So that there’s no confusion: the Long Day’s Journey into Night seen here is contemporary, political, brutal, and universal.

Lest there be any doubt, the audience is confronted upon entry with a large television screen showing a stream of CNN clips about the pandemic, Trump’s infuriatingly half-hearted efforts to calm our fears, and other confounding, enraging issues. From there—it gets worse.

Director Robert O’Hara’s rethinking of Eugene O’Neill’s epic memoir—“a play of old sorrows, written in tears and blood,” as the author himself called it—has at its core an idea both simple and utterly game-changing. The Tyrone family in O’Neill’s original play, about whom he wrote so candidly, was an artistic exorcism made still more poignant because they were understood to be a barely veiled depiction of Eugene’s own parents and brother. O’Hara’s Tyrones could be anybody. And the time could be now…

Click here to read the full review at Parterre Box.