Close Analysis into Mary Tyrone!!!! Life performance and interview

Drama Journals – Extra curricular activity –
Watching “Long Days Journey into Night” By Eugene O’ Neill

Today, June 7^th 2012, I went to Londons west end to watch the theatrical performance of Eugene O’Neills famous play of “Long Days Journey Into Night”.

Bibliography:
Born in 1888, Eugene O’Neill was perhaps America’s greatest playwrights.
He was born in a hotel room overlooking Times Square, and he was a child of a touring Irish actor James O’Neill and Mary Elle. Similar to the story of the play, his father had given up a promising Shakespearean career, and his mother disliked theatre. He attended a Catholic school at the age of 7, and was later expelled from Princeton university as he was said to “lead a restless, wandering life for several years”. He went to Spanish Honduras in 1909 to go prospecting for gold but was back after six months with malarial fever. Subsequent jobs included office work at a mail- order firm, stage managing a touring theater company and dock work in ports in Buenos Aires, New York and Liverpool. He also spent a lot of time at sea, where he suffered from depression and descends into alcoholism. He then contracted tuberculosis and was confined to a sanatorium for six months.

Watching Eugene O’Neills play was a fantastic experience. Although I had already read the play a couple of times, I loved how the actors really made use of its morbid humor, to make the audience laugh to tears, as well as cry when the actors exposed their characters vulnerability and pain.

I specially really enjoyed the characters of Mary Tyrone (Laurie Metcalf) and Edmund Tyrone (Kyle Soller), for different reasons.

In the case of Mary, I was  really drawn into the suspense that her character created. I was really impressed with her ability of successfully creating a character who was dependent on her addiction to morphine, to alleviate her pain, and this she showed both emotionally and physically. The thing I most enjoyed about her character was the visible journey from the start of the play, when Mary was sober and seemingly healthy, to her transformation into a mad woman, doped with morphine and having completely lot her mind.

v I liked her physicality’s- how she stitched her hands as that made me understand her addiction, her pain. It was a recurring symbol of pain, as she used it as an excuse to dig back into the past and to have a prescription for her pain.

I had a short interview with her after the performance, as I was curious about the way she managed to achieve this emotional truth in her performance, and wanted to know if she followed a particular method or technique of acting that helped her create her role: HER ANSWER:
“Mary started off as sober, and then, at the end, she was completely drunk and doped up. So because I knew how she ended, I worked backwards make my way to the beginning, and understand how she got there, and what were the reasons”.

I thought this was an effective technique to find her character’s  before and after time, as she had an objective of how she wanted to end.

 “I had to research into morphine addiction and used that as my base”

“In the last monologue, what I wanted to show was that Mary was looking for something. As the monologue says “with out it there is no hope”. I wanted to show that Mary was looking for something, and that she believed, that if she found it, she would find hope, the will she needed. It was through her recurring theme of faith, looking back into the past, her pain, that she wanted to find it…..”

Laurie Metcalf

At the time of this interview, I was looking closely as part of my own personal research as an actress into Stanislavski’s theories and methods, as becausce this play stems from the theatre type of realism, I approached it using Stanislavski’s methods of obtaining “Scenic truth”. However, it was very interesting to find out that when asking her if she had used any of his methods when preparing for her role, she said “ I haven’t really studied them”. It was interesting for me as she was very realistic with her character when acting, however I learned that an actor can many times be motivated simply by its faith of their characters situation and their comprehension and empathy of their emotional state, as well as by their own instincts.

If I had to act it out differently, the only thing I could think of would be to exaggerate more her changes of topic and to bring out more that double personality she has, that she let us see in the part where she talks to herself when she is alone “You are glad they left, they only bother you” “but why do I feel do damn alone?”

Another play it reminded me of was that by Arthur Miller of “Death of a Salesman”. I remember the first time I read that play, was one of the first time I read a drama, and I was amazed about how easily the emotions and feeling of the characters where transmitted to the reader by the word choices of the play writers.  I loved the play “Death of  a Salesman”, as in  personal level, it reminded me to my family and our own problems, and I think that was also one of the reasons why I found myself strongly connected to the play, as they are domestic drama’s and the scripts are therefore used as a means of really exploring the families secrets, defaults and problems. Both plays were similar in themes, as their members are unable to forget their pasts and their glorious days, and therefore their presents are unattended and decaying.

Me and super star Laurie Metcalf!!!!!