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Long Day's Journey into Night

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Long Day's Journey into Night
Written byEugene O'Neill
CharactersMary Cavan Tyrone
James Tyrone
Edmund Tyrone
James Tyrone Jr.
Cathleen
Date of premiere2 February 1956
Place of premiereRoyal Dramatic Theatre
Stockholm, Sweden
Original languageEnglish
SubjectAn autobiographical account of his explosive home life with a morphine-addicted mother and alcoholic father.
GenreTragedy[1][2][3][4]
SettingThe summer home of the Tyrones, August 1912

Long Day's Journey into Night is a tragedy play in four acts written by American playwright Eugene O'Neill in 1941–42, first published in 1956. The play is seen to be his best work and one of the best American plays of the 20th century.

O'Neill posthumously won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Long Day's Journey into Night.

References

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  1. "O'Neill, Lumet, Kurosawa, and the great Goldwyn". Esquire. 1962-12-01. Retrieved 2020-10-30. The theme is one of high tragedy : the unsuccessful struggle to escape the consequences of past actions. In Elizabethan drama, the actions are those of the protagonists, if only in the sense that their own characters, formed by the past, are responsible for the tragedy. Here the father and the elder brother are thus entrapped, like Macbeth or Othello or, better, the heroine of Middleton's The Changeling. But the mother is a different case. The reviewer's cliché about "the inevitability of Greek tragedy" is for once justified. The mother's drug addiction is not the result of her own actions but of her husband's miserliness in calling in a cheap doctor who gave her morphine to ease the pains of a difficult childbirth. The husband is thus punished for his own character, as in Elizabethan tragedy.
  2. "BWW Review: Long Day's Journey into Night – The Tragedy of a Family's Downward Spiral". BroadwayWorld. June 12, 2018. Retrieved October 31, 2018.
  3. Murphy, Brenda (20 September 2001). O'Neill: Long Day's Journey into Night. p. 94. ISBN 9780521665759.
  4. Andreach, Robert J. (16 July 2014). Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theatre. p. 179. ISBN 9780761864011.