Long Day's Journey into Depression

Depression is a complex and often debilitating mental health condition that can have a profound impact on a person's life. It is not just a passing feeling of sadness or low mood, but rather a persistent state of emotional turmoil that can interfere with daily activities, relationships, and overall well-being.

The journey into depression can be a long and arduous one, filled with challenges and setbacks. It may begin with feelings of fatigue, loss of interest in previously enjoyable activities, and changes in sleep and appetite. As the condition progresses, these symptoms can become more severe, leading to feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness, and even suicidal thoughts.

Seeking help for depression is crucial, as early intervention can often lead to better outcomes. Treatment options may include therapy, medication, lifestyle changes, and support from family and friends. With the right combination of these approaches, many people are able to manage their symptoms and begin to regain control of their lives.

It is important to remember that depression is a treatable condition, and there is always hope. If you or someone you know is struggling with depression, don't hesitate to reach out for help. You are not alone, and there are people who care and want to support you on your journey to recovery.

Is it just me, or does this bear an uncanny resemblance to Death of A Salesman? What if the title of that classic play were changed to 'Linda Loman Has a Morphine Problem'?

Now, don't get me wrong. I devoured this piece in one sitting, completely enthralled by it. The way Jamie quoted Swinburne nearly had me in tears.

There's something about the story that draws you in and holds your attention. It's like a modern-day take on a classic theme.

Maybe it's the exploration of human nature, the flaws and struggles that we all face. Or perhaps it's the way the characters are brought to life, making us care about what happens to them.

Whatever it is, this story has left a lasting impression on me. It's a reminder that even in the most unexpected places, we can find something that touches our hearts and makes us think.

I can't wait to see what else the author has in store for us.

I have come across The Iceman Cometh on numerous lists of books that one simply must read. As a result, I purchased it along with this play. Regrettably, I was unable to engage with The Iceman because it has an abundance of characters. At first glance, at least, these characters seemed to be very similar. Perhaps I will give it another try at a later time.

The Long Day's Journey into Night is regarded as an autobiographical work. I would highly recommend it to anyone who doesn't have an aversion to reading plays and who enjoys reading for atmosphere. The atmosphere within the family is masterfully conveyed. It immediately draws the reader in and is so incredibly horrendous that it leaves a lasting mark on one's soul, so to speak poetically. It is truly one of the finest plays I have ever had the pleasure of reading!

Ah yes, of course. Just after finishing my delightful collection of happy tales,

Slam! There comes the depressing O'Neill. (I should have definitely read it before the other, but oh well.)

It was good, very good, and sad, very sad. What else do you want from me, Eugene!? You already took all my tears.

This play by O'Neill seems to have a magic that pulls you into a world of sorrow and despair. The characters and their fates are so vividly portrayed that it's impossible not to be affected.

I find myself constantly empathizing with their struggles and hardships. It makes me realize that life is not always filled with joy and happiness, but also with pain and disappointment.

Despite the sadness, there is also a certain beauty in O'Neill's writing. The way he uses language to express emotions and thoughts is truly remarkable.

I will definitely be thinking about this play for a long time to come.

I loved this piece so much. It truly touched my heart and left me with a sense of longing. I really need to see this play performed live on stage.

The words in the blockquote are so profound. It describes those moments in life when one feels a sense of unity with nature, as if becoming one with the sun, the hot sand, and the green seaweed swaying in the tide. It's like a saint's vision of beatitude, a moment when the veil of reality is drawn back and the secret of life is revealed.

But then, just as quickly as it comes, the moment passes, and one is left alone again, lost in the fog of life. The author laments that being born a man was a great mistake, and that he would have been more successful as a sea gull or a fish. He feels like a stranger, never truly at home, not really wanting or being wanted, and always a little in love with death.

This passage makes me think about my own life and the times when I have felt a similar sense of disconnection and longing. It makes me wonder what it would be like to be part of something greater, to truly belong and have meaning in life.

Plays are indeed meant to be seen rather than simply read.

This particular American classic that delves into the themes of alcoholism and drug addiction within the theatrical community holds a special place and truly deserves to be witnessed.

The version featuring Jason Robards, Katherine Hepburn, and Sir Ralph Richardson is nothing short of magnificent.

One should not miss the opportunity to download this outstanding production at the very first chance that presents itself.

These renowned actors bring the story to life with their精湛的表演 skills, adding depth and authenticity to the characters and the overall narrative.

By experiencing the play in this visual and auditory form, one can fully appreciate the nuances and emotions that the playwright intended to convey.

So, don't hesitate, take advantage of the chance to download this remarkable version and immerse yourself in the world of this American classic.

**Expanded Article**

Long Day's Journey into Night, widely regarded as one of the finest American dramas and the masterpiece of its author, Eugene O'Neill, was first published posthumously in 1955. The play's plot and characters draw heavily from O'Neill's own autobiography, with his tortured family life, marked by regret and addiction, serving as the inspiration. The sources seemed to demand that it be withheld until O'Neill's death in 1953.

The play's title is highly appropriate as it adheres to the Aristotelian unities of time and place. Set from morning to night on one summer day in one room of the Tyrone family's New England summer home, the offstage sea, with its encroaching fog and sounding foghorn, contributes significantly to the solemn, dreamlike mood.

The patriarch of the Tyrone family, James, is a highly successful stage actor who emerged from impoverished Irish immigrants. His poor beginnings led him to sell out his Shakespearean gifts and ambitions for a lucrative role that made him rich and famous but ultimately vitiated his talent. This also caused him to become a lifelong miser, regardless of how much money he earned.

His wife, Mary, is a morphine addict who became hooked on the opiate after the birth of their son, Edmund. Edmund is their third son, but their second, Eugene, died in childhood. This tragedy, along with the punishing life on the road as an actor's wife, has contributed to Mary's addiction and despair, as well as her endless reminiscing about her long-vanished youthful promise when she was a convent-school girl.

Jamie and Edmund are their grown sons. Jamie is a dissolute and cynical actor, while Edmund is a budding intellectual and artist devoted to the most pessimistic currents of modern thought. Biographical critics note that Edmund is transparently a stand-in for O'Neill, although they also observe the poignance with which the author gives his own name to the dead child. The two sons, like their father, are alcoholics. Much of the play's rhythm is structured by their increasing drunkenness throughout the day and Mary's increasing disappearance into her morphine haze. Here, "night" represents not only a time of day but also a state of mental darkness.

Long Day's Journey is not entirely plotless. Its two dramatic foci are the family's discovery that Mary has relapsed into addiction, just when they thought she was cured, and Edmund's diagnosis of tuberculosis, which casts a shadow of death over the proceedings. Both events provoke intense dialogues among the family members as they hurl recriminations at one another or deliver monologues about their failed promise. These speeches gather emotional force and bitter honesty as the day turns to night.

Brief quotations cannot fully convey the play's mounting power of confrontation and scenic construction. I imagine it, like Death of a Salesman, is more powerful when staged than when read. O'Neill and Miller perhaps share a greater gift for dramaturgy than for eloquent language, which is not entirely true of other major American dramatists like Tennessee Williams and August Wilson. The play's tableaux, particularly the concluding one, might be more powerful than the rather slangy and verbose speeches.

On the other hand, Long Day's Journey also has a novelistic quality that is evident in its extensive stage directions. The descriptive passages seem meant to be read rather than staged. O'Neill's impossibly detailed renditions of his characters' appearances, which no casting director could hope to approximate, demand an inner theater.

What most fascinates me about this play is the debate about literature itself that O'Neill stages between the generations. The living room, the play's setting, features two bookshelves. One represents the rebellious modernity of the sons, while the other represents the old man's comparative classicism.

As opposed to the supposed calm universality of the father's classic and romantic drama and enlightened historiography, the sons incline toward anarchism and socialism in politics, naturalism and aestheticism in literature, all of which entail a rejection of Christian metaphysics and morality. In later scenes, the sons quote from Baudelaire, Swinburne, and Wilde, whose aesthetics Tyrone pronounces "morbid." He goes on to claim that Shakespeare contains both the genuine truths expressed by the morbid moderns but also much more.

When we learn in a monologue what Shakespeare means to Tyrone, a total transcendence of his desperate origins, we are less inclined to condescend with the radical youth to the elder's classicism. And when Edmund mocks Tyrone's possibly parochial insistence that "Shakespeare was an Irish Catholic," we might be invited to appreciate the English dramatist's universality as much as to laugh at the Irish-American's credulity.

O'Neill, I think, intends to synthesize the classics with the moderns. If his characters are trapped in a fate they can't escape, marked indelibly by their family and class origins and controlled by addictions they can't evade through force of will, is this any less true of the personae in Sophocles and Shakespeare? How great a departure is Schopenhauer's pessimism, Zola's naturalism, or Wilde's aestheticism, with their insistence on humanity's determination by inhuman forces and on art's amorality, from Greek tragedy's celebratory hymns to crushing fate?

Mary insists that "life," a mysterious determining force, is the agent in their lives, rather than they themselves. Edmund, for his part, praises the dissolution of the self in the engulfing sea as his most authentic experience, which we could easily compare to Hamlet's concluding admission, "Let be," or the manifest death-drive of Sophocles's Antigone or Euripides's Pentheus.

Edmund's artistic-mystic vision is the authentic experience of which alcohol and morphine offer only the degraded copy. This insight is why Edmund, the O'Neill stand-in, is alone among the characters in being able to write the play.

Browsing through Harold Bloom's introduction to a later edition of the text, I see that Bloom dwells on the un- or anti-Americanism of O'Neill's aesthetic. For Bloom, this means un- or anti-Emersonian, a rejection of Transcendentalist self-reliance and progressive optimism. In this vein, I have also sometimes heard O'Neill discussed by others as not American at all, an honorary Irish author working somewhere between the "scrupulous meanness" of Joyce's naturalism in Dubliners and the surrealist inertia of Beckett's drama.

Leaving aside the perhaps beside-the-point national question, Long Day's modernist combination of a naturalistic with a more symbolic or expressionistic mode makes O'Neill's drama exemplary of a heightened or mythic realism, like so much of the 20th-century's most powerful fiction and drama from Henrik Ibsen to Toni Morrison. O'Neill's intellectual conviction that his characters' wills are not their own, that they are lived by their fates, is embodied strikingly by their wild changes of mood, tone, and posture, as if O'Neill were asking the actors to be successively possessed by different spirits.

In this way, O'Neill's dramaturgy literalizes his famous description, in the drama's opening dedication to his wife, of "the four haunted Tyrones," protagonists of this haunting modern tragedy.

A story unfolds, filled with denial, sorrow, and the self-destruction of a family. The true horror becomes palpable when one realizes that the day described is just an average day in the lives of the Tyrones. And, it seems highly likely that things are going to take an even more downward spiral. There is a pervasive and lingering sense of fatality and entrapment that the characters have brought upon themselves. The fog outside is a masterful touch, mirroring the fog that clouds their minds, a fog that they seem to willingly embrace. However, there is one drawback. The detailed descriptions throughout make this piece read more like a novel rather than a play. This presents a challenge when it comes to translating it onto the stage, as some of these intricate details may be difficult to convey effectively in a theatrical setting.

“Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.”

From about 8:30 to midnight on a day in August 1912, the Tyrone family - husband and wife Maty and James, adult sons Jamie and Edmund - gathers at their Connecticut home. It is a one long day’s journey into night.

This is a semi-autobiographical play, perhaps we can call it autodrama these days. It was written in the forties but not published until after playwright Eugene O’Neill’s death. It won the Pulitzer Prize - his fourth - in 1957, and the Tony Award. O’Neill knew it was personal and didn't want it made public during his lifetime. However, most people loved it as soon as they saw it, and most critics consider it his masterpiece. A few years after his death, his reputation seemed to decline, and he is hardly known today, I think.

I think there is a great deal of misery in American literature, but this play is a brutally honest expose/confessional about one family’s struggle with misery, addiction - alcoholism, morphine - tuberculosis, all pushed to the very edge, the moment of truth. Raw and visceral, it is regarded as one of the great plays in the annals of American theater.

“Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.”

It foreshadowed other great moments-of-family crisis plays such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County (which I think owes a great deal to this play). It is powerful theater, which I only listened to this time. I don't like it quite as much as the Miller or the Albee, but it is truly strong to hear or see.

Strong, painful, tragic, wrenching and semi-autobiographical,

Long Day's Journey into Night is truly a tour de force.

It is distilled to just 4 characters and set within the crucible of a single day.

O'Neill's master work was published posthumously and first produced overseas.

This play is indeed one of the best ever written.

I have the habit of rereading it every so often.

The depth of emotion and the complexity of the characters are simply captivating.

If you ever get a chance to see it onstage, I heartily recommend doing so.

The live performance can bring the story to life in a whole new way, allowing you to fully immerse yourself in the drama and experience the power of O'Neill's words.

Don't miss out on this opportunity to witness a masterpiece.

Stage directions can often be a source of great frustration. They can seem overly detailed and sometimes even a bit excessive. In this case, they really drove me crazy.

However, as I thought about it more, I couldn't help but feel a sense of sadness for the person who had written them. Maybe they were trying to convey something very specific, something that was crucial to the overall vision of the piece.

Despite my initial annoyance, I decided that I would forgive O'Neill this time. After all, every artist has their own way of expressing themselves, and perhaps these stage directions were an important part of his creative process.

I realized that sometimes we have to look beyond our own immediate reactions and try to understand the intentions behind the work. So, while the stage directions may have driven me crazy, I was willing to give O'Neill the benefit of the doubt and move forward with an open mind.

Eugene O'Neill is a remarkable playwright who crafts his works from the depths of his own painful personal experiences. His writing is unsparing, laying bare the harsh realities of life without any sugarcoating.

In his plays, there is an unfeeling fog that seems to breathe down the necks of his characters, as if it were a truth bomb waiting to explode. This atmosphere of inevitability and doom adds to the overall sense of pain and tragedy that pervades his works.

What makes O'Neill's writing so powerful is its authenticity. The emotions and experiences he portrays are so real, raw, and relatable that they strike a chord with audiences on a deep level. We can see ourselves in his characters, their struggles, and their flaws, and this connection makes the pain all the more palpable.

O'Neill's ability to capture the human condition with such honesty and precision is what sets him apart as one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century. His works continue to be studied and performed today, a testament to their enduring power and relevance.