Paul Lazar on Long Day’s Journey: ‘You say a line and you think the entire play is in that line, and in the next line’

“Dearest, I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood,” Eugene O’Neill wrote to his wife in 1941, after completing Long Day’s Journey into Night, his longest and most closely autobiographical work.

Set over the course of one day, it follows a family torn apart by addiction and disappointment. O’Neill stipulated that the play shouldn’t be published until 25 years after his death.

It now forms the basis of Long Day’s Journey, a new production by Pan Pan, directed by Gavin Quinn and featuring the American actor Paul Lazar, who makes his Irish stage debut after an earlier collaboration with Pan Pan in New York.

Taking its title from O’Neill’s original first draft, the production offers an abridged, hallucinatory reimagining of the tragedy.

The production is set 100,000 years in the future, which might sound like an oddly specific leap in time. The inspiration comes from Samuel Beckett’s Quad, a short, wordless play made for German television in the early 1980s, in which four figures move in carefully choreographed patterns around a square.

Watching a recording of the piece played back in slow motion on a black-and-white monitor, Beckett was struck by the way its frantic movements had been transformed into a ghostly shuffle. He remarked that it looked as if it was set “a hundred thousand years later”.

The moment inspired Quad II, a second, silent version of the work, in which the figures seem condemned to continue their strange ritual across an unimaginable expanse of time.

“We’re trying to find a way to distil it down,” Quinn says, “to make it feel inevitable and to create something different in terms of the atmosphere. So that it’s not necessarily Eugene O’Neill’s naturalistic drama, or his version of Strindberg and Ibsen. We’re cutting it back, removing the story, but keeping the world.”

The idea is to strip the play back to a kind of urtext, reducing O’Neill’s sprawling family drama to its most elemental form. The original script contains more than 75 pages of stage directions alone.

“In this version we’re only taking a very tiny amount of the lines of the original,” Quinn says. “We’re trying to get it into its real ultra form, and seeing if the audience can shape that and pick up on that. It’s just a different way of looking at language.”

Pan Pan has a reputation for radical reimaginings of classic texts.

“We like to dig deep into the play. I think we’re just diving in from another angle. There’s the personal response, the emotional response, and then there’s the aesthetic response.

“For us that means looking at the fundamental themes of the play: addiction, love, hate, family – these big, familiar things – and finding another way to tell the story.

“We’re using other forms and languages, equally or even more than the text itself: the body, movement, light, form, colour, concepts. It’s about moving away from naturalism and questioning what naturalism in theatre even means, or what the fourth wall means now.

[ From the archive: Thirty years of Pan Pan’s ‘noise and people’ comes to GalwayOpens in new window ]

“We’re approaching it by asking: what is the hallucination of the play?”

For Lazar, what is remarkable is how much of the original play survives the process of distillation.

“Something I noticed acting it – and it’s a thought I’ve had about great plays – is this idea of DNA,” he says. “The entire molecular make-up of the body is contained in every cell, and you say a line and you think the entire play is in that line, and in the next line.”

Despite the radical reduction of O’Neill’s text, Lazar has been surprised by how little of its emotional substance is lost.

“The whole play keeps being there, sentence to sentence, word to word, syllable to syllable. It’s fascinating to be in the whole play, even in its distillation.”

The company has combined researching the characters and the original text with experimenting with how time, movement, sound and atmosphere might carry the drama. Quinn hopes the result will be an experience in which the audience loses its sense of time, “a bit like a hallucination”, sustained as much by images, music, gesture and the performers themselves as by language.

“When you don’t explain everything, it becomes quite raw,” he says. “There’s something ancient about it.”

He compares the approach to Greek tragedy, where the underlying myth can become more important than the particular language of the play. The emotions at the heart of O’Neill’s work remain recognisable regardless of how much of the text is cut out.

It’s an attempt to get “under the skin, right to the bones” of the play, and to see whether its psychological intensity can be communicated beyond the conventions of naturalistic theatre.

As part of the rehearsal process, Quinn asked the cast to read O’Neill’s play closely and reflect on memories of their own families, not to draw on them directly in performance but to enter into something of its emotional world.

Reading the play, Quinn suggests, inevitably brings one’s own family history to the surface. “It sort of brings you into a kind of dream of the past,” he says.

In O’Neill’s original the characters are constantly circling their shared history, alternately affectionate and vicious.

“They like each other, they scold each other, they admonish each other, they forgive each other, and then they attack each other.”

There is something of Strindberg’s brutality in this: his willingness to mine his own life for material, however uncomfortable or exposing. O’Neill saw in Strindberg a model of the playwright as someone compelled to get to the heart of things – to be, as Quinn puts it, “the purveyor of truth”.

When Long Day’s Journey into Night opened in New York in 1956, it was hailed for a rawness and psychological honesty that seemed to cut through the conventions of the theatre of its time.

“Can you do this in another way but still have the same emotional impact which the original had?” Quinn asks. “It’s an interesting experiment, if you like.”

The production brings together a cast that, besides Lazar, includes Andrew Bennett, Faith Jones and Annie-B Parson (who is also Lazar’s wife). Ingrid Craigie also contributes vocally.

For Quinn, assembling this particular group was central to the project.

“Theatre is a collaborative art form,” he says. “These amazing people are available, so this is the time to do it. They bring so much to the project, because they’re the people the audience are watching.”

[ A Moon for the Misbegotten: ‘When people are ready for this play, it is a balm on them’Opens in new window ]

Quinn has been drawn to O’Neill’s play for years, fascinated as much by its history as by the work itself. “I’ve always been taken by the history of O’Neill writing the play,” he says, particularly its intensely autobiographical nature and the fact that O’Neill never wanted it performed. He is struck, too, by the scale of the playwright’s ambition. “With his writing, he was almost trying to find the meaning of life. Pretty ambitious for any artist.”

Why stage it now is harder to pin down. “Maybe it feels right now to do something about human beings, about emotion, about how fragile we are,” Quinn says. “About how we can pretend to solve these problems and try to talk about family and our own personal histories.”

Ultimately, the decision is more instinctive than calculated.

“It’s not out of fashion, or because you want to impress people. It’s a sense that maybe emotionally you could bring something to this, something different for an audience.”

For Lazar, the play speaks to the present political moment in the United States.

“I’m coming from a country where lying is the currency,” he says. “When the general public discourse is a blatant lie, you’re caught in a kind of loop of deception.”

By contrast, O’Neill’s characters seem to be relentlessly telling the truth, at least as they understand it.

There’s another contrast with the contemporary United States, where the Trumpian emphasis on winners seems particularly at odds with O’Neill’s world. His characters are all failures, people who have failed to love or live as they might have wished.

For Lazar it’s this failure, and the struggle either to acknowledge or deny it, that gives them their vitality.

“They’re struggling towards the truth, and that process is painful. But to come here and be putting my truth against somebody else’s truth, this lovely batting of truth back and forth, is profoundly invigorating.

“I wonder if there’s some undercurrent resonating with the idea of, let’s all tell the truth for a little while, even if it’s only in a fictive context.”

Long Day’s Journey, staged by Pan Pan, is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, from Saturday, November 14th, until Saturday, November 21st, with a preview on Friday, November 13th