Dean Stockwell Listening, Part 2

The wrenching last 2 scenes of Long Day’s Journey – between Jamie and Edmund … and then the scene that ends the play, involving the whole tragic family. It’s his face as he takes it all in. And this is nasty stuff, relentless stuff – cruel things are said that can never be unsaid. Edmund, with all of his dissipation – his drinking, his whoring, and also his consumption, is the rock of the family. The steady one. And yet he is completely unstable on some level – all he does is absorb, absorb everybody else’s pain. Not to mention the fact that on some deep and utterly true level, everybody blames him for what happened to Mary Tyrone. Which basically means, that they blame him for being born. He knows it, everybody knows it … yet can such a thing be said? There are stories of Eugene O’Neill locking himself into his study for 10 hours a day, when he was writing Long Day’s Journey. His wife said he would emerge, at the end of the day, eyes puffed out of his head from crying all day long. He would write and cry. That was his process the entire time of writing the play. He was wrenching something out of his soul, and pouring it onto the paper, with his heart, pain, grief, loss … Edmund is the Eugene O’Neill persona in the play. The watcher, the absorber … the one who might, just might, if he survives, be able to make art out of all that tragedy. At a huge cost, of course, but what else are you gonna do.

Back to the beautiful intense listening face of Dean Stockwell.