artist. The current production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night is a case in point.

The production is smartly produced and boasts a marvelously talented cast, who give the script a capable and passionate go. We get a strong sense of a great play with iconic moments well-punctuated and luscious language well-articulated.

There is, however, something unmistakably out of synch. A uniform sense of playing is missing, and the performances seem, even after a week of playing, not quite ready.

Paul Falzone, an actor with Broadway, regional, and television credits in abundance, plays James Tyrone; Diane Gaidry, a Buffalo native with strong television and film credits plays his wife, Mary. These are two of the most coveted roles in 20th century American drama.

The sons, Jamie and Edmund, are played by popular local actors Christian Brandjes and Michael Providence; with recent Niagara University graduate Sara Kovacsi as Cathleen, the tippling maid.

Long Day’s Journey into Night is a long play. Taking place over the course of a single day, we watch as the Tyrone family is obliged to confront the demons that lie beneath the surface of their relationships. Each has, in profound ways, done things to disappoint the others.

The father, James, is a celebrated actor, who has squandered his once great talent in order to enjoy the commercial success of a single role. Having grown up in a poor Irish immigrant family, he has been stingy and withholding with his own family. His wife, Mary, is addicted to the morphine first given to her by a cheap hotel doctor, hired by her husband, after the birth of her younger son Edmund. Now Edmund, a grown man, is facing tuberculosis infection, and the father’s impulse is to send him for the cheapest therapy possible. These events are cross-cut by James’ troubled relationship with his older son, Jamie, a hard-drinking good-for-nothing.

In this production, scene follows upon scene without building momentum. When all the pistons are firing, this play can build to an emotional height in which the audience is fixed to a single heart beat. Here, however, from Act III, in which Mary sits with Cathleen and reminisces, to the conclusion, the scenes seem to be counting down the time. Each of the interactions through this section of the play is famous, adding to the weight. As Tyrone confronts and is confronted by each of his sons in the late-night sequence that concludes the play, I found myself looking to the door through which Mary Tyrone would come, marking the climactic scene.

Ironically, it is in this final scene that Diane Gaidry finally finds pace and fluidity in Mary’s speech. The sing-song quality that she employs throughout her performance works most effectively in these moments, and we get a glimpse of what she might be like in the role if she had the luxury of Jane Alexander’s six weeks.

As Tyrone, between bellowing pronouncements, Falzone gives us a hint of the swaggering matinee idol and of the husband in love with a beautiful young bride. His performances is quite well-realized, though, like Gaidry, he gets on increasingly sure footing as the evening progresses. Brandjes and Providence, who have rather less pressure on them, do come off better, giving cynical performances in their more playful roles. Kovacsi is quite charming as Cathleen.