Italics are mine

Digital Theatre: "Long Day's Journey Into Night"

I wrote last month about the phenomenal production of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" at the Old Vic, directed by Yael Farber, which I saw online thanks to Digital Theatre. Here is another remarkable production available on the website: "Long Day's Journey into Night" by Eugene O'Neill filmed at the Apollo Theater in the West End in May 2012, with David Suchet as James Tyrone and Laurie Metcalf as Mary Tyrone. Trevor White and Kyle Soller complete the cast. (The production won the Oliver Award for Best Revival in 2013.) The staging, faithful to the period, includes a realistic set and costumes without a great focus on contrasts or lighting, which makes this production's spirit very different from the light-and-shadows theme in "The Crucible"; yet, I found myself enjoying "Long Day's Journey..." as much as I loved at "Crucible".

What really carries "Long Day's Journey..." is the emotional life of the characters that is so expertly brought to the audience's eyes to see by the four actors playing the members of the Tyrone family (parents and two sons). I've seen the movie adaptation with Katharine Hepburn and didn't care for it. In every scene of the movie I felt I was watching Hepburn playing Mary Tyrone rather than Mary Tyrone herself - Hepburn was, I felt, very heavy-handed in her depiction of Mary's addiction. In contrast, Metcalf was a much subtler actress who convincingly portrayed Mary's mood swings depending on whether she has had time to "visit the spare room upstairs" or not. Because of a certain relative's severe alcohol addiction in my family, the play has always hit close to home for me, but Metcalf's characterization (the denials, the excuses to absent oneself in order to get more, the refusal to face reality, the blaming, etc) was truly spot-on. 

I am partial to "modern" stagings with very simple sets so visually the production with all the period details on stage was not quite to my taste but in the end that did not matter. What did matter was the superb acting that enables a group of actors on a London stage to tell us a story of addiction and family pain as relevant today as it was when it was premiered in 1956.

Below is the trailer.

And if you're inclined to watch more productions available on Digital Theatre, after "The Crucible" and "Long Day's Journey into Night", I'd recommend "A Doll's House", which I saw at BAM and is just perfect.

Highlights from #Muse15

Last weekend (May 1-3) I attended the Muse and the Marketplace writing conference in Boston. For this post I want to focus on my favorite teacher at the conference, Lynne Barrett of Florida International University, who taught two classes, and the winner of the Grub Street National Book Prize, The Great Glass Sea by Josh Weil. (Weil was on hand at the reception for a short reading and book-signing. He also taught a craft class and led a discussion on his book, which unfortunately I could not attend.)

Lynne Barrett

The classes I attended over the weekend were all very good but Lynne Barrett's were so head-and-shoulders above to the rest that the advice I got from the other presenters (quite good in its own right) seems very trite by comparison. I had taken a class with Barrett by chance at the previous M&M conference I attended - I think it was in 2009 - and when I had the opportunity to attend again this year and saw she was teaching two distinct classes this year, I jumped at the opportunity to hear her twice.

Because she might give these lectures elsewhere in the future and clearly put a lot of time and effort in preparing her talks, I don't want to post her entire content here for the world to see for free, so I'll only provide highlights. If you'd like to know more, please find a conference near you where Barrett teaches and race to secure a spot!

Lecture 1: Dramatis Personae. In this lecture, Barrett recommended making a list of the characters that appear in a story or novel, including when they appear and the role (character type) they play in the book. She also recommended making scene charts as a way to see how characters interact with each other. A scene chart captures, for each scene, the length of that scene and the characters that appear in it. (You want your characters to have effects on each other.) It also distinguishes whether the scene is in the present or a flashback. Barrett used a fictitious example of an internal process/decision to illustrate her point and then led us through a more complicated but highly insightful chart depicting character interactions in The Great Gatsby.

Quote: "Characters who enact their internal conflict with strong, contradictory actions serve the story the best."-Lynne Barrett

Lecture 2: Disentangling Time. This lecture discussed the structure of three progressive complications as an overarching frame for a story or book, with the writer's choice of point of view and story start (choosing what will be a flashback, etc) creating compelling, unique stories. Barrett used The Three Little Pigs to make her point and we had a great time crafting a story using that very same theme, turning the three little pigs into two brothers and a sister and the wolf into a loan shark looking for his money. In the second part of the lecture, we studied the structure of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier with an eye on disentangling time, especially how du Maurier accelerates or slows down the pace and skips information inessential for the reader. (For example, we are told the narrator discusses her now-defunct parents with Max for an hour but we are not told what she said, because it is not important to the story.) We analyzed some of du Maurier's techniques to increase tension. Rebecca also falls within the framework of the three complications when seen through the prism of how the narrator views Max's feelings toward Rebecca.

In addition to being an English professor at FIU, Barrett (@LynneBarrett on Twitter) is also an acclaimed short story writer, best known for The Secret Names of Women and Magpies. I hope she'll return to M&M next year!

Josh Weil

Weil read from his prize-winning novel The Great Glass Sea, set in contemporary Russia (in a slightly alternate universe), which depicts the life of two twin brothers who drift apart in adult age. It has been described as "an epic tale of brotherly love, swathed in all the magic of Russian folklore and set against the backdrop of an all-too-real alternate present." Weil, like me, studied Russian for several years in high school and what I've read of the book so far (I bought the paperback after the reading) is truly excellent, as original and compelling as it was presented to be. I can't wait to read more of the relationship between Yarik and Dima.

This was a highly successful M&M conference by all accounts, further cementing Boston's position as incubator not only of start-ups and technologies but of creative writers and artistic innovation.